Two Portage County cities voted within a week of each other to pause new data center applications while they write zoning they can actually defend. Streetsboro City Council approved a six-month moratorium last Tuesday. Kent City Council followed with an open-ended pause pending a planning-commission review. Together they add to the number of Ohio municipalities that have declared formal data center moratoriums in 2026 to a figure local reporters are now tracking week over week.
Streetsboro Mayor Glenn Broska put the rationale plainly: the city has no zoning rules specifically tailored to a facility of this scale, and the council would rather be slow than wrong. That posture — preparation over opposition — echoes what we've seen in East Manchester Township, PA, in North Franklin Township (which passed preemptive zoning before any project was proposed), and now in the Portage County pair.
What's unusual about Portage County is that the pushback has a face. Will Hollingsworth, a county resident whose TikToks about the proposed facilities have been passed hand-to-hand through township Facebook groups for weeks, has become the most-quoted citizen voice in local coverage. In an interview with the Record-Courier he told the paper, “We're not anti-progress. We're anti-being lied to about what progress costs.” That sentence has done more to shape the conversation locally than any official statement from either side.
The same week those moratoriums passed, an official Portage County Sheriff's Office Facebook post circulated widely — a generative-AI image of the sheriff standing next to a handcuffed Bigfoot, captioned with an immigration joke. It is a small thing and also not a small thing. An official government account used an AI image to make a joke while the county's residents were being asked to host the physical infrastructure that runs those same models. The juxtaposition sat in local feeds alongside the moratorium votes. Residents noticed.