EducateHilliard by Paul Lambert

10/23/2025

NBC4 posted a story online today about the AWS fuel cell project at their Scioto-Darby Rd campus.

The main issue I have concerns jurisdiction: is it the State of Ohio or the City of Hilliard. Jurisdiction is important because it determines who decides if this fuel cell facility gets built, and if so, who will determine the conditions, especially how the more than 1 million pounds per day of CO2 that will be emitted will be handled.

AEP and AWS claim this is a "Major Utility Facility" which is defined in Ohio Revised Code 4906.01(B)(1)(a) as "Electric generating plant and associated facilities designed for, or capable of, operation at a capacity of fifty megawatts or more," which AWS and AEP claim places its approval under the Ohio Power Siting Board (OPSB), which is a state agency created by ORC 4906.

4906.13(B) goes on to say "(B) No public agency or political subdivision of this state may require any approval, consent, permit, certificate, or other condition for the construction or operation of a major utility facility or economically significant wind farm authorized by a certificate issued pursuant to Chapter 4906. of the Revised Code."

In other words, what the OPSB decides is it when it comes to siting and constructing large scale utility infrastructure. No city, town or township can overrule the OPSB.

I haven't researched the legislative history of ORC 4906 and the Ohio Power Siting Board, but the reasonable assumption would be that it was enacted as a way to keep Not-In-My-Back-Yard (NIMBY) objections from stopping the development of critical energy infrastructure. After all, pretty much all of us use electricity, and it has to be generated somewhere, and there has to be transmission lines and substations to move the electricity from the generating plants to our homes. If every small town and township could say "yeah I want the power, but none of the ugly stuff near me," we'd not have have our electrical power grid. As Mr. Spock says, sometimes the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few.

In this case, the proposed AWS fuel cell facility will be capable of generating 93 megawatts (MW) of electrical power, placing well over the threshold of ORC 4906.01(B)(1)(a).

But that's not the whole story.

This AWS fuel cell is not designed to provide power to the grid. The reason AWS needs their own electricity generating plant is that there's not enough electrical power available from the grid to power all the AI servers and support gear they plan to put in those massive buildings.

That's a reasonable solution. It's one I would have taken back when I was involved in the construction of large scale data centers. Other large data center operators in the region are facing the same constraint, and are also making plans to generate their own power, e.g. the 200MW gas turbine facility purportedly for Meta/Facebook in New Albany, which has been submitted to the OPSB as case 25-302-EL-BGN.

When presenting to the City of Hilliard Planning and Zoning Commission on October 9. 2025 for case PZ-25-59, representatives of Bloom Energy, who makes the fuel cells, emphatically made the point that this facility at their Scioto-Darby Rd campus will be "behind the meter." In other words, it's not part of the public infrastructure - it's to make power for just the buildings and machines on the AWS parcel.

If that is so, then I believe the OSPB has no role to play in the approvals of this fuel cell facility, no more so than the OSPB has jurisdiction over approving the dozens of diesel engine powered generators AWS has on this site, which in total certainly generate more than the 50MW threshold of 4906.01(B)(1)(a).

But there is a nuance that I won't claim to understand: the drawings provided to the Hilliard P&Z Commission show interconnections between the AEP substation and the fuel cell facility. I'm not an electrical engineer, and won't claim to understand the purpose of this interconnection. It could be something as simple as to ensure that should the fuel cell array have some kind of catastrophic failure, that there is sufficient power to the array to operate critical safety equipment like valves, fans and pumps.

Or it could be a connection that enables the fuel cell array to indeed send power to the utility grid. Maybe this is a strategy to make it so that the OPSB has jurisdiction, even if AWS never intends to sell even one watt-second to AEP. But maybe they intend to sell a significant amount of power to AEP if the fuel cell array is built out before all the servers and other gear gets installed in the datacenter buildings. Exploiting a technicality.

For me, all this circles around the CO2 emissions. Will the people of our community be harmed physically or economically by CO2 emissions of this magnitude? Will it create a "death bubble" onsite that could be fatally dangerous to workers on the AWS campus. Will there be higher CO2 levels on I-270 that could affect drivers? Beacon Elementary is only 1,000 yards from where the fuel cells will sit. Does the OPSB give a hoot about these questions?

