What the Ordinance Actually Requires

Author’s note: The author submitted an alternative ordinance — The People’s Overlay — to all Columbus City Council members, the city attorney, and the mayor before the June 9, 2026 public hearing, and spoke at that hearing. 706Report.com has covered Project Ruby since its February announcement. Prior coverage is linked throughout this series.

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The council voted. The ordinance passed. Now what?

Most people who followed the Project Ruby debate paid attention to the public hearings. Fewer will read the ordinance itself. But in this case it’s worth it because what the document contains determines what the developer must prove, what Columbus can enforce, and what three months of organized public advocacy actually produced in writing.

The short version: the adopted ordinance is meaningfully stronger than what was introduced on June 2. It is also weaker, in specific ways, than either citizen alternative proposed. And in several places, it requires important things to happen, but doesn’t say what the answers must be. Those answers live in a development agreement that hasn’t been negotiated yet.

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First: What the Overlay Is Not

Before reading what the ordinance requires, it helps to be clear about what it doesn’t do.

The overlay is not an approval of Project Ruby. It is a set of rules that any qualifying developer on any qualifying parcel must meet to build a hyperscale data center in Muscogee County. The developer still has to apply for the overlay designation on the specific Layfield Road site, pass a public hearing before the Planning Advisory Commission, clear two more council readings, and execute a development agreement before a single land disturbance permit is issued.

Passing the overlay opened a door. It did not wave anyone through it.

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What Changed Most Between June 2 and June 16: Noise

The noise section is the most technically sophisticated part of the adopted ordinance, and the one that will matter most to the neighbors closest to the site. To understand why it matters, you need to understand why standard noise measurement often fails for data centers.

Most noise ordinances measure sound in A-weighted decibels, dBA, a scale calibrated for average human hearing. Data centers don’t make noise the way a lawnmower or a passing truck does. Their dominant output is a continuous, low-frequency hum from cooling fans, chillers, and transformers a sound that A-weighting significantly underestimates. People who live near data centers often describe it as oppressive not because it’s loud in the conventional sense, but because it never stops and it penetrates at frequencies that standard meters miss.

So what did the ordinance actually adopt?

The “no resetting permitted” clause sounds like fine print. It isn’t. Without it, an operator who detects a noise spike could restart the 30-minute measurement clock, making compliance easier to demonstrate on paper. With it, the average is genuine. The pre-construction acoustic study is the most consequential provision in this section: the developer must model expected sound levels from their specific equipment, on this specific site, against the neighboring properties before any building permit is issued, not after the campus opens. Those findings become binding commitments in the development agreement. Columbus doesn’t have to argue about noise after the fact. The engineering proof has to come first.

If violations occur after the facility opens, the ordinance provides escalating consequences: a written notice, a required remediation plan with a compliance timeline, fines of $1,000 per day if the plan isn’t implemented on schedule, and, as a last resort, revocation of the certificate of occupancy for the offending building. That last provision is a significant lever on paper. In practice, a city collecting tens of millions in annual property taxes from a facility is structurally unlikely to shut it down. The $1,000-per-day fine is the more realistic enforcement reality.

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Two Bans That Changed the Document

Two other provisions in the adopted ordinance are clean prohibitions; no phase-in, no exceptions for legacy equipment.

Which technologies are banned outright, and what does the ordinance require instead? The bold rows in the table below are prohibited; the others are permitted or required alternatives.

The PFAS prohibition deserves specific attention. Columbus Water Works is currently running a $200 million remediation program to remove PFAS contamination from the city’s drinking water supply. This isn’t abstract. The prohibition also references the EPA’s list, “as updated from time to time”, meaning it expands automatically as the EPA identifies new compounds. Columbus doesn’t have to rewrite its ordinance to cover the next generation of fluorinated cooling fluids.

One gap the generator ban doesn’t close: there’s no cumulative runtime limit. Testing is restricted to business hours, but the total annual generator hours and the combined emissions those hours produce aren’t tracked or capped. If a second campus eventually applies on the same 987-acre parcel under the same overlay framework, there’s no mechanism to evaluate their combined air impact. That gap was raised during the public comment process. It didn’t make it into the adopted text.

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The Development Agreement: Eight Required Subjects

Everything the ordinance requires gets specific and binding in the development agreement. It is a document that must be executed before the developer can disturb a single acre of the Layfield Road site. The ordinance specifies eight subjects the agreement must cover.

What must the development agreement contain?

The ordinance requires all eight to be addressed. It does not specify what the answers must be.

Element 5 is where the megawatt cap question lives. The ordinance says the agreement must include “conditions limiting expansion or megawatt capacity beyond the initial approved scope.” That language puts the subject on the table. It doesn’t require a specific number, and it doesn’t require anything to be recorded as a deed restriction on the land. The 837 acres that sit undeveloped behind Phase 1’s cleared footprint remain available for future applications under the same overlay. Whether Columbus negotiates a binding cap tied to the deed covering all 987 acres, or something softer, that can be revisited with each new application, depends on who does the negotiating and what they’ve been asked to secure.

Element 8 creates a decommissioning fund which a meaningful protection. But the amount isn’t set by the ordinance. It will be negotiated. The People’s Overlay called for the amount to be determined upfront by an independent engineer, sized to cover full demolition and ecological restoration. What Columbus actually secures in that negotiation is still an open question.

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What’s Still Open

The ordinance is a floor. Three protections that residents argued for throughout the overlay debate remain achievable, but only through development agreement negotiations that haven’t started yet.

None of these protections is foreclosed. All of them require someone at the negotiating table to ask for them and to hold the line. The development agreement cannot be executed until both parties agree, and no land disturbance permit issues until the agreement is signed. The developer cannot break ground until Columbus says yes to the terms.

That’s the protection. It’s also the pressure point. Everything now depends on what Columbus is willing to demand before it says yes, and who is in office when that negotiation reaches its final form.

Isaiah Hugley takes office in January 2027. The rezoning application hasn’t been filed. The six months between the overlay’s passage and the new mayor’s inauguration are the most consequential window in the entire Project Ruby story because what gets negotiated in the development agreement before Hugley walks in will determine what he inherits at the table. Part 4 covers the new city manager confirmed on the same morning as the overlay hearing, what his specific institutional history means for how those negotiations will unfold, and what Columbus residents can still do before January changes who controls them.

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Next: The new city manager, the incoming mayor, the development agreement that hasn’t been written, and the six-month window that will shape what Columbus walks into in 2027.