Business, labor coalition voices support for data centers

More than two dozen Valley businesses and labor groups are joining together to change the narrative surrounding data centers. The “Mahoning Valley Coalition for a 21st Century Economy,” founded by the Youngstown Warren Regional Chamber and Western Reserve Building Trades, was announced Monday at a news conference in Boardman. Guy Coviello, chamber president and CEO, compared data centers to essential infrastructure like highways, railroads and utilities. “The Mahoning Valley has an opportunity to be part of that growth, creating jobs, supporting our manufacturers and opening doors for the next generation of workers,” Coviello said. “We need to pursue those opportunities responsibly, with the interests of our communities at the forefront.” A recent poll found that 55% of Ohioans oppose data center construction in the state, while just 22% support it. Voters in the City of Hubbard just passed an outright ban on the industry, and other Valley communities are taking on temporary moratoriums. According to members of the coalition, those are steps in the wrong direction. The group aims to dispel what it calls common myths about data centers, and advocate for responsible adoption of the developments. For example, Coviello argued that concerns over excess water usage might make sense elsewhere, but in the Mahoning Valley region, aren’t a major problem. “We’re different from the rest of the country in that we have an abundance of water, and we actually could benefit from data centers using large amounts of our water,” Coviello said, because having a few large customers could actually stabilize water bills for the rest of the consumers in the area. Marty Loney, union president of the Western Reserve Building Trades, also lauded data centers’ jobs impact. Much of the job growth from data centers comes in the construction phase, so they aren't permanent positions, but Loney said that doesn't make them unimportant. “An average-sized data center is about 1,700 construction jobs over a several-year period,” Loney said. “That to me doesn’t sound temporary. That sounds like community benefits for our tax base.” There are also indirect job impacts, as Rick Organ described to 21 News. His custom steel manufacturing company, Hynes Industries, is hiring 50 new workers as it grows its business thanks to the demand for data center components. Still, the group is not in favor of untethered or out-of-control growth that puts the industry’s interests over the community. “We want to make sure that the developers that come in know the score up front,” Loney said. “[We] make sure that we talk about them having community benefit agreements, make sure that we get the communities involved so that they know that they're not going to cost them any more money.” It’s that form of “responsible data center growth,” as Coviello put it, that will place the next generation of Valley workers at an advantage. Several students from the Mahoning County Career and Technical Center attended Monday’s event to share how they are preparing for an increasingly AI-based economy. Zane Ruheim, MCCTC Class of 2028, told 21 News he is specializing in artificial intelligence and software engineering. “We’re working very closely with our instructors at MCCTC to build this career path to go into more of these data-center-focused and -oriented jobs. … We're currently building a 1-to-100 scale of a data center in our lab,” Ruheim said. “It's going to be able to help gear us towards those jobs because we're getting that real industry experience working with the same equipment.” Coviello hopes students like Ruheim will be able to employ those skills in the Valley after they finish their education, reversing “decades of brain drain.” “We have an opportunity to not only retain our best and brightest by building out data centers responsibly here, but we have an opportunity to attract everybody else's best and brightest to our community,” Coviello said. The coalition has already started its outreach to local governments in Mahoning and Trumbull Counties.