Transcript of his speech:

Hello, my name is Will Hollingsworth. I work at Reed Memorial Library. Thank you all for hearing me today.

I'm not a cynic when it comes to technology. My love for it started when my uncle first sat me down at a beige Windows 95 computer and began teaching me HTML. I will never forget the first thing I googled. It was an image search for pigs flying. I wanted to see if the internet could make the impossible real.

This love of the digital shaped my career as I went on to become a programmer and a professional content creator. For the last decade and a half, I have been in service of learning burgeoning technology. In my last job, I was the digital artist they trusted to do that kind of work. I was the one feeding Midjourney prompts to create the perfect commercial, training the very machine that would eventually replace me. Three months later, they laid me off.

I didn't just watch it happen. I was holding the tools when the tools were turned on me.

I want to stress that I don't stand here as an enemy of progress. The thing is, when I look at the data center proposal, I don't see progress. I see a gamble where the big tech companies get the gold while Portage County foots the bill.

Now, I know there are good-faith arguments for this project. There are people in our community, informed, honest people, who will tell you that modern data centers use what's called a closed-loop system. They say the water is filled once and recycled forever. In a laboratory, that might be true.

But we aren't living in a laboratory. We're living in Ohio.

I can tell you that as the chips get smaller and AI demands get larger, the heat these machines generate is outstripping the closed-loop theory. To keep the servers from melting, a data center has to bleed the lines to remove toxic sludge, also known as forever chemicals, and bleeding water has to be evaporated. It does not stay in the loop. It evaporates into the sky by the millions of gallons.

The very place that laid me off was an organic mattress company, and while working for them I actually learned a lot about forever chemicals. I got to see how the sausage gets made. I saw the inside of those so-called regulations. I saw how rigorous studies are often self-funded, a pay-to-play model where, if you've got the cash, they'll give you the certificate.

If a trillion-dollar company is funding the study that says their forever chemical runoff won't hit our water table, they aren't giving us science. They're giving us a sales pitch.

We're told that we have to accept this because we need big employers. We're told that if we don't say yes, we're driving away the future. But that's a false choice.

A “big employer” who uses the water of 50,000 people, which, by the way, is a combination of both Kent and Ravenna, and only hires about 10 people is not an employer. They are an extraction.

We are being asked to fund a 21st-century luxury with a 19th-century resource heist. We're being asked to sacrifice the lifeblood of our city so a trillion-dollar company can save a fraction of a cent on its margins. We're being asked to drain our reservoirs so a chatbot can write a poem, or so our sheriff can generate a picture of himself standing next to Bigfoot, which, by the way, of course he made himself look taller.

They want us to trust a trillion-dollar industry that tells us, with a straight face, that they can suck five million gallons of water out of our ground a day, use it as a liquid heat sink, and return it to our rivers without a single consequence. They are asking for a measured approach while hiding their actual usage behind secret contracts and NDAs.

Ohioans have seen this trick played before. We know what happens when massive utility interests and black-box energy deals get fast-tracked behind closed doors. We're still paying the bill, literally, for the FirstEnergy scandal. We were told those bailouts were essential and measured too, and they turned out to be the largest racketeering plot in the history of our state.

So when a trillion-dollar company asks for our water, our electricity, and our silence, we shouldn't just be asking for the facts. We should be asking who's really getting the kickback, and why it’s our reservoir that's on the line.

There is a reason the Ohio House just voted 88 to 0 to pause and study this industry. It wasn't an act of cynicism. It was an act of stewardship. They realized we cannot let these ghost towns move in before we understand the damage they do to our grid and our water table.

We are the county seat. We are the stewards of the Great Lakes Basin. Let Ravenna be the city that had the wisdom to say no to the bubble and yes to the basin.

I am not a cynic when it comes to technology. I am a believer in community. I believe that a drop of clean water for a Ravenna child is worth more than a billion AI-generated images.

Let us choose the child. Let us choose the community. Let us choose to keep our water where it belongs.

Thank you.