Clayton OH 365-day data center moratorium (2026)

City of Clayton, Ohio (Montgomery County) — RESOLUTION adopted by City Council at its meeting of JULY 16, 2026, imposing an IMMEDIATE temporary moratorium of 365 DAYS on the ACCEPTANCE AND PROCESSING of applications for ZONING, CONDITIONAL USE, AND BUILDING PERMITS for DATA PROCESSING CENTERS. THE STATED LEGAL DEFECT DRIVING IT, and the transferable finding: the city's codified ordinances LACK A SPECIFIC DEFINITION OR USE CLASSIFICATION for data processing centers, and such facilities COULD BE INTERPRETED TO FALL WITHIN THE CITY'S EXISTING DEFINITION OF A WAREHOUSE-TYPE USE. A data center admitted as a warehouse is approved under standards written for storage \u2014 no power, water, noise, or generator review \u2014 and in many codes administratively rather than by council. Any municipality with a pre-2020 zoning code should assume this exposure exists unless it has checked. Compare Portage IN Technology Campus district data center rules (2026), which solved the same problem by creating a single permissible district, and Putnam County FL data center moratorium (2026), where commissioners adopted a DEFINITION before adopting the pause. TERM AND EXTENSION: City Manager Elaine Wittman stated the period 'could be 365 days or it could be less', that the city 'would have to come back to council' to extend, and that the temporary framing reflects that 'things with the state are still up in the air' \u2014 i.e. the same wait-for-the-state posture recorded on Ottawa IL data center moratorium extended to 2027. CAPACITY OBSERVATION: Wittman did not think the city had enough open land to accommodate a data center; the moratorium is protective rather than responsive to a pending project. THE PIQUA NDA PRECEDENT, raised by resident Deborah Retman at the meeting and recorded here because it is the concrete harm the transparency objection rests on: the CITY OF PIQUA approved zoning for a massive data center WITHOUT INFORMING RESIDENTS of the zoning change, DUE TO A NON-DISCLOSURE AGREEMENT, and residents have taken legal action to halt the project. The Piqua site sits in a 1,168-acre heavy-industry area at the I-75 Exit 78 Business and Industrial Park, of which approximately 330 acres was reclassified from agriculture to heavy industrial in late January 2025. NEITHER THE PIQUA REZONING NOR THE RESIDENT LITIGATION IS INDEXED and both are leads. Pennsylvania has since banned data center NDAs outright (Pennsylvania EO 2026-05 data center restrictions (2026)).