- legal
- governance
A non-disclosure agreement is a contract in which a party agrees not to reveal specified information. In economic development it is the routine instrument by which a hyperscaler keeps a project confidential during site selection — binding a city, county, utility, or economic-development agency to secrecy about the company's identity, the incentives under negotiation, and the load involved, often under a code name.
The NDA is where public accountability and private deal-making collide in this record. A confidentiality agreement between a public body and a private developer can wall off exactly the terms — the tax abatement, the water and power commitments — that the public has an interest in seeing, and its scope is frequently contested through public-records law. An NDA cannot override a statutory records duty, so the tension between a signed confidentiality clause and R.C. 149.43 is a recurring seam the platform documents rather than accepts at face value.