Field Reporter for Inkstick Media
Last November, Ross Larue, an Ohio farmer and former member of his small township’s zoning board, noticed something he’d never seen before in an application filed by a real estate developer. The Larue family had been farming in Madison Township (population: 1,461) in Pickaway County for two centuries. The fertile green pastures had been a quiet place where neighbors referred to their whereabouts by the names of the family farms that anchored the community: the Henson family farm, the Scarborough farm, the Fagan farm. When Larue began his stint on the zoning board, around 2010, the meetings were pretty uneventful. The kind of applications they’d get were things like a homeowner wanting to start a mom-and-pop business from their garage.
This application, however, was for something far more transformative. It was for a development he’d been watching for some time, which, according to the papers in front of him, had “been qualified as a megaproject,” a legal category Ohio uses for large corporate ventures. The application went on to say that zoning changes sought by the developers were “exempt” from local referendums due to newly revised Ohio law…