Cleveland Needs to Learn How to Say Yes
This is Kenn Dowell. Cleveland born. Glenville raised. And never afraid to say what needs to be said.
200 Million People Are Making Money Online. Cleveland Just Voted to Block What Powers Them.
Two hundred million people worldwide are making real money online right now. Food bloggers. Fitness coaches. Small business owners. Content creators. Young people building audiences and selling products from their phones. Every single dollar they earn runs through a data center somewhere.
Today, Cleveland City Council’s Utilities Committee voted to block new data centers from being built in this city. No new permits. No new reviews. No new licenses. The full council could make it official as early as July 15.
I understand the concerns that got us here. But before this city makes a decision it cannot take back, Cleveland needs to hear what nobody said in that hearing room today.
I Understand Why They Did It. Start-1:12:39
A proposal for a 150-megawatt hyperscale data center in Slavic Village caught public officials by surprise. The Bibb administration denied the permit. Residents are worried about noise, power outages, and who benefits when Big Tech moves into their neighborhood.
Those concerns are real. I am not dismissing them.
But Council President Blaine Griffin said something today that needs to be the north star for everything that happens next. “We do want to make sure that we get this right. But we also don’t want to say that Cleveland is closed for business.”
He also said he has a $7 billion investment on the cusp of coming to this city. And the language coming out of this debate is being watched carefully — because the wrong words send the wrong message to every major investment looking at Cleveland right now.
Cleveland has a long habit of ignoring that second part.
This Is a Pattern. Not a Policy.
Walk through downtown Cleveland right now. Count the empty storefronts. Count the buildings that have been dark for years. Look at the vacant land sitting and sitting while other cities build on theirs.
There is not one Amazon facility inside the city limits of Cleveland. Not one. The largest employer of warehouse and logistics workers in the country looked at this city — all its available land, all its workforce — and put every operation on the outskirts. Never inside the city.
That is not an accident. That is a reputation.
Utilities Committee Chair Brian Kazy said it plainly. “Data centers are here. They’re probably not going anywhere anytime soon. But what we need to figure out is, do we have infrastructure that’s going to support them?”
He also said this. “Data centers are the boogeyman. You either believe in him or you don’t. If you believe in him and he’s there, you’re scared. If you don’t believe in him, you’re never scared.”
That is exactly the problem. And it is exactly why education matters more than emotion right now.
So What Is a Data Center?
In plain English.
A data center is a building full of computers. Stacked floor to ceiling, running around the clock. When you check your MyChart and your test results are waiting. When you log into your bank at midnight from your phone. When you make a payment, stream a show, send a text, post a photo — all of that is hitting a data center somewhere.
There are already 22 data centers in the Greater Cleveland area. Nearly 50 throughout Northeast Ohio. They are already here. The question is not whether Cleveland will have data centers. The question is whether Cleveland will have any say in how they operate — and any share in what they produce.
The Jobs Nobody Is Counting.
Some council members argued that data centers don’t employ many people. IBEW Local 38’s Mike Bremmer pushed back hard. “Cleveland needs an identity. It’s not steel. It’s not railroads anymore and it’s not auto. We could be the tech capital of the Midwest.”
Jamie Davis — a Black Cleveland man, born and raised here, 30-year union member — talked about pre-apprenticeship programs. Skills that last 30 and 40 years. Electricians making $120,000 a year who started as apprentices at $36,000. A ticket to the middle class nobody can take away.
I want to go further than that.
There are over 200 million content creators working right now. Food bloggers. Fitness coaches. Black-owned businesses running their entire operation through Instagram. Gen Z entrepreneurs who have never held a traditional job and don’t plan to. Young people right here in Glenville, in Hough, on the east side — building audiences, selling products, making real income from their phones.
That creator economy is worth $254 billion this year. Every dollar flows through a data center. When you vote against that infrastructure, you are not just voting against a server technician. You are voting against every person in this community who uses the internet to earn a living.
That creator economy alone is worth $254 billion this year. Add the broader digital economy and you are talking about the foundation underneath almost every job that exists in the modern world. When you vote against data center infrastructure, you are not just voting against a server technician. You are voting against every business owner, every entrepreneur, every professional, and every creator in this community who uses the internet to earn a living.
The construction jobs are real. The electrical trade careers are real. But those are the jobs that build the building. The economy that runs inside that building — and the economy that runs because of what that building makes possible — that is what nobody in that hearing room yesterday was talking about.
So I am talking about it here.
The East Side Argument. And Why the Facts Matter.
Councilman Kevin Conwell said what a lot of people on the east side are already feeling. Everything negative ends up in Black neighborhoods. Not by coincidence. By economics. Cheap land. Communities with less power to fight back.
He is right about the history. But in this specific case, the facts tell a more complicated story.
The site in question is the old Morabito Enterprises trucking property on East 55th Street. Dormant. Zoned industrial. Generating nothing — no jobs, no tax revenue, no activity. The Ohio EPA came in, inspected it, and issued a finding of no further action needed. The contamination has been cleaned up.
