Amherst’s Board of Zoning Appeals rejected a use variance on Thursday, July 30, 2026, killing — at least for now — a plan by Cervenka Development Partners LLC to convert three buildings on the Nordson Corporation campus into a 45-megawatt data center. The decision came less than 24 hours after a public hearing the night before that drew a large crowd of residents to city hall, where only 60 people were allowed inside under capacity limits and the rest listened from the lawn.

The board’s written ruling said the developer failed to make a convincing case that Amherst’s industrial zoning code — which does not list data centers as a permitted use — should bend to allow one. Cervenka Development Partners has 30 days to appeal to Lorain County Common Pleas Court.

The vote was narrow in scope but consequential in effect. Amherst’s zoning code treats the Nordson site as industrial, and the city’s position is that data centers are not explicitly allowed there, meaning any conversion requires a use variance. The board found the developer had not cleared that bar.

Board member John Jeffreys pointed out at the hearing that the three buildings had only been listed for sale in April. According to News 5 Cleveland’s coverage, Jeffreys told the room that Nordson, a multibillion-dollar company, could afford to keep them on the market a while longer.

Tom Cervenka, a principal at the Illinois-based firm, argued the buildings were purpose-built for Nordson and would be hard to re-tenant as manufacturing space. He conceded at the hearing that another user could eventually come along, though it might take years — a concession the board seized on in its written decision, saying it undermined the hardship argument a use variance requires.

Nordson itself was not the applicant. Cervenka sought the variance as part of due diligence while weighing whether to purchase the property. That detail became its own flashpoint. Attorney Gerald Phillips, representing a group of local homeowners, argued at the hearing that the process itself was flawed because the applicant neither owned the property nor had documented authorization from Nordson to act on its behalf.

The Nordson campus sits inside a small city flanked by homes. Residents’ objections tracked the pattern now familiar to any community where a hyperscale or mid-scale data center has been proposed: noise from cooling equipment and backup generators, load on the local grid, water use, and property values.

Cervenka’s team told residents the facility would use a closed-loop liquid cooling system to keep water demand minimal, and would install acoustical walls where warranted. Residents were unconvinced. One neighbor, Laura Krupelak, told Cleveland 19 she doubted a closed loop would stay closed forever, given evaporation and eventual maintenance. Logan Dutro, an Amherst resident who works as an IT systems administrator, told the board he would not want to live within several miles of a facility like it.

The 45-megawatt figure is the number that matters for the grid conversation. As The Cool Down reported, the project would have joined a national wave of AI- and cloud-driven facilities pressuring local utility capacity. The rejection means that load does not, for the moment, land on the local Lorain County service area from this site.

Mayor Mark Costilow, speaking after the vote, said Amherst City Council could consider a moratorium if it wanted to, but he believes the existing code is doing its job. He also said, plainly, that he did not support the project.

Amherst’s fight is small in megawatts and large in signal. Communities across Ohio, Virginia, Georgia, and the Mountain West have spent the past two years absorbing a fast-moving buildout tied to generative AI training and inference workloads. The economics for developers are attractive. The economics for neighbors depend heavily on which costs get socialized onto the grid and which stay with the operator.

The direct-democracy version of this fight has already produced its bookend. In June 2026, Monterey Park, California became the first city in the country to ban data centers by ballot initiative, with voters approving Measure NDC by a lopsided margin. Amherst has not done that. The city has done something narrower — refused one exception on one site — and left the underlying code intact.

None of that national context was on the ballot in Amherst. What was on the table was a use variance, a set of buildings, and a code that does not name data centers one way or the other.

Three tracks are open. Cervenka Development Partners can appeal to Lorain County Common Pleas Court within 30 days of the July 30 decision. The developer can walk away and let Nordson keep marketing the buildings. Or the developer can come back with a different proposal that fits the industrial zoning without needing a variance.

Nordson, for its part, is continuing a gradual departure from Amherst as it moves its corporate operations to Westlake. Older manufacturing buildings at the southern end of the campus are already empty and slated for demolition, with the city and the company in discussions about the future of that land. The three newer buildings at issue in the zoning fight remain on the market.

Amherst resident Judy Heiser asked officials at the hearing to consider tightening the zoning language so data centers would be explicitly excluded. Costilow told News 5 that decision would sit with City Council, and that he thinks the current codes are effective. In his 24 years in Amherst politics, he said, only two other issues have mobilized residents at this scale — a fight over backyard chickens and one over trailers in driveways.

The comparison is not as dismissive as it sounds. Small-city zoning politics tends to run on immediate, tangible concerns: what you can see, hear, and smell from your porch. A 45-megawatt facility a few hundred feet from a residential street lands in the same category, even if the technology powering it is worlds away.

For now, the three Nordson buildings are still Nordson’s. The grid load stays hypothetical. And Amherst has a written decision that other Ohio zoning boards will read closely the next time a use-variance application for a data center crosses their desk.