My hope is that the Hilliard city leaders will file a court action to stop any further development of the AWS fuel cell facility until the question of jurisdiction can be answered. It's not cheap to hire a lawyer to draft and file such a lawsuit. The City has the funds, and is definitely a party to the matter. It's a question of whether or not the City Council wants to engage.

HILLIARD, Ohio (WCMH) — Amazon Web Services’ contested proposal to power Hilliard data centers with a fuel cell system is now expected to move forward without city approval. “In m…

10/15/2025

My mail-in ballot has arrived, so it’s time for me to make some decisions.

For City Council, we have seven candidates for four seats. My votes will go to Les Carrier, Andy Teater, Kathy Parker-Jones and Tina Cottone.

I’ve been an Independent for a long time - I vote for the person and not the political party.

Les, Andy and I have worked together for many years to bring substantial, positive change to Hilliard. We were leaders in the efforts to pass Issue 9 to eliminate the City's ability to provide financial breaks to apartment developers, and Issue 33 to change the Hilliard form of government to the City Manager Model.

That doesn’t mean we see eye-to-eye on every issue. We don’t. But I know both of these men well, and want them to continue to be part of the leadership of this community. It’s not healthy when every Council vote is unanimous. It’s important that different perspectives are heard. Better decisions are made that way.

I’ve also known Tina for several years. I was honored that when she first ran for City Council, she wanted to sit down with me and pick my brain about stuff I learned while serving on the School Board. The health of our City depends on our local governments working well together: School Board, City Council, Norwich Twp Board and Brown Twp Board. That starts with developing empathy for what’s important to the others in their respective domains of service to the community. Tina has done that. I’d like to see her continue.

I’ve known Kathy Parker-Jones since I first ran for School Board nearly two decades ago - when she was a teacher for Hilliard Schools. I respect her intelligence, integrity and her way of thinking about things. I trust her. That’s what I want most for those who endeavor to represent me.

For Norwich Twp Trustee, I’m voting for Greg Young and Earl “Sonny” Cantrell.

The Norwich Board today is completely different from the one that was seated when I was appointed as the Norwich Township Fiscal Officer in 2022. Greg was elected in 2023 to complete the final two years of Larry Earman’s term after Larry passed away, and Sonny was appointed this year to complete the last few months of Chuck Buck’s term when Chuck passed away. A great deal of institutional knowledge and governing experience was lost when we lost Larry and Chuck.

Greg retired from the Norwich Twp Fire Department as the Assistant Fire Chief. I have a good sense of the scope and complexity of that role, as the Asst Fire Chief and the Fiscal Officer work closely together on annual budgeting for the Fire Department, as well as its day to day fiscal operations. It’s a great background for the kind of matters a Trustee has to deal with. He fills in a good deal of that institutional knowledge that was lost.

I have never met Sonny Cantrell. I do know he’s been a successful small business owner in Hilliard for fifty years, and that he was selected to fill a Trustee’s seat by Rick Tidd and Greg Young. He has also been endorsed by the Norwich firefighter’s union. Sonny’s familiarity with our community, his business experience and the endorsement of his colleagues make him my choice.

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10/13/2025

[NOTE: SEE CORRECTIONS BELOW}}

There's a couple of misunderstandings about the property tax abatement deal Amazon Web Services got when they came to Hilliard. Most folks have heard that they got a 100% abatement for 15 years, and that's true, but here's the rest of the story:

First, Ohio has two kinds of property tax. One is the Real Property Tax that all of us pay directly (on the home we own) or indirectly (included in our rent). This tax is assessed against the value of the land and any improvements - ie buildings - standing on the land. It does not include the value of the contents of any buildings.

The other is Personal Property Tax (PPT). For individuals, there has not been a tax assessed on personal property for a long time, if ever, so most of us have never heard of it. In my home state of West Virginia, PPT is assessed on vehicles, or at least it was when I was a kid. To renew your license plates each year, you had to pay the PPT, and it was a chunk. No one liked it.

