Attack ads have been flooding Ohioans’ airwaves this summer, and in the race for the U.S. Senate, Democratic nominee Sherrod Brown has been hammering GOP nominee Jon Husted for praising data center projects.
“He’s been called the face of data centers in Ohio,” the narrator in the Brown ad says. “Jon Husted; who’s he really working for?”
Brown and Husted have both held elected office for long stints, though, and each of them have changed their tunes on an issue that was noncontroversial for years.
“I’ve made clear from the beginning that Jon Husted is the point man for these 230 or 240 new data centers in Ohio,” Brown said in an interview with the Statehouse News Bureau earlier in August. “That he pushed the legislature to give ... $2.5 billion of tax subsidies.”
A decade ago, Brown was celebrating Amazon Web Services’ investments in central Ohio, according to an archived news release. And generally, Democrats have been slow to criticize the industry, which has created short-term construction jobs—many of which hire union labor.
Husted has also recently been recalibrating, saying he now believes the big sales and use tax break for new construction statewide he once backed should no longer be awarded. Data centers, he said in an interview in late July, have done “a terrible job of talking about the value and virtue of it.”
“They’ve earned that backlash,” Husted said. “They haven’t been as forthcoming about the benefits that will come in terms of local jobs and construction worker jobs and reduced property taxes, and they haven’t offered things like paying the energy bills for local communities, for the power plants they build.”
But the federal government, he said, has little business in regulating data centers.
“The state government has a little bigger role in that, but local governments and local residents are the ones that should make those choices,” he said.
Election Day is less than 80 days away.
