Serving Lucas, Ottawa, Sandusky and Wood Counties
The Oregon city council had its latest regular meeting on Nov. 10, answering multiple questions from the public on the potential data center project and passing a couple ordinances.
The initial resident Q&A portion of the meeting opened with Connie Trudell questioning why many of the council members and city officials have not toured the inside of a data center.
It was said that only city administrator Joel Mazur, councilman Paul Drake, and director of public service Paul Roman have toured the inside of one.
Councilman Steve Hornyak said that he was able to tour two data centers from the outside, but getting inside them is a little tougher for tours.
Mazur said he toured a data center with the West Licking Fire District in Licking County, Ohio, along with the fire personnel, with the help of Oregon fire chief Clayton O’Brien, who coordinated the meeting.
“They are very secure facilities,” Mazur said. “It's something that we had to coordinate and schedule through with the fire department.”
Trudell then questioned why Mazur was able to obtain security clearance, while others weren’t.
“I do have some colleagues that work down at West Licking Fire District,” O’Brien said. “They have a bunch of data centers down there. I did reach out to them. That's how we were able to coordinate the meeting to get our fire prevention team down there to take a look at what a data center was all about.
“I recently have reached out to them again to ask for another meeting. That way we could kind of coordinate after Mr. Hornyak had announced last time that he would like to see a data center. (I’ve reached) back out to see if we could facilitate another meeting in early December. I'm waiting to hear back from them. It does take a few weeks.
“The data center that we went and toured was a Meta data center, so they have to go back through the person that does the tours just making sure schedules and things work. We are working on that, and I'm hoping to be able to take different council members and our new mayor down to visit that.”
Trudell followed up by asking Mazur what he observed in his tour.
“For the most part, there were more workers there than what I had thought, but it was a parking lot with two large buildings with a connector in the middle,” Mazur said. “Surprisingly, the majority of the building was what seemed to be HVAC systems, but there are server rooms. It's hard to describe in words — server rooms with server racks in them and a lot of air cooling inside of the buildings with fans, and like I said, HVAC systems.
“There really wasn't a whole lot to them other than it was a lot of computer equipment with a lot of HVAC systems. Very big rooms, very cavernous, as you can see from the outside in some of these buildings.”
Trudell asked why a data center tour wasn’t a prerequisite for all public officials prior to making decisions on a data center in Oregon.
“I can only answer for myself on that, but typically as we're looking through projects, we would probably get to that point once the project was closer to at hand and we were ready to act or look at those,” Hornyak said. “I just haven't done that yet. That's why I talked about it at one of the previous meetings about trying to set up such a field trip, if you will, where we could go and actually tour one of those, and ask some questions.
“Individually, if I pick up the phone and call somebody who's running a data center and said I'd like to come inside your place, even though I can say I'm a council member from Oregon, Ohio, that's not going to carry much weight. But if we, administratively as a city, are trying to reach out saying we want to learn more about these, it gives an opportunity for better success for being able to achieve that.”
Another resident, Aimee Mottmiller, made a prepared statement against the data center. She then asked, since there is no non-disclosure agreement, who the end user was for the data center project.
Mazur said they don’t know and that to his knowledge, no city officials have been told that information. He also encouraged people to attend the upcoming question and answer forum on the data center Nov. 19 at Fassett Middle School at 6 p.m.
“I encourage everybody to show up and ask every single question that you possibly can think of,” he said. “In all honesty, in all seriousness, we need to pressure test this and make sure that this is a good fit or not. (We encourage you to) bring everybody that (you) know to ask the right questions.”
Ordinances
Council approved an ordinance authorizing the city to enter into an LPA agreement with ODOT, which will allow the city to put out bids for a safety project on Bayshore Road.
The city received grant funding to make improvements to the curve at Otter Creek and Bayshore, where they come together. It’s a long, sweeping curve, and over the years, the city has had a reoccurring crash pattern of roadway departure crashes over about a five-year period.
Rodney Shultz of the city’s engineering department spoke on the ordinance.
“We were averaging about two crashes a year, one of which was a fatal in 2023,” he said. “We met with our police department. We meet quarterly to review crashes. We've discussed this location and came up with looking at making some improvements there. The improvements will include adding flashing chevrons, adding center line and edge rumble strips along the edge, so that way if people leave the travel lane, hopefully that'll alert them to get back on track, and then also raise pavement markings.”
Shultz said the city received a grant for $91,300 to make those improvements, and they’re planning on doing an alternate bid for Cedar Point Road to add rumble strips. That depends on how the bids come in.
“We figure if we have a contractor here doing the other location, we might be able to get some decent numbers,” Shultz said. “We can make that decision once we bid that project out.”
Councilman Dennis Walendzak asked if there was a matching amount that the city had to meet to get the grant.
“It's a 90-10 grant, but actually part of the project includes basically re-striping because when you do the rumble strips on the center line and edge, you've got to re-stripe anyways,” Shultz said. “Basically, the cost of the re-striping will be our match, which we basically do almost every year anyway, so it basically will not cost us anything.”
Another ordinance passed authorizing the mayor to permit the chief of police, Brandon Begin, to enter into an agreement between the FBI and the Oregon Police Department to participate in the Northwest Ohio Safe Streets Task Force.
“This ordinance is necessary to enter into an agreement with the Federal Bureau of Investigation for one of our officers to participate in the Northwest Ohio Safe Streets Task Force,” Begin said. “This task force targets violent fugitives and drug trafficking, and many other different types of high-priority crime.
“We do have one officer who currently works part-time for the unit, and he'll be retiring at the beginning of the year, so we're in the transition right now to move over another officer into that. There were some changes in leadership for the field office for the FBI, so they asked us to re-sign this agreement with the new supervisor agent.”