Until 2005, Ohio assessed a Personal Property Tax on business equipment and inventory. So for an office building, the land and building would be assessed Real Property Tax, while all the desks, chairs, filing cabinets, copy machines, computers, etc would be assessed Personal Property Tax. This was a very big deal for something like a steel mill. All the gazillions of dollars of equipment in the mill would have PPT assessed. Auto dealers would get assessed PPT on all the unsold cars in their lot. That's the reason they had big sales before the year ended and the value of the inventory was captured.

In the case of the AWS datacenters, the land and the building shells would be assessed Real Property Tax, and the gazillions of dollars of servers, network switches, and the like would be assessed PPT. The value of these servers, switches etc is multiples of the value of the buildings and land.

But in 2005, the General Assy abolished the PPT in hope of revitalizing heavy industry. For Hilliard Schools, that was about $13 million/yr in revenue that evaporated. The General Assy established a phase out program such that the State made up a fraction of the lost revenue for several years, but that's long over. Some the local levy millage we have now serves to replace that lost revenue.

By the way, this elimination of PPT is one of the reasons central Ohio has one of the largest concentrations of hyperscale datacenters in the world. Didn't bring back the steel industry though.

So most of the asset value AWS has in Hilliard was never taxable anyway. The abatement they received was for the Real Property Tax. But that's not the end of the story. As part of the abatement deal, AWS signed an agreement to make payments to Hilliard Schools in lieu of taxes.

[[There were two deals. One for the first campus on Britton Rd. A separate agreement was signed for the campuses on Leppert and Scioto-Darby. A copy of the second one is available via the link below.]] THIS IS INCORRECT - THERE WAS NO COMPENSATION DEAL ON THE BRITTON RD FACILITY, ONLY LEPPERT AND SCIOTO-DARBY]]

Once each datacenter building is completed, AWS pays to Hilliard Schools an amount based on the size of the building. Here's the exact wording from the agreement:

""Annual Payment" means, for the first year that payments are due under this Agreement, an amount equal to Two Hundred Fifty Thousand Dollars ($250,000), for the second year that payments are due under this Agreement, an amount equal to Four Hundred Thousand Dollars ($400,000), and for the third year and any subsequent year an amount equal to Four Hundred Thousand Dollars ($400,000) plus One Dollar and Fifty Cents ($1.50) per square foot of any Building at the Project Site that benefits from an Exemption."

The Leppert Rd campus is eight buildings of about 180,000sf each, so that's $400,000 + $2.2 million or $2.6 million per year. The Scioto-Darby campus will finish out at about the same size, so that's another $2.2 million.

So when fully built out, the two newest AWS campuses will generate on the order of $5 million/yr in payments to Hilliard Schools.

Not a free ride.

10/10/2025

The Oct 10, 2025 edition of the DIspatch reports that the Ohio House of Representatives has passed two bills affecting property taxes. They now go to the Ohio Senate for their consideration.

The first bill, HB129 deals with how the "20 mill floor" is calculated, and therefore has no affect on the Hilliard Schools community. The 20 mill floor is a mechanism to ensure that all local school districts tax themselves a minimum amount and don't rely entirely on the state for funding. Hilliard Schools is currently at 37.95 mills, according to the most recent Five Year Forecast.

HB309 is more consequential. It allows the County Budget Commission to reduce the amount of property tax collected by a taxing entity (e.g. school district or township) if it deems the amount to be collected to be "unnecessary or excessive," defined as (this is copied directly from the Bill):

(1) "Unnecessary collections" mean collections from a tax beyond the reasonably anticipated financial needs of the taxing authority for the specific purposes of the tax after accounting for current fund balances, projected expenditures, and other available funding sources.
(2) "Excessive collections" mean collections from a tax in an amount or at a rate that exceeds what is required to provide services at a level that is consistent with statutory obligations.

There is no formula as to how the amount of property taxes that would be collected would be measured against these standards - it would be solely based on the judgment of the County Budget Commission.

Many may not know that there is such a thing as a County Budget Commission. According to its web page: "Under Ohio law, the main role of the Franklin County Budget Commission is to review the tax budget of every political subdivision within the county. This includes school districts, police and fire districts, county agencies and libraries, as well as cities, villages, and townships."

