The receipt: what is Project Dazzler
In 2025, a Delaware-organized special-purpose entity called Tilted Gate LLC began acquiring parcels in Green Township, Scioto County, Ohio -- about half a mile east of the Ohio River, in the southernmost stretch of the state. The acquisitions, recorded in the county GIS, came from a holding company referred to in resident filings as Virginia Holding and from a handful of individual property owners. By the time the consolidation was complete, Tilted Gate controlled a roughly 792-acre site along Braunlin Road, near Franklin Furnace.
The county commissioners knew about the project. They knew the operator's name. They did not say either. According to subsequent reporting and resident accounts, the commissioners signed non-disclosure agreements with Tilted Gate during the negotiation period. The arrangement is legal in Ohio and increasingly common in data-center siting; it is also the structural reason most residents only learn about projects of this scale after the public-comment window has narrowed.
The codename inside the developer's filings, leaked in January 2026 through WSAZ and the Ironton Tribune, was Project Dazzler. The campus, as it has now been publicly disclosed: 1.7 million square feet across two data-center buildings, plus support facilities, access roads, stormwater infrastructure, and an electrical substation. Total investment: 1 billion dollars. Permanent jobs in the first phase: approximately 50. The operator, confirmed in March 2026 by Datacenter Dynamics: Google.
Five hundred feet
The number that should anchor every conversation about Project Dazzler is 500 feet. That is the distance, as the campus is currently sited, from the corner of the data-center property line to the nearest home on Braunlin Road. There are approximately twenty homes inside that line.
Residents found out about this distance the same way they found out about Project Dazzler: from the leak in January. They had not been notified in advance because the commissioners' NDAs prevented it. They did not have a say in the rezoning or the land conveyance because by the time those steps happened, the parcels had already been assembled. They have, since January, organized: a petition, regular attendance at commissioner meetings, public testimony, and -- as of May 6, 2026 -- attendance at an Ohio EPA public meeting at the local high school to comment on the project's wetlands discharge permit.
The answer they keep getting from county officials, according to the tipster who flagged this story to us, is that the project will be "great for our area." The answer they keep giving in return is that it will not be great for the twenty households across the property line.
The water
The reason Ohio EPA is involved is the wetlands. The 792-acre site contains, according to the project's permit application, isolated wetland areas that the construction will directly impact. The permit at issue is an Isolated Wetland Permit -- the regulatory mechanism Ohio uses to allow industrial development that fills or alters wetland habitat.
The wetland permit application was filed by Tilted Gate LLC. The Ohio EPA's public comment portal for the permit (still accepting comments as of the May 6 public meeting) is at ohioepa.commentinput.com/?id=x2pM63Bt8e. On March 6, 2026, Ohio EPA confirmed the application was administratively complete and the agency began its formal technical review. By statute, regulators have up to 180 days from that date to act on the application -- which puts the latest possible decision in early September 2026.
In parallel, residents are watching the wetland-discharge question with the same anxiety that residents of Independence, Missouri and Carlisle, Pennsylvania have raised about water in their own data-center fights. Once a wetlands permit is approved, the project's water-handling footprint is locked in. Once water is discharged, it is not recoverable.
The tax giveaway
Scioto County commissioners agreed to a property tax abatement covering 75 percent of the data center's property value for 15 years. In lieu of those taxes, the developer is committed to paying a base PILOT (Payment In Lieu Of Taxes) of 500,000 dollars per year. According to documents released after the project leaked, the commissioners described the abatement as standard practice for an investment of this scale.
Do the math: a 1 billion dollar facility, abated at 75 percent for 15 years, equates to roughly 11.25 billion dollars of taxable value that the local schools, the county general fund, and the township will not assess. Across 15 years, a typical Ohio commercial millage rate on that base would yield 200-300 million dollars in property tax revenue. The 500,000 dollar PILOT replaces that with about 7.5 million dollars across the same 15-year window. The math leaves a wide gap, and the gap is on the township and the county's books.
The commissioners' framing, in public meetings, has been that the project will deliver indirect benefits -- construction jobs, secondary spending, regional development -- that exceed the foregone tax base. That argument is the same one residents have heard in Carlisle (Pennsylvania), De Soto (Kansas), and Bessemer (Alabama). It is also the argument the Kairos Fellowship report we recently published characterizes as the central rhetorical move of the data-center industrial-recruitment playbook.
What to watch
1. The Ohio EPA decision on the wetlands permit. The 180-day clock started March 6, 2026. A decision is due no later than early September. If approved, the project's water-handling and stormwater footprint becomes locked in regulatory record. If denied or conditioned, the project's design changes.
2. Any further public comment windows. The May 6, 2026 public meeting is one milestone in the EPA review, not the only one. Residents on Braunlin Road and across Green Township should track the EPA comment portal at ohioepa.commentinput.com/?id=x2pM63Bt8e for additional opportunities to formally object.
3. The construction schedule. Scioto Valley Guardian reported in early March that the project is "inching closer to breaking ground." Once construction begins, the leverage available to the community narrows sharply.
4. Whether other Ohio counties test similar shell-and-NDA structures. Project Dazzler is not the first data center to use a Delaware-organized LLC to assemble parcels under cover of NDAs (we documented the same pattern in Pennsylvania Digital I and Bessemer's Project Marvel), but it is the freshest example with a confirmed Google connection. Other Ohio counties facing similar inbound interest should expect the same script: shell LLC, sign-by-sign land assembly, NDA-protected negotiation, late leak, fast approval.
5. The 50-jobs question. Phase 1 will produce approximately 50 permanent positions. Phase 2 numbers have not been publicly disclosed. Residents and journalists should ask, every public meeting, what the per-job public subsidy works out to.
We track this project on the map. The community organizers in Franklin Furnace who flagged the story to us have been working without the receipts at hand because the NDAs had them in the dark. They have the receipts now. So do you.