Ohio truck driver takes on Amazon's $5B data center as township ban heads to hearing
Photo: Limbach Inc.When John Glenn first set out to stop an Amazon Web Services data center from going up near his home in rural Butler County, he worried he was being selfish. Now the 37-year-old truck driver is leading the charge to ban data centers from his township altogether — and he may win.
Glenn was appointed to the St. Clair Township Zoning Commission in October, and he has spent his first weeks in the role spearheading a resolution to bar data centers from the township of about 6,600 people. On Tuesday, November 10, his resolution goes to a hearing of the Butler County Planning Commission.
"Once I got to thinking and digging into it, the selfish part kind of went out and I started thinking about everybody's else's families," Glenn told The Cincinnati Enquirer. "I would want somebody to fight for me and my family."
The zoning commission voted unanimously on October 13 for the amendment, which reads: "Data centers are prohibited as a principal land use in all Zoning Districts. No such facility shall be authorized as a permitted, conditional, or planned use development use."
The county planning commission will consider the amendment at 3 p.m. on November 10 at the Butler County Government Services Center in Hamilton, recommending whether the township should approve or deny it. The township's three elected trustees will have the final say at a future meeting that has not yet been scheduled.
The hearing is the next hurdle for Amazon's planned $5 billion data center campus — 18 buildings on about 600 acres just south of Trenton, in St. Clair and Madison townships. Trenton residents voted overwhelmingly on November 3 to ban data centers from their city, passing Issue 17 by 3,541 votes to 903, or 79.7 percent. But that ban applies only within city limits, and the Amazon site sits just outside them.
Trenton had tried to annex the land for the project from the two townships, but withdrew the petition in September after pushback from township officials. That left the project able to move forward on township land — unless St. Clair bans data centers from its zoning.
Amazon Web Services did not directly answer questions from The Enquirer about whether it would move forward with the 18-building campus outside Trenton, or whether it would continue other projects in municipalities that passed data center restrictions on November 3, including Sunbury, Ohio. In a statement, an Amazon spokesperson said: "We appreciate the opportunity to engage with these communities on the benefits that our data center investments can bring."
"We remain committed to setting a high bar for responsible data center development in Ohio, and will continue engaging communities early as we build out this important infrastructure," the spokesperson said.
The city of Trenton has estimated the campus would create at least 120 full-time jobs and $15 million in revenue for Trenton and Edgewood City Schools. New research from the MIT Center for Real Estate found that data centers created an average of 1,000 to 1,300 new jobs in the counties where they opened, mainly in transportation, warehousing, technical services and real estate, about two years after a data center opened.
Glenn, who has lived in the township since 2023, said he believes the township's board of trustees will sign off on the resolution he championed. Trustee Wanda Jones told The Enquirer in an email that she fully supports township residents in opposing the data center and "standing behind a ban to protect our community residents and the wildlife in the area." The other two trustees did not respond to The Enquirer's request for comment on how they will vote.
Trenton Mayor Ryan Perry said during an October 15 council meeting that the township trustees had never said they were opposed to data centers, recalling a meeting early in the negotiations when a county commissioner asked if anyone wanted to stop the project entirely.
"No one spoke up," Perry said. "It could have died in the county that first meeting. We could have saved a lot of money and a lot of negotiation time if we had been aware of that."
Glenn said he pushed for the resolution to preserve the rural scenery and environment "people have grown to love."
"We're not against the township growing or businesses coming in," Glenn said. "It's just we want to make sure it's a business that's good for everybody in the community, not just a handful of people."
Trenton was one of 18 Ohio communities where voters passed bans or other restrictions on data centers on November 3 — 21 measures in all, the most of any state, according to Ballotpedia's count. Ten towns banned large data centers outright, including Trenton, Sunbury, Piqua and Granville.
Sources: The Cincinnati Enquirer, "How one man in rural Ohio is fighting a $5B Amazon data center" (Nov. 8, 2026); The Cincinnati Enquirer, "Ohioans overwhelmingly pass data center bans, restrictions on ballot" (Nov. 4, 2026); Ballotpedia via JNewsNetwork, "Ohio Voters Say No to Data Centers in All 21 Ballot Tests" (Nov. 6, 2026).
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