I had direct interaction with the Budget Commission when serving as the Fiscal Officer for Norwich Township. The Township Board of Trustees would submit their budget annually to the Commission, and I as the Fiscal Officer would have to wait to receive the approval from the Budget Commission before I was authorized to make disbursements for township expenses. Any changes to the budget in the course of the year would have to be submitted to the County Budget Commission for approval as well. Every other year, the State Auditor would examine the township's records for evidence that these approvals were received, and that spending was in line with the approved budget.

So the role of the County Budget Commission is to ensure that the many local governments within its county spend the tax revenue they received in the manner approved by the local governing board (eg School Board, Township Board), and the voters who approved the levies.

This HB309, if it becomes law, would expand the power of the County Budget Commission to allow it to actually reduce the tax collection below the amount approved by the voters.

Who sits on the County Tax Commission? It is the County Auditor (Michael Stinziano), the County Treasurer (Cheryl Brooks Sullivan), and the County Prosecutor (Shayla Favor).

House Speaker Matt Huffman, when asked about these bills said: "school district officials always say lawmakers’ changes will lead to teacher cuts. That’s an argument that’s always made, that if we don’t follow the fair school funding plan, we’re going to have to lay off teachers. We’re going to have to not have lights for Friday night at the football game. That’ll be the first thing to go.”

He acts like that is an idle threat. But when more than 80% of a school district's operating budget is for compensation and benefits, and nearly all the money raised by a new operating levy goes to paying the compensation and benefits increases built into the union collective bargain agreements, that's exactly what happens.

Less revenue means the district can pay fewer people - some would have be laid off. And because the union agreements require that those who at the bottom of the seniority ladder - the ones who get the lowest pay - get laid off first, it takes a lot of them to be released to reach the spending cut necessary.

Please don't pull out the age-old trope that there are too many administrators, or that they get paid too much. Our school district is $250 million corporation with 2,000 employees, serving over 16,000 students. A certain amount of management is needed, and what we have is appropriate, if not a little thin, in my opinion. Compare the number and compensation of management in a business of similar size.

I can't imagine that the three budget commissioners relish being given this power. They are after all elected officials, and I can see their decisions on whether or not to reduce local property taxes unilaterally as being the most prominent and most tangible part of their record when they run for re-election. The pressure to reduce property taxes will be immense.

But here in Franklin County, all three of those offices are currently held by Democrats, as are all countywide offices. The teachers' union traditionally supports Democrats, but more specifically they support incumbents and candidates who support the teachers' unions.

As longs as the Democrats control county level offices in Franklin County, I don't see the County Budget Commission voting to reduce taxes. But who knows - Party allegiance and traditional ties are one thing (okay, two things). But cutting everyone's tax bills can earn a lot of votes. Refusing to do so can mean not getting (re)elected. It's a tough spot for them and an opportunity for the Republicans.

If HB309 makes it through the Senate substantially unchanged, I suspect Governor DeWine would veto it. But who knows, maybe he and the Republican Party want to put all the urban area County Budget Commissions controlled by Democrats on the hot seat.

I think that as local taxpayers, we have to decide whether we think it's okay for a County Budget Commission comprised of three people we had little influence in electing to be allowed to override the wishes of the voters of our own community who passed the levies to support our own school district and township.

If you do, then perhaps we should reorganize Ohio's school districts to a countywide level, since that is where the spending control will be held. That's what is done in many states, including our neighbor West Virginia, who has only 55 school districts instead of Ohio's 600 plus.

10/07/2025

At the October 9, 2025 6pm meeting of the City of Hilliard Planning and Zoning Commission, case PZ-25-59 will be heard (thanks Hilliard Beacon for the story). It is an application by Amazon Web Services to put a very large fuel-cell based electricity generation system on its campus at Scioto-Darby Rd and I-270.

Fuel cells are a technology many of us first heard of during the Space Race, when fuel cells were developed to provide electrical power to manned spacecraft. The Fuel Cell and Hydrogen Energy Association says "A fuel cell is a device that generates electricity through an electrochemical reaction, not combustion. In a fuel cell, hydrogen and oxygen are combined to generate electricity, heat, and water. "

They are not emission free however.

