The News-Herald editorial board got it right in its May 9 analysis of levy fatigue in Lake County: passing levies is hard, and it is getting harder. The May 5 primary underscored the point. Perry Joint Fire District scraped through with a 5-mill levy. Mentor Schools watched a 4.9-mill levy lose by more than 1,200 votes despite a credible, well-organized campaign. These are not flukes. They are symptoms of a structural problem that no amount of good messaging can fix.
Statewide on the May primary ballot, two-thirds of proposed school levies failed—of 53 proposed school operating levies, only 19 passed.
Our project will provide a new stable source of long-term local tax revenue, reducing the burden and risk to local taxpayers.
Ohio’s system stacks the deck against local services. House Bill 920 quietly erodes the real purchasing power of every levy voters have ever approved, even as property values climb. State funding for fire districts and schools continues to contract: Chief Chiappone has noted Perry Joint Fire District will lose more than $700,000 in state revenue by 2028. Meanwhile, the costs that actually run an agency—apparatus, salaries, benefits, insurance, utilities—rise every year on their own schedule. The result is a treadmill: well-run taxing districts, with disciplined boards and strong community support, still find themselves at the ballot box every few years to hold even. And voters, facing their own household pressures, eventually say no, not because they don’t value their schools and fire departments, but because they’ve been asked too many times.
That is the honest diagnosis. The question worth asking next is whether Perry has a way off the treadmill.
We believe it does, and the Perry Technology Park data center is the answer.
Our project would generate nearly $380 million in tax revenue distributed across community taxing entities over 31 years. Perry Local Schools would receive more than $155 million. The fire district would receive approximately $39 million, which is enough to materially reduce the frequency and scale of future levy requests, cover equipment upgrades, and cushion the loss of state revenue that is already locked in. The park district, the library, Perry Village, Perry Township, and the senior center each receive a durable, private-sector-funded revenue stream that does not require a single homeowner to write a bigger check. All this from a site that currently generates zero tax revenue.
We also hear the questions residents are asking, and we take them seriously.
On water: The facility will be air-cooled, not water-cooled, operating in a closed-loop configuration with no well water use. Our project will use less than the 275,000 gallons per day already allocated to the site by the county, a small fraction of the Bacon Road treatment facility’s available capacity, which currently operates at roughly half its 6 million gallon per day design capacity.
On noise: The Village has adopted enforceable property-line sound limits of 65 dBA, with required pre- and post-construction monitoring and compliance testing—a standard comparable to, or quieter than, typical light industrial uses.
On lighting: A photometric study is required before construction, with mandatory shielded, downcast fixtures, no flood lighting, no uplighting, and pole heights capped at 20 feet. These are not developer commitments that can be walked back. They are codified Village standards, backed by Ohio EPA, PUCO, and federal regulatory oversight at every phase of approval, construction, and operation.
On air quality: Like every hospital, emergency services building, and mission-critical facility, the data center will have backup generators to maintain operations during the rare occasions when grid power is unavailable. These generators are not a power source; they are a safety net. They are designed to operate only during actual power outages, which, given FirstEnergy’s reliability record and the double set of power circuits onsite (so if one fails, the other will carry the load), are expected to be infrequent and brief. The US EPA and Ohio EPA both have strict regulations and oversight over the project, with approvals required before a generator is ever installed and mandatory reporting when the project is operational.
On environmental questions: There are codified Village standards as well as strict requirements under Ohio EPA, US EPA, U.S. Fish & Wildlife regulations at every phase of approval, construction, and operation.
Every dollar this project puts into the system is a dollar that does not have to come from a working family’s paycheck, a retiree’s fixed income, or a small business’s margin. It is not a grant that expires or a windfall that disappears. It is commercial tax revenue; the kind communities have always sought precisely because it pays for services without placing the burden exclusively on residents.
The editorial board observed that levies involve “an unpopular subject: higher taxes.” True. But levy dependence is itself a structural vulnerability. When the revenue base is narrow, every school board, every fire board, every village council is one failed ballot measure away from painful cuts. Diversifying that base is the most responsible long-term move available to local leaders.
Perry is not choosing between a data center and something better. It is choosing between a broader, more stable tax base and the status quo, which means returning to voters, hat in hand, with increasing frequency, against increasingly difficult odds.
The News-Herald’s editorial identified the fiscal pressure Lake County’s communities are living under. The Perry Technology Park is a concrete answer to it.