In the Upper Ohio, the Water Rules Never Went on the Ballot.
On November 3, voters in more than 40 towns, cities and counties across 10 states got a direct say on data centers, and nearly every time they said no. One of those towns sits in our own watershed. Most of the big projects aimed at the Upper Ohio never went before voters at all, and the water rules that govern them are thinner here than almost anywhere else in Pennsylvania.
Preliminary results compiled by datacentersontheballot.com show data center opponents won virtually every local ballot question this fall, with Ohio holding the most votes. Hubbard, in Trumbull County, banned data centers with 77 percent of the vote. Meanwhile western Pennsylvania’s largest proposals, at Homer City, Shippingport, Springdale and Upper Burrell, move ahead under state rules that require little more than registering a large water withdrawal. New research from the Potomac basin shows why that matters: data center water use peaks on the same hot, dry days our rivers run lowest.
A near sweep at the ballot box
Stateline and Route Fifty tallied the results the morning after the election. Opponents won in the Midwest, the South, the East and the West. Some questions were advisory and bind no one; others were outright bans written into town charters. The only data center win came in Harwood, North Dakota, where 430 voters turned down a charter amendment that would have required independent review and a public hearing before large industrial projects.
Ohio carried the biggest share, with nearly 20 communities voting, and opponents won every one. Trenton passed a ban 80 to 20. Wilmington voters rejected rezoning for a data center in four separate referendums. Perry, in Lake County, approved a rule by nearly nine to one that makes developers seeking tax breaks put up financial guarantees first. Sunbury and Pataskala wrote bans on large facilities into their charters. A statewide constitutional amendment banning new data centers over 25 megawatts could reach Ohio voters in 2027, and a May poll found 57 percent of Ohioans ready to vote for it.
Water showed up in the fine print, too. In Emporia, Kansas, where just over 60 percent of voters approved a ban, a “high impact” data center is defined in part as one that draws more than 100,000 gallons of water a day.
The one that flows our way
Hubbard is a small city on the Pennsylvania line east of Youngstown, and 77 percent of its voters approved an ordinance banning data centers inside city limits. Hubbard drains to the Mahoning River, which joins the Shenango to form the Beaver River and meets the Ohio in Beaver County.
That same county is home to one of western Pennsylvania’s biggest proposals. Aligned Data Centers is planning a campus at Shippingport, on the Ohio River. Upstream, Dynamo DC is pursuing a campus at the old power plant site in Springdale on the Allegheny, and another project is working through approvals in Upper Burrell in Westmoreland County. None of these went to a public vote. A Quinnipiac poll this summer found 74 percent of Pennsylvanians would oppose an AI data center in their community, so the appetite is there. The ballot question is not.
Homer City and a reservoir with no cap
The largest project in the region is at Homer City in Indiana County, where developers are building a 4.5 gigawatt gas plant to power a data center campus on the site of the old coal plant. Its water comes from Two Lick Reservoir, a 5-billion-gallon impoundment on Two Lick Creek, which flows to Blacklick Creek and on to the Conemaugh. According to reporting by Capital and Main, the plant holds an uncapped allotment from that reservoir dating to 1968.
The reservoir also serves the utility for Indiana borough and White Township under a 1988 drought plan. That plan exists for a reason: in 1985 the old plant’s draw helped push the reservoir to the edge of running dry. The developer has said cooling and water decisions will be left to its future data center tenants.
How high data center water use can climb on a peak summer day compared with the yearly average, according to a March 2026 study by the Interstate Commission on the Potomac River Basin.
What the Potomac numbers tell us
Our neighbors on the Potomac have counted what the rest of us are still guessing at. The Interstate Commission on the Potomac River Basin studied the more than 290 data center buildings in its watershed and found they average about 800 gallons a day for every megawatt of power. Most of that water evaporates and never goes back to the river. In the Washington area, data centers account for 1 percent of water withdrawals but 9 percent of the water actually consumed, rising to as much as 12 percent in summer. Their busiest days land on the hottest, driest weeks, when rivers run lowest and everyone else is watering gardens too.
The commission also flagged a gap that should sound familiar. Data centers that buy water from a public utility generally fall outside the rules that require big users to cover what they consume during low flows.
The rules here are thinner still. In the Susquehanna basin, any project drawing more than 20,000 gallons a day needs approval from the Susquehanna River Basin Commission, which now steers data centers toward dry cooling. The Ohio basin in Pennsylvania has no commission that approves withdrawals. Under the state’s water planning law, a user taking more than 10,000 gallons a day registers and reports to DEP. That is a record, not a permit.
What to ask at the next hearing
Some new tools are coming. Pennsylvania’s 2026-27 budget requires data centers to file annual reports with the state, at $10,000 a day for anyone who skips it, and directs DEP to publish yearly trends in data center energy and water use. Governor Shapiro’s August executive order brings water use under DEP permitting and blocks state approvals for projects that lack local consent. In West Virginia, the House passed new data center site rules in February and voted down two amendments that would have limited groundwater use and required water impact assessments.
“Voters across the country have emphatically rejected the push for AI data centers.”
Mitch Jones, deputy director, Food and Water Action
A township vote is a powerful thing, but rivers do not stop at township lines. A ban in Hubbard does nothing about a campus down the river in Beaver County, and a reservoir allotment signed in 1968 never pictured an AI campus. The questions worth asking at every hearing in the basin are simple ones: where does the water come from, how much of it evaporates, and what happens in the third week of a dry August. Our partners on the Mon, the Allegheny, the Conemaugh and the Ohio have been asking them for a while now. It turns out a lot of voters agree with them, even the ones who never got a ballot.
Sources: Stateline and Route Fifty reporting on November 2026 local election results, using preliminary data from datacentersontheballot.com; Fox 8 Cleveland and Fortune on Ohio results; Capital and Main on the Homer City redevelopment; the Tribune-Review, via the Mon Valley Independent, on western Pennsylvania proposals; the Interstate Commission on the Potomac River Basin’s March 2026 report, Data Centers and Water Use in the Potomac River Basin; The Allegheny Front on Susquehanna River Basin Commission rules; Pennsylvania DEP on water withdrawal registration; Utility Dive on the 2026-27 Pennsylvania budget; WHYY on the August 18 executive order; and West Virginia Public Broadcasting on House Bill 4983. Current as of November 13, 2026.