Per the submission to the P&Z by AWS, the Bloom Energy fuel cell system produces 750lbs of carbon dioxide (CO2) for each MWh (megawatt-hour) of electricity generated. (see image below)

The fuel cell array that AWS wants to install will be 72.9 megawatts. If I'm doing the math correctly, that means it will generate about 55,000 pounds of CO2 per hour - 1.3 million pounds per day. According to Google Gemini, this is about 8.5 million cubic feet of gas at 50F and one atmosphere. This is enough to completely fill the volume of about 2,500 homes. Every day.

Bloom Energy claims that their fuel cell systems produce electricity with much less CO2 emitted than is the case with other generation methods, such as burning coal, or running diesel or gas turbine generators. That's undoubtably true. But less is not the same as none.

Bloom Energy also says that this concentrated production of CO2 makes their systems ideally suited to be paired with a carbon-capture system. I'm sure that isn't cheap. And I don't see any mention of this in the AWS submission.

AWS says this on their Sustainability page: "AWS relentlessly innovates its infrastructure design, build, and operations to make progress towards net-zero carbon by 2040 and being water positive by 2030."

Pumping out 1.3 million pounds of CO2 every day seems 180 degrees opposite of that.

These hyperscale data center operators are desperate for electrical power. They count on those big buildings to convert electricity into profits. No electricity - no datacenter - no revenue. They're seeing that the electric utilities can't keep up, so they're coming up with their own ways to generate electrical power on site.

Many are installing onsite gas turbine generating plants. That's what Meta/Facebook is planning for their massive campus in New Albany, where they need 200MW of power. Some, like Microsoft, are planning to install small modular nuclear reactors on their data center campuses. That's how much power they consume.

The datacenter folks are way out ahead of the regulators and government leaders on this stuff. It can be easy to say "Yes" to a big economic engine like AWS without fully understanding the impact.

I encourage our local leaders to educate themselves on this technology and ask the hard questions, and I encourage all of us to hold them accountable.

I'll put the link to the P&Z case in the first comment.

09/03/2025

Folks wonder how it is that hundreds of single family homes and apartments can get built in the school district, yet the enrollment in the schools remains fairly constant. In fact, the last I heard, the enrollment isn't projected to increase materially over the next ten years.

According the Enrollment Report provided to the School Board on August 20, 2025, the Class of 2026 numbers 1,238 students.

That means that for the total enrollment of the school district to remain around 16,500, those 1,238 graduating seniors would have to be replaced by 1,238 new students. So where will they come from? Where will they live?

Upper Arlington Schools has a history that might be informative. The City of UA developed quickly after World War II, as the Greatest Generation came home, giving birth to the Boomer Generation. Development continued into the 1970s, when UA essentially ran out of developable land. The enrollment of the school district grew with the development, and they built many new schools to accommodate all the students.

By the 1960s, the Boomer kids were starting to graduate from high school. Enrollment peaked in the 1970s. The kids went off the college and to start their lives, while the parents mostly just stayed in the family home. Without a stock of housing available they could afford, most of those Boomer kids moved to somewhere other than UA and started their families there.

Gradually, the student population of UA Schools began to decline. So much so that in 1982, the UA School Board decided they no longer needed Fishinger Elementary, and sold it to a group of parents who would form Wellington School.

In time, those folks of the Greatest Generation began to pass away, and finally homes in UA became available again. As a result, young folks are moving in, children are being born, and the school enrollment is again on the rise.

What does that have to do with Hilliard? We're not UA. For one thing, we're not landlocked - there are thousands of acres of developable land still available in our school district.

But we are like UA in a way, in that those parents who swarmed to Hilliard starting in the 1980s to escape the court-mandated busing in Columbus City Schools have now seen their kids graduate, but the parents aren't going anywhere. As was the case in UA, most of the homes which once housed two or three kids are now housing the empty nester parents, who aren't planning to sell anytime soon.

So yes, a lot of new housing is being built in our school district. That's creating the places where those 1,238 new kids will live, just to keep the enrollment the same. And remember, the same thing happens every year - every grade has around 1,200 kids.

Bottom line is that tendency of parents to stay in their homes when they become empty nesters means plenty of new housing is needed to accommodate the new students necessary to keep enrollment relatively constant.

