Who Pays for the AI Boom? What Ohio's 1st District Race Says About Data Centers
Who Pays for the AI Boom? What Ohio's 1st District Race Says About Data Centers
Ohio is becoming one of the data center capitals of the country, and the bill for that growth is landing in a congressional race in Cincinnati.
This week on Purple Political Breakdown, I sat down one-on-one with Rep. Greg Landsman, the Democrat representing Ohio's 1st District, who faces Republican Eric Conroy on November 3. I asked him directly about affordability, gerrymandering, and voting rights. But the answer I keep coming back to is what he told me about data centers, because the issue cuts across party lines in a way almost nothing else in Ohio politics does right now.
The problem, in Landsman's words
When I asked him about data centers, Landsman didn't start with policy. He started with how the deals get made. He told me developers have been coming into towns in Southwest Ohio, holding secret meetings with politicians, and walking away with land and tax breaks without any input from the community. He pointed to NDAs as the core problem: "They cannot do this secretly." Meanwhile, the power these facilities need requires new transmission and generation, and the question of who covers those costs is showing up in utility bills.
His proposed fix
Landsman explained that he plans to roll several bills into one data center reform package after the election. Data centers would pay the full cost of grid upgrades and new power, with ratemaking moved to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission and a $15 million per day penalty for passing costs onto ratepayers. The package would also require water use disclosure, environmental standards for air, noise, light, and soil, escrow money so sites can be returned to farmland, and a ban on NDAs between public officials and developers. His bottom line to me was that Congress has to remember "they don't work for big tech. They work for these towns."
The strongest critique
The sharpest pushback is not coming from the tech industry. Ohio's Consumers' Counsel, the state's ratepayer advocate, strongly supports making data centers pay their own way but warned that handing exclusive ratemaking to FERC would displace the Public Utilities Commission of Ohio and make it harder for ordinary ratepayers to be heard. Their preferred fix keeps the federal no-cost-shift rule while letting state regulators enforce it. That is a real design question, not a talking point, and it is one I'd want Landsman to answer next.
The other side of the race
Eric Conroy's campaign frames affordability around energy independence, lower fuel costs, cutting federal spending, and reducing regulation on small businesses. That is a different theory of the same problem: more supply and less regulation rather than federal cost allocation. Voters in OH-1 are effectively choosing between those two approaches.
Why this matters beyond Cincinnati
Data centers are one of the rare issues where a farmer in Clinton County and a renter in Cincinnati want the same outcome: transparency before the deal and someone other than them paying for the grid. Whoever wins on November 3 will be voting on how that gets decided.
Hear Rep. Landsman explain his plan in his own words in the full interview:
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/can-greg-landsman-hold-ohios-1st-district-against-eric/id1626987640?i=1000798061948
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Navigating the vast amount of bouncing around the political spectrum my entire life I have finally figured something important out. It doesn't matter. I've been religious, been in the military, went to a liberal school and all in all none of the political biases matter. We shouldn't let toxic discourse cloud our judgement and find a solution through logic and conversation. In pursuit of this mission I created this podcast to focus on these important conversations.
