By JAN McLAUGHLIN
BG Independent News
Construction of a roundabout on Ohio 582 will begin next month to accommodate the new $750 million data center being built north of Bowling Green.
The proposed roundabout will be located 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 of the district headquarters.
During the peak of construction for the data center, more than 1,000 vehicles a day will be accessing the site, according to Theresa Pollick, of the Northwestern Water and Sewer District.
The project will move quickly, according to Todd Audet and Rex Huffman of the Wood County Port Authority, which is coordinating the roundabout effort.
“We can move fast. There’s not a whole lot of impediments in the way,” Audet said Wednesday.
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, the need for a traffic study is negated.
“It’s not as complicated as downtown Perrysburg,” Audet said.
While it is unconventional for a port authority to manage roundabout construction, it works in this instance since efforts are being made to not slow down the data center project, Audet said.
“The Port Authority has the resources to organize and execute a roundabout,” he said.
Turn lanes from Route 25 will also be constructed to access the data center. The extra lanes will be added in front of the Middleton Township offices, and will connect with an internal road into the data center development.
The roundabout and additional turn lanes on Route 25 will cost an estimated $2.5 million to construct, according to Huffman. The expense will be paid for primarily by “Project Accordion,” Huffman said, noting that the company behind the data center remains very cautious about revealing its name, and continues to use the code name “Accordion.”
Construction of the roundabout will begin in early September, and will require the closure of Route 582, between Route 25 and Mercer Road, for an estimated 60 days. Alternate routes will be discussed with local fire and EMS services, school transportation systems, and farmers harvesting their crops.
The roundabout will be built large enough to accommodate tractor trailers and agricultural equipment.
It is expected that other roadway improvements may be made near the site, including to Mercer Road by the county, and to the I-75 interchange by ODOT.
While vehicular traffic to the data center will decrease after construction, it is expected that more development will occur in the area.
Audet predicted that earth will start moving in the next few months for the data center construction.
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 a year ago.
Once completed, the Middleton Township site is expected to employ about 50 people, earning an average of $80,000 a year
“This is yet another tech project that can help us move away from our rust belt reputation,” Wood County Commissioner Craig LaHote said last year.
The site is equipped with features needed for a data center, starting with the availability of large acreage, Gottschalk said. Through the Northwestern Water and Sewer District, it has access to 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.
Since the project was announced, the Wood County Economic Development Commission has received multiple inquiries from other data center projects, according to Gottschalk.
