Why you had to dig for this
By now a fair question: if all of this is public record, why did it take a story to assemble it? Because none of it was meant to be easy to see. The withholding here is not one refusal — it’s an architecture, layered along the records lifecycle, and each layer is individually lawful-looking. Open each layer below to read the operative clause and the document it lives in.
No single refusal hides this deal. Each layer is individually lawful-looking; read together along the records lifecycle, they keep the deal's substance non-public. Calling the whole an engineered system is argument — every clause below is [verified] from a committed document; the characterization is the read.
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R.C. 4582.58 Front-end statutory shield [verified]
“Financial and proprietary information, including trade secrets, submitted to the Authority is not a public record subject to R.C. 149.43 until that employer commits in writing to proceed.”
effect Developer information routed through AEDG / PAAC is a statutory non-record for the entire formative period — the deal's substance never enters “record” status while it is being decided.
Port Authority records policy · adopted 2022-07-28 ·aedg/paac-records-policy.policy.yaml -
NDA §6(f) Developer-notice — County [verified]
Before responding to legal process, the County must give the Company prior written notice — “at least 10 business days” — disclose only “such information as is required by law,” and “request and seek confidential treatment.”
effect A tip-off-and-minimize protocol baked in before any public-records request is answered — requested by the County's own counsel.
County–Bistrozzi Mutual NDA · Res #417-25 · executed 2025-07-01 ·legal/prr-mandamus/mutual-nda-bistrozzi.nda.yaml -
RDA §9.13 Developer-notice — Authority [verified]
The Company acknowledges the Agreement is a public record, but the Authority agrees to give the Company written notice “at least five (5) business days prior” to disclosure.
effect A second, parallel developer-notice mechanism on the Authority side.
Roadwork Development Agreement · effective 2025-09-15 ·aedg/roadwork-development-agreement.rda.yaml -
CRA §22 Fee-shifting indemnity [verified]
The Agreement is a public record, but “the Company indemnifies the County and pays its attorney fees if, in a public-records action, the County withheld a record.”
effect The developer underwrites the defense of withholding — removing the usual financial deterrent to over-withholding.
Community Reinvestment Area Agreement · Res #548-25 · 2025-07-10 ·legal/prr-mandamus/cra-agreement.cra.yaml -
ORC 121.22(G)(8) Closed deliberation [verified]
First invoked 2025-05-27 for the BOSC CRA, expressly citing the Bistrozzi NDA as the basis for confidential discussion; the exemption appears nowhere in the covered record before that date.
effect The deliberations themselves are held out of public view — the open-meetings counterpart to the records shield.
Board of Commissioners executive sessions ·commissioners/closed-deliberation-and-corridor.yaml -
R.C. 149.43 / 9.66(D) Non-production — the deciding figures [verified]
Item 4 (the cost-benefit analysis) withheld as “being reviewed by legal counsel”; items 5–15 deferred though authorized in the Board's own minutes; the DTE-100 transfer-tax price fields produced blank.
effect What is produced omits the numbers that decide the public-interest question — the cost-benefit, the land prices, the school terms — by claim, deferral, or blank.
County PRR production · cover 2026-06-05 ·legal/corpus-completeness-audit.md -
R.C. 149.433 + R.C. 1333.61 A third agency, a new statutory basis [verified]
The Soil & Water Conservation District withholds the data-center plan sets on two grounds at once: R.C. 149.433 “infrastructure records” (a 25-year exemption) and R.C. 1333.61(D) trade secret — “water and wastewater usage for a data center” — redacting even the plan-share links in the produced emails.
effect Extends the architecture to the site-level stormwater jurisdiction, under statutes the County's own productions never invoked — and reaches the very water/usage data the cooling and sanitary analyses turn on.
Allen SWCD PRR response · 2026-06-12 ·legal/prr-mandamus/bosc-prr-production-2026-06-12-aswcd.response-index.yaml
This is the spine of the records case: the County did not merely decline one request — it agreed in advance to notify and minimize (NDA §6, RDA §9.13), indemnified its own withholding (CRA §22), deliberated in closed session (G)(8), and produced the deciding records blank or not at all — all behind the R.C. 4582.58 shield.
It is why the same record went to the Ohio Select Committee on Data Centers — where the case against the very confidentiality regime behind layer 6, R.C. 9.66(D), is made on the record: communities asked to subsidize a developer the public is not allowed to name.
One record consolidates the whole architecture — the withholding map. Here it is as a teardown, with the deciding analysis (item 4) still locked.
The withholding stack
No single refusal hides this deal — a stack of seven lawful-looking layers does, from a statutory non-record shield to closed sessions to a production that returns the deciding figures blank or not at all. Each layer stands on its own; the audit can call the whole an engineered system only as argument, not as record. And yet — read together, the thin record still reassembles the project. That reassembly is the point of the story.
item 4 · WITHHELD Where's the cost-benefit analysis?
PRR item 4 — the cost-benefit analysis, projected tax-revenue impact, and public-ROI inputs — was withheld: "being reviewed by our legal counsel for compliance with R.C. 149.43 and R.C. 9.66." Held under R.C. 9.66(D).
The single analysis that would weigh the 75% / 15-year abatement against the public return was not produced. Items 5–15 came in a later batch; item 4 — the one that scores whether the deal pays — is the one still withheld. The deciding number is the one the record won't show.
Hold the line one more time. Every clause and statute above is read from a
committed document — that part is [verified]. Calling the whole
an engineered system is argument, and the record says so itself.
The other distinction worth carrying: “we have no records” is not the same
as “we won’t produce these records.” When items 5–15 were
deferred as if held elsewhere, the resolutions authorizing them
were sitting in the Board’s own minutes — which means the records exist
where the request was directed. That gap is a fight you can win.
When “no records” isn’t “no records”
The sharpest example is the one that sounds the most innocent. Asked for the edit history of the county websites that carried the project’s notices — item 16 of the request — the county answered “no records.” But the sites keep revision histories; the endpoints that serve them answer, just behind a login. The records exist; the county simply doesn’t hold them in hand. They sit with the host — AhelioTech Services, named in the commissioners’ own 2024 minutes as the county’s web host — and with the in-house author, county IT director Brian Mauk, identifiable as the WordPress author on a county site. A request for the audit logs has somewhere to go. “No records” was true only in the narrowest custodial sense, and the county’s own minutes say so.
The vendor trail has its own tell. The firm credited with building the county sites —
including the AEDG booster site that fronted the project — is CorpComm Group,
Inc., a corporation that has been legally dissolved since 2023-06-05,
its credit and a live link still sitting on the public pages, its domain quietly renewed
and paid through 2027 more than a year after it died. [verified] from the
Secretary of State’s dissolution record and the live page source; reading this as an
architecture rather than an accident is, as ever, the argument.
And sometimes the withholding is a void rather than a wall. The request asked the Soil & Water district for anything touching Beth Seibert — a county commissioner who is also a former district staffer and now presides over its board, a person sitting on both sides of the table. The answer came back zero, in both directions, with no onward referral: no district-to-Seibert correspondence, no county trace through her either. A blank where the paper should be densest is its own kind of finding — though, held to the discipline, a null is a question, not yet a verdict.
The thin record, reassembled
Six chapters, six records, one method: take a source, read it into structured data, say plainly what it means, and leave a path back to the proof. The deal was built to be hard to see — and yet, document by document, it reassembles. That reassembly, done in the open with provenance on every figure, is the whole point.
Now it’s yours. Pick any figure and follow its citation to the source.