HUBBARD TOWNSHIP — Trustees who went on a tour of a data center location nearly two hours southwest of them agreed that the experience felt like an episode of “The Truman Show.”

Earlier this week, trustee Eric Lamb said he traveled to New Albany, Ohio, to participate in an economic development tour that was focused on data center construction and operations, as well as construction practices and utility demands associated with a large-scale data center.

New Albany is home to 40 completed data centers across 15 companies, with 28 more announced or under construction in its “IT and Mission Critical Cluster,” a high-availability infrastructure designed to host applications and services that cannot experience downtime without severely impacting business operations or safety, according to a presentation from the city.

The city welcomed its first data center investment in 2010, its first hyperscale investment in 2015, and Meta in 2017, with Google following two years later, according to a timeline in the presentation.

The timeline shows that more than 15 total data centers were under construction by 2024, with 40-plus being completed in 2026.

Lamb said the visit “skewed” his mind away from the thought of having one in the area.

“In this area, we’ve been talking about like one, two data center (projects) in areas and stuff like that; this is a town that took and put 40 in,” Trustee Jason Tedrow said. “They’ve taken this to the hyperscale more or less.”

Tedrow said the tour was “kind of disappointing” in the sense that he felt it was trying to be a sales pitch, as opposed to informing leaders, and expressed belief that some of the information wasn’t presented properly.

Tedrow said he asked officials if anyone had an issue with the data centers, questioning if they saw a shift in their voter base because people coming to town to work there wouldn’t vote against it.

Lamb said they drove for about 12 miles, and they saw 20 houses, with half of them boarded up.

“They built a 15-minute city — it was surreal. No high signs, like a town of 11,000 people had Verizon stores, AT&T stores,” Lamb said. “All the fast food and restaurants you could possibly think of, brick buildings, white picket fences everywhere.”

“It was 88 miles of horse fence through the town with asphalt sidewalks,” Tedrow said. “Everything was a lot of commercialized stuff, and everything was highly controlled; it felt like you were in an episode or in the movie ‘The Truman Show.'”

“The Truman Show” is a 1998 American comedy-drama directed by Peter Weir starring Jim Carrey as Truman Burbank, a man who is unaware that he is living his entire life on a colossal soundstage, and that it is being filmed and broadcast as a reality television show that has a huge international following. All of his friends, family and members of his community are paid actors whose job is to sustain the illusion and keep Truman unaware that the world he inhabits is scripted and fake.

Tedrow said that, after doing research, major cities will run 800 to 3,500 strand fiber-optic cables, but New Albany is running 5,000-plus strand trunk lines all over the place.

“They have the main facility for American Electric Power Company for 11 states centralized down there, they’re putting in Meta facilities, they’re putting in the Intel semiconductor facility down there,” Tedrow said. “And that building is massive, and they went 40 feet down, basically, and put a basement in, something like General Motors in Lordstown for us.”

Tedrow said such an endeavor is a huge expense, but it was explained that it was a partnership between the city and a land developer called the New Albany Company, which he noted was founded and co-worked on by Les Wexner and Jeffery Epstein.

“That kind of gave me a little bit of a — I don’t know if that’s really what I want to trust on you selling me that this is a good idea,” Tedrow said.

Tedrow said the community is considered a “master plan community” — a large-scale, self-contained residential development designed comprehensively from day one.

“Everything is HOAs, homes starting in the mid to high $400,000s; a lot of the stuff is, your landscaping is part of the HOA fees, everything else. You can walk to the city, you can ride golf carts around there,” Tedrow said. “Depending on which neighborhood you’re in, looking up into it, some of the HOA fees include the country club membership.”

Tedrow said they basically privatized the entire government, but Lamb said it was more of a business.

“They have a mission statement, and then pillars they’re holding on what they want to do to grow this community out,” Tedrow said.

Lamb noted his own experiences running a business, and called it “hard-pressed” to see $100 million corporations and holding pillars for 30 years — especially when the community only had a population of 1,000 back then.

“It definitely put a different perspective on it, I think it was a little concerning,” Tedrow said.

Tedrow said he spoke with a Lake to River representative while he was there, who informed them that even though the township has a moratorium and their zoning commission is working on a moratorium, there is a developer interested in Hubbard Township — aside from the one in the city.

Tedrow said the zoning commission tried for an outright ban on data centers, but they legally can’t do one, which is why they pushed for the moratorium.

He said the commission has some draft items, but trustees are giving them time so they can be thorough, and the community will have time to voice opinions and concerns.