By JAN McLAUGHLIN
BG Independent News
The rain last week delayed the concrete curing, and the cold temperatures expected this week are putting a kink in the road striping. Together, those weather conditions dampened plans to show the new roundabout on Ohio 582 in action on Monday.
But while the demonstration of a semi-truck and farm equipment navigating the roundabout didn’t occur as planned, Wood County Port Authority Executive Director Rex Huffman assured that traffic will soon be coursing through the circle between Ohio 25 and Interstate 75, north of Bowling Green.
“We wanted to show how a tractor trailer and combine can traverse this roundabout,” Huffman said. “This is made for heavy traffic.”
The stretch of Route 582 between Route 25 and Mercer Road has been closed since early September. The goal is to have the roundabout open later this week or next week.
The $2.8 million roundabout, plus turn lanes on Route 25, are aimed at accommodating the new $750 million data center being built in the area. The project is expected to enhance traffic flow and safety in the area, while supporting significant economic development and infrastructure growth in Wood County.
The name of the company behind the data center is still not being released. For more than a year, local officials have referred to the data center plan as Project Accordion.
The plans call for a total investment of $240 million for the purchase of about 750 acres and $510 million for the buildings, machinery and equipment, according to Wade Gottschalk, executive director of the Wood County Economic Development Commission, who announced the project last year.
The new roundabout sits between Ohio 25 and Interstate 75, just to the east of the Northwestern Water and Sewer District headquarters. It will provide access to the new data center, the water and sewer district, and a proposed maintenance facility for the Ohio Department of Transportation planned to the east.
During the peak of construction for the data center, more than 1,000 vehicles a day will be accessing the site.
The roundabout will keep that traffic flowing, said Huffman. The port authority coordinated the roundabout project.
“We didn’t want a stoplight. We convinced them this is the way to go,” he said. “We want to make sure traffic keeps moving.”
The roundabout was funded by $1 million from the Ohio Department of Development, $250,000 from the Ohio Department of Commerce, and the rest by “Project Accordion.”
The timeline for the data center project calls for buildings to be under construction next spring. Huffman predicted the name of the data center company will likely be released sometime early next year.
“We let the company control their own message,” he said.
The Ohio Department of Transportation also has plans for 40 acres it owns just to the east of the water and sewer district headquarters. Hiram Crabtree, business and human resources administrator for ODOT District 2, said plans are in place to relocate the ODOT garage for Wood County to the acreage along Route 582.
ODOT has outgrown its location on East Poe Road and on Mitchell Road, in Bowling Green, Crabtree said.
Law enforcement officers at the roundabout Monday view the roundabout as a safety feature. State Patrol Lt. Matt Geer and Sgt. Ryan Purpura advised that motorists accustomed to the straight path of Route 582 just need to pay attention to the new signage.
“It’ll be something different for the public,” Geer said. “People just need to watch the signs, watch the lane markers, and watch your left” for oncoming traffic. At night, the roundabout will be illuminated by seven lights.
Wood County Sheriff Mark Wasylyshyn is a big believer in roundabouts as a way to reduce serious crashes.
“I love roundabouts,” he said. “They are definitely safer.”
Wasylyshyn pointed out a previously dangerous intersection, at Ohio 199 and Roachton Road, that was improved with the addition of a roundabout. In the past, there used to be at least one fatal crash there each year.
“Now it’s unusual to have an injury crash,” he said.
Multiple roundabouts have been installed on rural roads in the county, the sheriff said. Among those are several at intersections with Ohio 199. Two more are planned in the future, with one at Route 199 and Route 582 in 2027 or 2028, and another at the three-road intersection of Route 199, Five Point Road and Dunbridge Road in 2029.
This project to accommodate the data center moved along quickly since the property along Route 582 is primarily farm fields, with plenty of room for the roundabout. And since a roundabout is considered a change that “calms” traffic, there was no need for a traffic study.
Once completed, the data center site is expected to employ about 50 people, earning an average of $80,000 a year. While vehicular traffic to the data center will decrease after construction, it is expected that more development will occur in the area.
The site is equipped with features needed for a data center, starting with the availability of large acreage and transportation links. Through the Northwestern Water and Sewer District, it will have access to Bowling Green water, which is vital for the cooling of servers. The acreage is close to a source of electricity, with the First Energy substation nearby on Mercer Road. And fiber-optic lines traverse the area, which could carry large amounts of information to and from the data center.
When announced last year, it was reported that the plans for the data center call for two buildings between 300,000 and 400,000 square feet each, according to Chris Knezevic, an attorney representing Liames LLC. The buildings will have a very simple exterior design, and inside will be “a lot, a lot, a lot of computer servers,” he said.
“On the inside, it’s all technology,” Knezevic said, with “access to data from all over.”
Data center facilities house IT infrastructure for building, running, and delivering applications and services, and for storing and managing the data associated with those applications and services. Last year, Knezevic said he did not know if the proposed site in Wood County would be used by one company or serve several customers.
Data centers have evolved in recent years from facilities housing traditional IT infrastructure for the exclusive use of one company, to facilities owned by cloud service providers for the shared use of multiple companies and customers.
