Ohio said private developers couldn't take your land. Then came the data centers: Leila Atassi

CLEVELAND, Ohio — For a while in the mid-2000s, one of the most stubborn houses in Ohio stood in a fenced, treeless field in Norwood, with nothing left around it.

Carl and Joy Gamble had bought the home in 1969 and raised two children there. When a developer set his sights on their Cincinnati-area neighborhood for an upscale shopping and office complex, the city agreed to use eminent domain to clear the way. Their neighbors sold, and their houses came down. The Gambles refused, and in February 2005 they were forced out anyway, moving in with their grown daughter in Kentucky while their case worked its way through the courts.

Joy Gamble described what she’d learned about property in America: once people with money “decide they want what you have, you don’t own it.”

In July 2006, the Ohio Supreme Court sided with the Gambles, ruling that economic benefit alone cannot justify taking someone’s home. They never moved back. Illness had caught up with them both, and the following spring they sold the house to the developer.

Their fight still produced something lasting. A year later, Ohio lawmakers rewrote the state’s eminent domain law to bar takings for “private commercial enterprise, economic development, or solely for the purpose of increasing public revenue.” It was a promise to everyone in Ohio who owns a home, a farm or a storefront: The state would not take what’s yours just because someone richer had a more profitable use for it.

That promise now has a gap wide enough to run a high-voltage line through.

The 2007 law carved out an exception for utilities. Their projects are “presumed to be public uses,” and they can take land that isn’t blighted. That made sense at the time. Transmission lines carry power to hospitals, schools, factories and homes, and a single holdout shouldn’t be able to stall the grid for an entire region. Former state Rep. Bill Seitz, who helped write the law, said those upgrades serve “a public purpose, no question about it.”

For the grid of 2007, he was right. The lawmakers who wrote that exception could not have imagined the PORTS Technology Campus in Piketon.

SoftBank’s planned AI data center, billed as the largest in the world, could need 10 gigawatts, more electricity than every household in Ohio combined, cleveland.com’s Anna Staver reported last week. Ordinary distribution lines can’t carry that load, so Ohio Power is developing three new transmission lines to feed it, including one through Ross County, where Lauren Dill Morton’s family has farmed the same land for more than 200 years. She won’t sell, and under current law she may not get a choice.

“I don’t feel like it’s a public necessity,” Morton told Staver. “It’s a necessity for that data center, maybe.”

Ohio Power says SoftBank has committed to cover the cost of the lines. That’s meant to reassure ratepayers, and perhaps it should. But paying for a transmission line doesn’t automatically make it a public necessity. A line built for a private customer might also strengthen the broader grid. The question is whether it would be needed without that customer. If one developer drives the demand, pays the bill and consumes the power, why should a landowner be forced to surrender property to make the deal work?

Ohio law gives utilities another advantage: Their projects are both presumed to serve the public and presumed necessary. When state regulators approve the specific property rights a utility wants to take, Ohio law can make the presumption of necessity impossible for landowners to challenge.

A 2022 Ohio Supreme Court case revealed just how much leverage utilities have. An Ohio Power representative testified that the company generally asks landowners for more rights than it needs, backing down only when someone challenges it in court.

The justices in that case ruled that courts must scrutinize those demands. But that still leaves landowners with a lousy choice: Hire a lawyer to fight a utility company, or sign away whatever rights it demands.

Rep. Tristan Rader, a Lakewood Democrat, wants lawmakers to revisit eminent domain as they study data centers. But the Ohio Business Roundtable has floated a proposal to expand utilities’ “quick-take” powers, allowing them to seize land before owners finish fighting over compensation. Lawmakers specifically withheld that power from utilities in 2007.

Ohio has already handed data centers generous tax breaks and allowed energy projects serving them to advance with little local say. Expanding eminent domain would take that deference a dangerous step further, forcing property owners to surrender their land for infrastructure built largely to benefit private developers.

Ohio lawmakers have already had a chance to close that loophole. They passed it up.

In 2023, Republican lawmakers introduced House Bill 64, backed by the Ohio Farm Bureau, to eliminate the automatic presumption of necessity and force condemning agencies to prove their case. It stalled, and later versions dropped those protections.

Lawmakers should revive them and add one test for lines serving a single private development: Would the public need this line if the development didn’t exist?

If the answer is yes, and the utility can prove it with clear and convincing evidence, eminent domain remains an option. If not, the developer should have to negotiate with willing sellers, like any other private business.

That rule wouldn’t stop Ohio from competing for data centers. It would simply require the companies profiting from them to negotiate with the people whose land they want. Lawmakers should close this gap now — while the lines still exist only on paper — because we know what happens when the law arrives late.

The Gambles won their case and still lost their home.

Lauren Morton shouldn’t have to win in court to keep land her family has held since Thomas Jefferson signed the deed.