Norman Edwards — 40 years fighting for Black workers in this city — said it plainly. That site has been sitting contaminated and abandoned. A $1.6 billion investment wants to do something positive with it.
One analyst said that site, developed as a data center, could produce $6 million a year in taxes for Cleveland schools. Right now it produces zero.
And Jamie Davis said it directly in that hearing room. Slavic Village is 50% Black, 42% white, and 8% Hispanic. “It’s not even a Black or white issue for Slavic Village. It’s not.”
Real regulations solve the protection problem. A reflexive no solves nothing. Three Months Is Enough — If Cleveland Uses Them Right. Three months is not the problem. What Cleveland does with them is.
Council does not need ninety days of hearings where misinformed people repeat things they half-read on the internet. That is not engagement. That is theater.
What council should launch right now is a full public education campaign. The same way Cleveland funds campaigns for charter amendments, school levies, and ballot initiatives — put money behind it and go into the community. Partner with local influencers, podcasters, food bloggers, and business owners. The people whose livelihoods run on data center infrastructure every single day. Take it to the churches, the barbershops, the community centers. Come on podcasts like Strategic Moves. Get the information out through voices people already trust.
But education cannot only flow one direction. Residents also need to see their council members doing homework. Meeting with companies that got this right in other cities. Learning what water recycling systems Washington State requires. Studying noise reduction standards and buffer zones already written into law elsewhere. Looking at closed-loop cooling technology that cuts water use by up to 90 percent. Building community benefit agreements that require local hiring and direct reinvestment.
Other cities already built this playbook. Cleveland does not have to invent it. Just study it and put it in writing before a single new permit gets approved.
We Get to Learn From Their Mistakes.
I want to take a personal moment. This conversation is not abstract to me.
One of my first professional jobs was with Cuyahoga County. We were taking the Recorder’s Office off the old dumb terminals — green text on a black screen, no mouse, just commands typed into a box. Moving everybody over to Windows. From there we scanned recorder documents. Then other county departments. Then the county built its own data center to store what we were digitizing. Then the city followed. Then the banks. Then the municipalities. Those little server rooms tucked into the back of office buildings all over this region — that is the legacy of what we were building in the early days.
I have watched this technology grow from green text on a black screen to artificial intelligence running in buildings the size of city blocks. And what I know from that evolution is this.When you are trailblazing, you do not always know what you are walking into.
Meta did not build its first data centers knowing what we know now about water consumption, cooling systems, noise, and community impact. They opened a trail nobody had walked before. And when you open a new trail, sometimes you damage things you did not expect to damage.
But here is what comes out of that. Better technology. Smarter systems. Closed-loop cooling. Noise reduction. Filtration standards. The solutions being demanded in Cleveland today exist because other communities demanded them first.
Cleveland does not have to be the guinea pig. Cleveland gets to show up after the trail has been cut and say — here are our terms, built on everything we learned from everyone who came before us.
That is not a disadvantage. That is leverage.
A Tip for City Hall.
One question needs to be answered before anybody votes on anything.
What happened to the IX Center deal?
The IX Center is a 2.2 million square foot building on 159 acres of city-owned land right next to Cleveland Hopkins International Airport. Electrical infrastructure already in place. Away from residential neighborhoods. Away from every concern raised in today’s hearing.
Last year, sources reported it was being converted into a data center — with Amazon Web Services as the likely tenant. The city projected 250 jobs. Council voted to extend the lease. The paperwork never got signed. The tenant walked away. Nobody has fully explained why.
That building is still sitting there. That land is still city-owned. And Cleveland is still arguing over whether data centers belong here at all.
Stop fighting over whether to say yes next to someone’s house. Start building the city’s own data infrastructure at the one site already purpose-built for it. Sell capacity to Cleveland Clinic. Sell it to MetroHealth. Sell it to Cuyahoga County. Every hospital and government agency in this region pays someone else to store their data right now. Cleveland could be collecting that money instead.
Own the asset. Set the terms. Profit from what you build.
That is what a smart yes looks like.
What Comes Next.
The moratorium gives Cleveland three months. If council is not ready by September 14th, the moratorium sunsets and it is fully open for business with no guardrails at all. That is not a win for anyone who showed up in that hearing room today — pro or anti.
Use the time. Do the work. Come back in September with something real.
I am not willing to watch Cleveland waste another opportunity. That is why I am doing this series.
Over the next two posts, and on my radio show and podcast I am bringing in the experts. People who know this industry from the inside. We are going to break down what a data center actually costs a community, what it gives back, and what a smart agreement looks like before the vote happens.
Subscribe right now so you don’t miss Part 2. And drop your question below — what do you want Cleveland’s working group to get right before they bring this back to council in September?
— Kenn Dowell, Strategic Moves Media Network
Can you tell me what you know about crib-to-cradle build up/tear down responsibility, tax abatement for how long (it's viable), and can we request the billionnaires foot this bill?, they are making a lot of money...thanks, love your thoughts