The Ohio Supreme Court ruled on September 1 that Trenton, a Butler County city of roughly 14,000 near Cincinnati, must certify a citizen-drafted data center measure and send it to the Butler County Board of Elections for a special election. The justices found the Trenton City Council had no legal basis for rejecting a petition carrying 336 valid signatures — more than double the 128 the residents actually needed.
The dispute turned on a single word: electors. The court’s answer decides not only whether Trenton votes, but how high any Ohio charter city can set the bar on its own residents.
What the court actually decided
Five Trenton residents filed a charter-amendment petition with the city clerk in July, seeking to prohibit construction of large new data centers. The clerk forwarded it to the Butler County Board of Elections, which verified 336 valid signatures. The board also verified that 1,277 Trenton voters cast ballots in the November 2025 general municipal election, and that 8,197 registered voters lived in the city at the time.
Council saw a different number. At a special meeting in early August, members voted 4-3 to reject the petition, reasoning that the city charter had adopted Article XVIII, Section 9 of the Ohio Constitution, which requires signatures from ten per centum of the electors of the municipality. Trenton read electors to mean everyone entitled to vote — all 8,197 registered voters — which put the threshold at 820.
The court did not treat that as a close reading of an ambiguous charter. It treated it as a conflict with the state constitution, and said the constitution wins. Sections 8, 9 and 14 of Article XVIII have to be read together, and under the court’s 1996 decision in State ex rel. Huebner v. W. Jefferson Village Council, Section 14 is the provision that sets the signature count — based on the total vote cast at the last preceding general municipal election. Ten percent of 1,277 is 128. Faced with 336, council had a mandatory constitutional duty to forward the petition immediately.
Trenton argued home-rule authority let it set the higher bar. The court had rejected a materially similar argument in its 2015 decision in State ex rel. Wilen v. Kent, and rejected it again here. In a per curiam opinion, the justices concluded that the relators had shown by clear and convincing evidence that the council “disregarded applicable law.” Chief Justice Sharon L. Kennedy and Justices Jennifer Brunner, Joseph T. Deters, Daniel R. Hawkins and Megan E. Shanahan joined the opinion; Justices Patrick F. Fischer and R. Patrick DeWine joined it in part and concurred in the judgment. Trenton Data Center Campus, a company building a data center in the city, had been allowed to intervene and oppose the residents.
The written summary is posted on the state’s court reporting site, Court News Ohio, which frames the ruling around constitutional mechanics rather than the merits of data center policy.
One point has been widely compressed in coverage: the court did not order a November vote, and it did not say the November deadline had passed. It clarified that the city is not required to use the Nov. 3 ballot, because that is a regular state election rather than a regular municipal election. What the constitution requires instead is a special election between 60 and 120 days after council passes the ordinance certifying the petition, as the Dayton Daily News reported. Council was expected to take up certification at its Thursday meeting. Counsel for the petitioners has publicly urged the city to put the measure on the November ballot anyway, to spare taxpayers the cost of a standalone election.
What the measure would and would not stop
The proposed amendment would prohibit construction of new data centers requiring more than 25 megawatts of electricity inside Trenton’s boundaries. That threshold matters more than the shorthand “data center ban” suggests.
It would not touch Project Mila, the Prologis-developed campus already under construction in the city — a roughly 893,000-square-foot, 250-megawatt project on 141 acres that has already cleared city approval. WCPO reported the same limitation when the petition was filed: organizers described the proposal as forward-looking, aimed at future development rather than the project already in the ground.
The larger question is a second Amazon Web Services proposal — 18 buildings across roughly 600 acres — which currently sits in Madison and St. Clair townships, not in Trenton. Both townships have objected to Trenton’s annexation request, and a public hearing before the Butler County commissioners is scheduled for September 15. If the land stays in the townships, a Trenton charter amendment would not reach it at all.
The residents who brought the case
Barry Blankenship, who organized the Woodsdale and Trenton Environmental Resistance — W.A.T.E.R. — and helped lead the signature drive, told the Journal-News he was overwhelmed when the decision came down. “It feels like finally we have been heard,” he said. He told WVXU he hopes the vote lets residents be heard on whether data centers belong in their backyards. Trenton’s mayor and city attorney did not return WVXU’s request for comment before publication, and the city did not respond to the Journal-News either.
The group’s stated objection has been siting rather than the industry itself: proximity to neighborhoods and a school, plus water use, noise, light and grid demand. Those are the same concerns driving petition campaigns in other small Ohio jurisdictions this year.
The second case in a month
Trenton is the second data center case the Ohio Supreme Court has resolved in about four weeks. In early August, the court ordered the village of Ashville in Pickaway County to submit residents’ referendum petition against an EdgeConneX data center project and an associated natural gas plant to the county board of elections. Ashville had argued the underlying agreement was locked in as emergency legislation. The court found the village had not given sufficient reasons for the emergency designation.
That ruling did not guarantee a vote — the board of elections could still have found the resolution an administrative action, which is not subject to referendum. On August 24 the Pickaway County Board of Elections voted unanimously that the resolution was legislative, and certified the referendum to the November 3 ballot. Ashville, not Trenton, is on track to be the first Ohio community to vote directly on a data center project.
Why the signature-threshold fight travels
Reading electors as registered voters rather than as voters who actually turned out produces a signature ceiling roughly six times higher. In Trenton, that was the difference between 128 and 820 — the petition cleared the real threshold by 208 signatures and would have missed the council’s version by 484. That is not a rounding decision. It is the whole ballgame.
The reach of the ruling is that the answer is now settled statewide, not city by city. Any Ohio charter municipality whose charter borrows Section 9’s electors language cannot use it to demand a higher count than Section 14 permits. Statehouse News Bureau reporting noted the unanimity of the outcome in a second consecutive data center dispute — a pattern of the state’s highest court pushing procedural roadblocks aside and sending the question back to voters.
What Trenton voters get is narrower than the headlines imply and more consequential than a single project. The campus going up off Kennel Road is going up either way. The 600 acres next door may never be Trenton’s to decide. What is on the ballot is the rule for everything after that — and, in a city of 14,000 where 1,277 people turned out last November, the margin that settles it may be smaller than the petition that forced the vote.