In a surprise move at the deadline, the City of Trenton added an emergency ordinance to their agenda Thursday and approved a ballot initiative it had rejected weeks earlier, effectively adding a vote to ban data centers to the c oming November election ballot.The meeting began in unusual fashion with a representative of Butler County Prosecutor Mike Gmoser's office hand-delivering legal notices to council and the city's legal team that they could, in fact, add the initiative to the November ballot if they took action at the meeting or called a special meeting Friday.The letter ended: "I trust that the foregoing clarifies that it is not too late to adopt an ordinance for the November 3, 2026 election. I leave it to you and your legal counsel to consider all ramifications and consequences of a failure to abide by the ruling of the Ohio Supreme Court in this matter," followed by Gmoser's handwritten signature.WATCH: Trenton pushes data center ban to the voters in November City of Trenton approves data center ban voteMayor Ryan Perry spoke to the audience immediately after the representative had finished distributing the legal notices.He said city officials originally thought the initiative had to be considered by voters in a "special election," which would force it to be held at a different time than the November general election."What we didn't know, and what I didn't know at the time, is that you can concurrently run that election and the special election at the same time, so that was made clear to us, and we will act accordingly," he said.The initiative will now be considered by the Butler County Board of Elections.The vote came the same night city officials delivered a detailed presentation on their continued efforts to annex 601 acres from Madison and St. Clair Townships for an Amazon Web Services data center, and Prologis continues to build a data center on the south side of town near Carvana.Both townships have formally objected to the annexation with Butler County, and a hearing will be held on the merits of their objections on September 15th. ...read more read less