BY NICHOLAS A. SANFORD
CITY MANAGER • CONNEAUT
It’s Time We Had a Conversation.
“NICK, IF YOU CAN’T TAKE THE HEAT, GET OUT OF THE KITCHEN.” My grandmother offered me that bit of wisdom not long after my appointment as City Manager of my native hometown in 2024. She would know, as the sister of a longtime City Councilman and Ashtabula County Commissioner throughout the 1960s through the 1980s she had seen then—firsthand—that public service rarely comes without criticism. And if you’ve followed our Council meetings, social media, or the local news lately, the kitchen has been particularly warm. Much of the heat has centered on data centers, more precisely, the possibility of data centers in Conneaut. Questions have been raised about transparency, secret agreements, closed-door negotiations and projects supposedly moving forward beyond public view which give rise to suspicion as to the posture of leadership here. For clarity, there are no data-center projects presently before the City for approval. There are no secret NDAs that have been presented to or executed by me, or by Council. There is no hidden project waiting behind the curtain.
But there is something happening in Conneaut that deserves considerably more attention than any rumor about a project that does not presently exist. Our current financial forecast projects a profoundly low General Fund carryover into 2027 as predicted by our Finance Director back in 2025. This does not mean Conneaut is approaching insolvency or that the doors of City Hall close come Jan. 1. It means something more fundamental: under the trajectory of our existing revenues and expenditures, the status quo is becoming financially unsustainable. And, after years of kicking this can down the road, this has become the conversation Conneaut can no longer afford to defer.
The Cost of Deferral: For decades, communities like ours have managed the symptoms of economic decline by postponing difficult decisions. Conneaut, considering its vast 27 square miles, has become remarkably good at making things last longer than they should. We extend the useful life of an ambulance another year. We repair a snowplow rather than replace it. We clamp another water main break and patch the road above it. We stretch equipment, personnel and dollars as far as they will go. There is modest virtue in that stewardship; government should respect the taxpayers whose money it spends, and Conneaut has historically operated within significant financial limitations while attempting to keep the burden upon its taxpayers as reasonable as possible. But eventually, deferral stops being thrift and becomes liability and debt owed to the future.
The aging ambulance with the certified cot eventually must be replaced. Deteriorated water mains eventually sustain a catastrophic failure. A road patched repeatedly eventually requires reconstruction on the same levy-funded revenue structure. A depleted workforce eventually produces overtime, burnout and diminished capacity. Equipment kept beyond its useful life eventually costs more to maintain than responsible replacement would have cost.
Meanwhile, the price of asphalt, fuel, vehicles, construction, insurance, utilities, wages and virtually everything else municipal government purchases continues to increase at profound pace. Those obligations do not care about the national political climate, nor Conneaut’s. And they do not stop increasing simply because our revenues fail to keep pace.
Our Three Choices: Ultimately, this arithmetic renders local governments with relatively few (unfavorable) options. We can ask the same taxpayers to carry an increasingly expensive municipal government; we can reduce services and continue postponing investment. Or, hear me out, we can deliberately broaden the economic base supporting this community. My administration has chosen to pursue the third option. Now—this does not mean growth at any cost; it does not mean every project, it does not mean every developer. I’ve said time and time again, responsible development means that which is the right project at the right time which makes the most sense for the future. It bears the responsibility to protect the people, neighborhoods, environment and infrastructure of Conneaut, and recognizing something that should transcend the controversy of the moment: Doing nothing has a price, too.
The Nickel Plate Shops are gone. The Huletts are gone. Emco-Wheaton, General Electric and Norton? Gone. The economic structure that supported much of twentieth-century Conneaut is not coming back in the traditional form in which our parents and grandparents knew it. Ergo, we cannot finance a twenty-first-century city by waiting for a twentieth-century economy to return. And importantly, I cannot underscore that tourism alone cannot reasonably be expected to carry the entire financial burden of municipal services in a city of Conneaut’s size. We need a broader, more diverse foundation.
Growth Means More Than One Industry: That is precisely why our economic-development strategy has never been about a single project or industry. We have pursued new housing. We have sought downtown redevelopment; we continue working toward greater investment at the Port and lakefront. We have pursued hotel and lodging opportunities for a community that remains dramatically underserved in commercial accommodations.
We have focused on the I-90 and State Route 7 interchange and the enormous potential represented by one of the region’s most important gateways. And, yes, we have explored opportunities involving advanced manufacturing and the productive reuse of dormant or underutilized industrial property. These initiatives have different purposes, different impacts and different timelines, but they share one objective: Broaden the tax base so that the people already living and working here are not indefinitely expected to shoulder an ever-greater burden themselves.
Development is not the objective, a stronger Conneaut is the objective. Development is one means of getting there.
What the Data-Center Debate Actually Produced: Something constructive emerged from the controversy surrounding advanced manufacturing. Citizens raised legitimate questions about what major industrial development should look like in Conneaut. City Council responded by creating the Advanced Manufacturing Zoning Review Ad Hoc Committee through the adoption of an Ordinance recently. The nine-member committee does not exist to approve a data center. In fact, it cannot approve one. And there is presently no data-center proposal before the City for it to approve.
Instead, its purpose is to do something local government too often fails to do: proactively establish rules before somebody arrives asking us to make the decision without the necessary safeguards. What protections should surround major industrial development? What buffering should be required? What infrastructure demands are acceptable? How should environmental compatibility, property impacts, community benefits and other consequences be evaluated? What should Conneaut demand from major investments seeking to locate here? The committee process allows us to develop them publicly and deliberately before an actual application puts a clock on the City’s decision-making process. That is more than postponing a difficult decision. It’s doing the harder work of establishing the standards by which future proposals—if they ever arrive—will be judged, creating the important distinction between being pro-development and being pro-Conneaut. For me, I choose the latter.
The Standard Is Simple: We seek diversified economic development because Conneaut needs revenue to fix streets, replace equipment, maintain infrastructure, support police and fire protection, employ qualified people and provide the basic services residents expect from their city. If an investment does not leave Conneaut stronger, we should be willing to say no. But when responsible investment can broaden our tax base, create opportunities, put underutilized property back to productive use and help shoulder costs that otherwise fall upon existing residents and businesses, we must also retain the courage to say yes. That is responsible economic development.
Thinking Three Generations Ahead: The question facing Conneaut is much larger than whether one supports or opposes data centers. Reasonable people engaging in civil discourse can disagree about these developments. The more consequential question is: What is our plan for sustaining this community for the next three generations?
If our answer is that Conneaut should remain economically exactly as it is today, then intellectual honesty requires us to accept the financial consequences of that choice as well. A stagnant tax base does not freeze the cost of asphalt, nor reduce the price of an ambulance, or replace a water main, police cruiser or snowplow. And it does not make the challenging financial projection for 2027 disappear.
Decline is NOT inevitable. However, it becomes a choice when we recognize the trajectory before us and flatly refuse to change it. For me, I refuse to believe that for Conneaut, my native hometown, its best years are behind us. I refuse to believe our children and grandchildren should someday be asked to carry a greater burden because, when we still had the opportunity to broaden this City’s economic foundation, their City was too afraid to try. I believe we can protect Conneaut and grow Conneaut. Looking at the numbers before us, I believe it becomes our responsibility now to the generations that follow that we do both today, as the opportunity presents itself.
