The Supreme Court of Ohio ruled on 1 September in State ex rel. Blankenship v. Trenton City Council, 2026-Ohio-3069, ordering the council to put a charter amendment before voters. The amendment would prohibit construction of data centres over 25 MW inside Trenton.
The arithmetic at the centre of it
The Butler County Board of Elections certified 336 valid signatures. The statutory requirement was 128 — ten per cent of ballots cast in the November 2025 municipal election. Trenton City Council insisted the number was 820, arriving there by taking ten per cent of registered voters instead. The court found clear and convincing evidence that the council disregarded applicable law and held that it had a mandatory constitutional duty to certify.
What the common framing gets wrong
Two things. This is not a ruling about data centres. The court decided a pure election-law question — what “electors” means in a charter-petition signature threshold — and never reached the merits of a 25 MW cap. Anyone reading it as judicial scepticism of data centres is reading a case that does not exist. And “voters get to decide” is being taken to mean November: the court said it is too late for the 3 November ballot, so this goes to a special election within 120 days of certification, which the city must schedule and fund. A standalone special election is a materially different, lower-turnout contest from a general one.
What the measure would and would not do
The 25 MW line is a construction prohibition threshold, not a cap on an existing facility. Note also who was in the room: Trenton Data Center Campus, LLC intervened as a respondent and was granted intervention on 19 August, so the site's developer was a party to the case it lost.
The template being handed out
A state supreme court has made it substantially harder for a council to keep an anti-data-centre measure off the ballot by reinterpreting its own signature rules. Ohio already cleared the Ashville referendum in August; this is the second such green light in a month, and the procedural route is replicable in any Ohio charter city.