Jade Davis Says Cleveland Holds the Levers on the Slavic Village Data Center
A 150-megawatt hyperscale data center wants a home in Slavic Village. The question for Cleveland is not whether the servers come. The question is who sets the terms when they do.
For our Data & Power series, I sat down with Jade Davis, president and CEO of BRITE Energy Innovators. She did not dress anything up.
The light bill fear has a cause
Talk to people in any city where a data center landed and you hear the same story. The plant came, and the bill went up. Davis does not wave that away. She traces most of it back to one thing: there was no regulatory structure in place before the project arrived. Nobody wrote the rules first.
That is the warning for Cleveland. Council is writing data center rules right now, and the order matters. Rules written after the deal protect the deal. Rules written before it protect the neighborhood.
Who holds the levers
Then Davis said the line every resident should carry into the next hearing. Here, she said, “the Black community actually controls a lot of government levers.”
Think about what that means on the ground. Zoning. Permits. The power and water hookups. The tax deals. Every one of those runs through a public decision, and every public decision is a place where a neighborhood can make demands and hold the people who vote accountable for the answer.
Power you leave on the table is power somebody else spends for you.
What comes next
Councilman Brian Kazy has moved to extend Cleveland’s pause on new data centers. That buys about 90 more days to get the rules right before anybody breaks ground. Watch the full conversation above, then read where the fight stands now.
