- environment
- regulator
The Ohio Environmental Protection Agency is the state agency that carries out most environmental permitting and enforcement in Ohio under authority delegated by the federal EPA. It issues the NPDES water-discharge permits, the permit to install that precedes construction, and the air permits a facility operates under, and it brings the enforcement actions when those permits are violated.
For this record the Ohio EPA is the agency whose files carry the operative facts about a facility's water and air impact — the permit terms, the fact sheets, the compliance history. It is also the agency a public-records request most often targets, and where the tension between disclosure and a company's confidentiality claims plays out. Its decisions sit alongside those of the Ohio Power Siting Board on the energy side and the federal EPA above it.
Hypotheses
Open questions
- The comment window on the Bistrozzi "Bosc" indirect-discharge permit closed, and no final permit has issued
- The campus's own discharge characterisation measures a different data center, 90 miles away
- The campus discloses a 0.10 MGD sanitary design flow — cut by two thirds from the permit it replaces
- The campus's own filing puts American/Bath WWTP at 72% of design once the campus is connected
- Ohio EPA is monitoring lime-kiln dust drifting off the data-center construction site
- Nobody owns the forcemain's MGD design capacity
- The campus's allocated share into the City of Lima WWTP is unquantified
- The grant instrument behind the $650k Lost Creek project
- Acquire the GLRI / Ohio EPA Lost Creek grant instruments (subaward, design, load-reduction table, monitoring)
- Track the disposition of the Level-2 wetland permit DSW401252260W (incomplete 2025-12-23)
- Acquire the corridor environmental records (forcemain + Shawnee II Ph2 NPDES/SWPPP/ESC; item-9 MGD) — the #151 referral
- The municipal-WWTP dilution check is hydraulic only — no per-parameter assimilative capacity on record
- The 2022 permit application tells Ohio EPA that four SSO basins are built to a 25-year storm; the consent decree sizes them to a 5-year storm