Granville Mayor Melissa Hartfield walked to the podium during a Heath City Council meeting Monday night and came out swinging in opposition to a proposal to build as many as 600 homes in the City of Heath and in the Granville school district.
“The entire proposal is nothing more than a grotesque exploitation of the Granville school district, Union Township and all the school district taxpayers,” Hartfield told the council. “This development might make it to the finish line, but we will be at every turn, judiciously working to reduce the impact on our taxpayers and stop these types of developments from exploiting our schools in the future.”
Heath council members, who had listened politely on Feb. 3 as Hartfield and two others from Granville spoke passionately in requesting consideration for their neighbors, voted unanimously to approve annexation of about 67 acres of a farm that would be part of the development. The council previously approved annexation of an adjacent 187-acre farm in Union Township south of Granville that also is part of the proposed development.
Speaking pointedly to Heath Mayor Mark D. Johns before the council vote, Hartfield said that she and he had been part of a months-long planning process initiated by the Thomas J. Evans Foundation called Framework, which recognized that rapid development would come in the wake of Intel’s $28 billion computer-chip manufacturing campus in western Licking County – the single largest economic-development project in Ohio history.
Hartfield said the community members involved in the Framework process worked to build consensus around shared values and goals for the future of western Licking County.

“In those meetings, every one of us talked about avoiding housing developments like you see in Powell and Delaware where thousands of people are crammed onto some cornfield with little or no traffic considerations, no school funding – and yet, here we are with a development that mimics those poor planning practices.”
She quoted from the final Framework report, which says on page 33 that “Unfortunately, there are examples of communities pushing their agenda on other communities. This is a serious challenge that contradicts the collaborative spirit necessary for success for individual communities, the county and the region.”
Hartfield spoke after Thomas Miller, a Granville Board of Education member, who laid out in detail the costs.
“The economic model of our schools is built on five acres per house zoning in the townships,” Miller said. “The proposed zoning has over 25 times more houses and devastates our financial model. This is because the taxes from the development do not even come close to covering the costs of educating the additional students.”
He said that even with property tax and income tax going to the school district from residents of the subdivision proposed by M/I Homes of Columbus, “the net operating cost along for the rest of Granville to educate the children in Heath will be nearly $9 million a year, plus the added cost of building new facilities for the additional students.”

That means, Miller said, that “every family will have to budget over $2,000 more per year just to educate the kids for this Heath development. Imagine telling all of your constituents that they would need to pay an extra $2,000 every year just to educate the kids of a neighboring town.”
Miller said a 30% increase in taxes for all property owners in the Granville school district would leave “seniors on a fixed income, the school teachers, the farmers and the everyday workers who are currently living on a tight budget” unable to afford to stay in Granville.
“The only reason this development is here is because Granville schools are some of the best in the entire state,” he said. “But you’ll destroy the schools you are trying to take advantage of and infuriate your neighbors and your future Heath residents in this area.”
In asking for a seat at the table as Heath works on zoning the annex properties and the developer’s detailed plans, Miller said, “I can’t prevent you from letting development bulldoze over the Granville school district, but I urge you to take time to think about what you are doing to your neighbors and the future students. Only you, as a municipal council, can choose development that is constructive.
Miller encouraged Mayor Johns and the council to “have a constructive conversation about a model that will allow us to grow together.”
Granville native Nate Dennison, who told the council he was born and raised in Granville by two teachers, traveled the world and moved back to Granville to raise his children, was stunned by the size of the proposed development – and the potential impact on schools and taxpayers.
He said he was raised to live by the Golden Rule – to treat others as you would want to be treated.
“Is this how you would want to be treated?” he asked. “I plead to your character and your ethics to reconsider this.”
Before the council voted to approve annexation, council member Jim Roberts asked Mayor Johns whether the zoning and development plan for the site had been approved. Johns said neither had been finalized.
Johns told the council and Granville residents at the meeting that he has worked diligently as development proposals unfolded to inform Superintendent Brown of the details, and that he has worked with the property owners and M/I Homes as an advocate for the Granville district in terms of requesting a site for an elementary school within the development.
The most recent plan for the site includes about 14.5 acres for a school site.
Johns said that his ongoing conversations with Brown include details about housing density, but Johns did not indicate he was pressing for less density. And on the point of school funding, he said that he has been an advocate for pressing state representatives to supply adequate funding so that the burden does not fall on local residents.
And while the Ohio Supreme Court found the state’s school-funding formula unconstitutional four times, Heath Law Director David Morrison noted that it has been ignored by the legislature.
Johns clarified that a proposed special assessment fee on properties in the proposed subdivision – in addition to property and income taxes – would be for infrastructure such as roadways, not for water and sewer lines.
That was little consolation to the Granville officials who have said they would prefer that such a special assessment go to the schools, as was done when the Park Trails subdivision was built in the city of Newark and the Granville school district.
Heath officials gave no indication that they plan to press for changes in the development plans, but Johns said after the meeting that the zoning and development plans have not been finalized, and “it’s not done until it’s done.”
Hartfield and Miller, along with Granville schools Superintendent Jeff Brown, said after the meeting that they would continue to talk with Heath officials about finding ways to reduce the density of the proposed M/I Homes development. And Hartfield said she is on a mission to encourage Union Township property owners in the Granville school district to annex to Granville rather than any other adjacent community.
The next Heath City Council meeting will be at 7:30 p.m. on Tuesday, Feb. 18.
Alan Miller writes for TheReportingProject.org, the nonprofit news organization of Denison University’s Journalism program, which is supported by generous donations from readers. Sign up for The Reporting Project newsletter here.