But it also means that someday, all of us Boomer parents will be passing on, making our homes available to new families. This will accelerate over the next 10-20 years. Then, if our community and school district is still in demand, there could be an explosion of new students, and another growth spurt like we saw in the 1990s, when the enrollment doubled and the district constructed a new building every year for a decade.

Now could be a kind of a golden period, where $millions of new real estate is being developed without a corresponding increase in students. This will go a long way toward funding the never-ending rise in the money paid out for compensation and benefits of the teachers, staff and administrators. But that's only if the current property tax funding scheme survives, and that's not looking likely.

Maybe the trend will be that as the homes built in the 1990s become available, the homes being built now will age into the empty-nester status, continuing to suppress the growth in enrollment. Maybe that pattern will repeat for decades to come.

In the short term, we have to decide as a community, which I define as the school district, what kind of housing we want to see getting built. Do we want housing that our kids can afford? I heard a thirty-ish young married guy say the other day that he had no expectation of ever being able to afford a single-family home in a place like Hilliard, and that he and his wife would be renters forever. Maybe we need to ease up on the McMansions and look into more tiny homes and other options.

07/12/2025

During the First Industrial Revolution, animal power was replaced by steam engines. In the Second Industrial Revolution, repetitive human manual labor - ie assembly line work - was replaced by programmable manipulators, aka industrial robots.

We are now entering the Third Industrial Revolution, where human brainpower is being replaced by artificial intelligence. Professions such as physicians, lawyers and such. Harvard is offering executive education classes to teach hospital administrators, insurance executives and pharmaceutical leaders how to integrate AI in the delivery of healthcare, for example.

And when you marry AI and robots, another class of human labor can be replaced: jobs that require both intelligence and mobility such as heavy equipment operators, including farm equipment, freight handlers, warehouse workers, delivery drivers. Some say passenger airliners will someday be flown without human pilots.

So what things do we need to teach in Hilliard City Schools to be "Ready for Tomorrow" when we're probably less clear about what tomorrow will look like than we have been since WWII?

More are beginning to feel that now more than ever, it's vital that we give kids a classical liberal arts education, particularly majors like English, Philosophy, History, Sociology, Political Science, Biology, Chemistry, etc. In other words, the hard-earned collective wisdom humanity has accumulated over the millennia.

When I entered the College of Engineering at Ohio State fifty plus years ago to study computer science, our curriculum was stuffed with mathematics, physics, chemistry and computer science courses. Yes, we had to take a couple of "rounding courses" like Freshman English Composition, Psychology and a culture course or two. But it was really trade school for becoming a software developer. I was thrilled to have never had to take an English Literature or a History course.

Today, computer science is the last major I would recommend to a high school kid intending to go to college, unless their intention is to get a PhD. We are have already reached a level of AI technology where many programming/coding tasks can be completed by an AI tool like ChatGPT. IT is not an expanding job market any longer. Many new computer science graduates are having great difficulty finding employment in their field.

It is no longer necessary to learn a "computer language" like BASIC or PYTHON to tell computers what to do. They now speak our language - better than many of us. And they can draw on every bit of information we've ever recorded in order to solve problems.

There is an old fable about the humans building a powerful AI system to which they give control of all systems: food production, healthcare, physical infrastructure, transportation, weapons, etc. Then they order it to: "End Human Suffering." So it kills all the humans.

If there is a skill to be taught in these nascent days of deploying AI, it's how to craft a conversation with an AI agent. The requests made need to be clear, unambiguous, and accurate, or you can end up with the tragedy of this fable.

My college English Composition professor told us on day one that he would not grade on our spelling, grammar, or vocabulary. The purpose of language is to transfer thoughts from one mind to another, and that's what he would grade us on - our ability to achieve that thought transfer with fidelity.

But, he said, that was a lot easier to do if you were skilled at following the conventions of spelling, grammar and vocabulary.

Such is the case with AI interactions. The objective is to transfer your queries and instructions to another intelligence, and not have tragic misunderstandings.

That seems more like an English degree than computer programming.

AI will impact civilization to a degree similar to that of nuclear energy. We just don't know all the ways yet. The next generations need to know how to deal with it or H. sapiens is in real trouble. I hope some of the really smart kids study history, economics, psychology, political science and the humanities.

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