Amherst OH Nordson campus data center variance denial (2026)

City of Amherst, Ohio (Lorain County) — BOARD OF ZONING APPEALS written decision of Thursday, July 30, 2026 DENYING A USE VARIANCE sought by CERVENKA DEVELOPMENT PARTNERS LLC to convert three buildings on the NORDSON CORPORATION campus into a 45-MEGAWATT data center. TIMING: the decision issued LESS THAN 24 HOURS after the hearing. STATED GROUND: Cervenka failed to make a convincing argument that the city should grant an exception to the rules. PUBLIC PARTICIPATION: more than 100 people attended, exceeding building capacity and spilling onto the lawn and around the block. THE ZONING POSTURE IS THE POINT OF THIS ENTRY: DATA CENTERS ARE NOT EXPLICITLY ALLOWED BY AMHERST'S INDUSTRIAL ZONING CODE. Because the use is not among the permitted uses, a developer must seek a USE VARIANCE, which under Ohio law requires a showing of UNNECESSARY HARDSHIP \u2014 a materially higher standard than the practical-difficulties test applied to area variances, and one an applicant frequently cannot meet where the property has other viable industrial uses. AMHERST ADOPTED NO MORATORIUM AND NO NEW ORDINANCE. A zoning code that simply does not enumerate data centers, combined with a board prepared to deny, produced the same practical result as the bans and moratoriums that dominate this dataset, at no legislative cost and with no vested-rights exposure. FOR JURISDICTIONS REVIEWING THEIR POSITION, the threshold question is therefore not 'should we pass a moratorium' but 'is this use already unpermitted under our existing code'. APPEAL RIGHT: Cervenka had 30 DAYS to file an administrative appeal in the LORAIN COUNTY COURT OF COMMON PLEAS; no located source reports whether it did. CROSS-REFERENCE WORTH NOTING: a developer of the same name \u2014 reported as Illinois-based Tom Cervenka \u2014 was separately behind a small-scale data center proposal on Cass Road in Garfield Township, Michigan, stalled by that township's one-year ban (Garfield Township MI data center and crypto mining ban (2026)). The relationship between the two is not established by any located source and is recorded as an observation, not a finding.