Four Residents Are Suing Over How Perry Township's Data Center Got Approved

I read a lot of agendas for this site. Most of them are boring on purpose - that's usually a good sign, actually. This one's different.

Four Perry Township residents filed a lawsuit on September 1st. Not against the data center itself - they're careful to say that up front. Against the process that approved it.

What The Lawsuit Actually Says

The project is Panattoni's 240-megawatt data center along Faircrest Street SW, with Amazon confirmed by local officials as the eventual operator. It's already under construction. Perry Township, Canton, and Stark County all signed off on a 75%-for-30-years property tax abatement between March and June of this year - Perry gets $2.75 million upfront in exchange for giving up most of the property tax revenue for three decades.

The lawsuit isn't challenging whether that deal is a good one. It's challenging whether it was approved the right way.

Two specific things are at issue. First, a noise ordinance Perry adopted in October 2025 - the lawsuit alleges Panattoni representatives met privately with Trustee Matt Miller and Township Administrator Gerrie Cotter, exchanged emails, and supplied sample ordinances from other cities before it was adopted, and that the final language ended up resembling those suggestions. The plaintiffs' attorney, Chun Yee Au, was careful on this point too - he said a company talking to officials about pending legislation isn't inherently illegal, and it happens constantly. His argument is narrower: whether the township made sure any of that input actually served residents, not just the developer.

Second, the March vote on the tax exemption itself. The lawsuit alleges trustees discussed it in executive session and voted right after, while the public agenda listed only "adjournment" as the next item - so residents who'd been sitting there all night reasonably assumed the meeting was over and left. The resolution's actual title was "To Preliminarily Consent to Terms of a Tax Exemption Agreement Benefitting the Township" - which, if you're an ordinary person skimming a meeting agenda, tells you almost nothing about a multi-hundred-million-dollar tax decision happening that night.

I want to be careful here: none of that is a court ruling. It's what four residents are alleging, through their attorney, in a filing that hasn't been decided yet. Trustee Matt Miller said Perry Township is reviewing the lawsuit with legal counsel. Panattoni said it wasn't aware of the suit and has followed every applicable requirement. Nobody's been found to have done anything wrong. That distinction matters, and I'm not going to blur it just because "lawsuit alleges shady backroom deal" is a more exciting sentence than the accurate one.

The Detail That Actually Got Me

One resident, Keith Brown, said something that's been stuck in my head since I read it: Perry Township residents apparently knew more, publicly, about the roughly $2 billion Cleveland Browns stadium project than they did about a project he estimates at nearly twice that size going up in their own township.

I don't know if his $4 billion figure is exactly right. I do know a professional sports stadium got more public scrutiny than a data center that's already bigger, already under construction, and already got three separate governments to approve tax breaks for it. That gap is the whole story, honestly, more than any single allegation in the filing.

The Question I Keep Coming Back To

I build cloud infrastructure for a living. I have an actual, non-hypothetical interest in this industry doing well. So when a story like this shows up, I have to ask myself the same question I asked back when I first started this whole project: am I capable of looking at this honestly, or am I rooting for a specific outcome without admitting it?

I don't think the answer is "never cover anything that touches your own industry." I think the answer is what I keep trying to do here - track what's actually filed, what's actually alleged, and what's actually still just an allegation, instead of picking a side and describing the same facts to fit it.

Why This Belongs Here

This is the plainest version of Stark Civic Monitor's whole reason for existing that I've run into yet. Not "are data centers good or bad" - that's not a question I'm trying to answer. It's "did the public bodies handling a multi-billion-dollar approval do it in the open, the way Ohio law says they have to." That's a question with real documents behind it, a real court that'll eventually weigh in, and real residents who say they found out about most of this by filing public-records requests themselves.

I'll be tracking how this one plays out.