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Amazon's Wilmington Data Center Returns to the Planning Commission Tuesday

The tabled plan for Amazon's Cosler Farm campus is back on an agenda for the first time since a federal judge froze it in July, and it arrives a week after Wilmington voters turned down four other data center rezonings.

November 7, 2026  ·  Updated November 11, 2026  ·  Underclassic

For four months, the plans for Amazon's data center campus on the old Cosler farm south of downtown Wilmington have sat on a shelf at City Hall, held there by a federal judge. On Tuesday afternoon they come back down. The city's Planning Commission has called a special meeting for 4:30 p.m. in Council Chambers with a single item on the agenda: the tabled site plan for Amazon Data Services at 1488 South US 68.

The agenda is short and conventional. Bohler Engineering, Amazon's agent, will present the project; city staff will deliver its report; the commissioners will discuss it among themselves; residents will have a public hearing; and the commission will act. Acting can mean approving the plan, approving it with conditions, rejecting it, or tabling it again. The land is already zoned Light Industrial, so the question before the board is not whether a data center may go there, but whether this particular layout of buildings, roads and equipment meets the city's code.

How it got stuck

The plan stalled in July, when U.S. District Judge Jeffery P. Hopkins, hearing a lawsuit brought by residents in Sharp v. City of Wilmington, ruled that City Council could not shield an October 2025 executive session behind privilege, because its minutes did not meet the requirements of Ohio's open meetings law. The consequence was practical: the Planning Commission was barred from acting on the site plan until council passed the underlying ordinances again.

Council did. In August it passed a noise exemption for critical infrastructure, O-26-43, by a 6–1 vote, and on September 3 it re-passed the Cosler Farm rezoning, O-26-41, and the measure making data centers a permitted use in industrial districts, O-26-42, each 5–2 and each with an emergency clause that let it take effect at once. Council members Snarr and Schlabach voted no. A separate challenge to those emergency clauses in Clinton County Common Pleas Court was dismissed in early October by Judge Jonathan Hein; the plaintiffs' attorney has said the ruling is being appealed.

The federal case itself has not moved much since. Amazon joined it as an intervenor, the residents filed a second amended complaint in late October, and the most recent filing on the public docket is the plaintiffs' Rule 26(f) planning report of October 30. No scheduling order has been entered, and nothing on the docket, as of Saturday morning, asks the court to stop Tuesday's meeting.

A week after the vote

The timing gives the meeting a weight its agenda doesn't show. On November 3, Wilmington voters rejected four referendums on rezonings sought by Ardent and TAC for roughly 546 acres of other land, by margins of about four to one in unofficial returns. Those ballots did not touch the Cosler Farm parcel, whose zoning council settled in September, and the results have not yet been certified by the county Board of Elections. But they are the clearest reading anyone has of how the town feels about data centers, and the commissioners will hear that feeling in the public hearing on Tuesday whether or not it is on the agenda.

The commission's own job is narrower than the politics around it. A site plan review is a test of setbacks, access, drainage, landscaping, lighting and the other details the code prescribes; boards can attach conditions, and residents can ask for them. What the commissioners decide, and on what grounds, will be the first official word on the Amazon campus since the judge's order, and the first since the town said no at the ballot box to the next wave.

Underclassic will report the outcome Tuesday evening on its Wilmington page.

Sources: City of Wilmington meeting notice; agenda text via Muyni; Sharp v. City of Wilmington, No. 1:26-cv-00448 (S.D. Ohio) docket; Wilmington News Journal coverage. Related: data centers on the ballot, Wilmington, Ohio, town page.