The Daily Standard
Story Archive
CELINA - A global firm's new long-haul fiber network route set to begin in Chicago will make its way through Mercer County en route to Columbus, Mercer County Engineer Jim Wiechart confirmed.
In January 2025, Zayo Group announced it intends to build more than 5,000 long-haul fiber route miles to meet the growing demands of AI workloads. The five new long-haul routes will enable direct, low-latency and scalable paths between key data center hubs and forecasted growth areas, the company said in a news release.
The route locations were reportedly determined based on expected data center growth, power availability, existing capacity constraints and other regional characteristics.
Despite harboring reservations, namely concerns about drainage tiles and liability, the Mercer County Commissioners this week granted Legion Engineering, on behalf of Zayo Group LLC, a pair of permits to work within road right-of-way limits in Mercer County.
Wiechart said the work is related to Zayo Group's new Chicago-to-Columbus route. Zayo Group LLC, a Delaware limited liability company whose principal office and place of business is in Denver, is registered with the Public Utilities Commission of Ohio, he pointed out.
Zayo Group LLC plans to use the permits to install underground fiber-optic cabling using a direction bore method of construction and an open trench method at two different locations: Mercer Road from U.S. Route 33 to 6510 Mercer Road to Celina Mendon Road, and Celina Mendon Road from Mercer County Road to Denny Road.
"Their fiber installation will be a series of separate fiber ducts in the same trench cut. This fiber will not directly serve local residents. Zayo will not share who inhabits the fiber ducts," Wiechart said.
David Urbach, Zayo's director of underlying rights, did not return a phone call from the newspaper by press time.
However, as part of the agreement, Wiechart successfully negotiated two assurances, according to Mercer County Commissioner Dave Buschur.
"We made the requests to protect our infrastructure and look out for our county and landowner interests," Wiechart said.
Prior to any construction or installation work, Zayo Group LLC must post a $250,000 bond or other surety in a form satisfactory to the county to cover the costs of any damage caused by construction and installation.
"The biggest concern we have is the potential damage to subsurface pipe and tile that are likely to be cut by the installation," Wiechart said in an email to The Daily Standard.
Furthermore, an inspector appointed by the county engineer's office will monitor all work performed on road right-of-way limits on behalf of Zayo Group LLC and assess it $88.30 an hour, Buschur said.
"Their work will likely take a quarter to half of the year," Wiechart told the newspaper. "We will have an inspection presence on site although some of the potential damage will be not initially evident."
Mercer County assistant prosecutor Amy Ikerd touched on the importance of having county engineer office personnel at the sites to observe the work.
"The request from Jim's office to supervise the installation came about because of concerns that we've got this out-of-state company that might be hard to locate after everything's done," Ikerd told the newspaper. "Six months afterward if we have a problem we wanted to be able to hopefully have a means of correcting any issues that arise."
Zayo Group LLC's engineer first contacted the county engineer office nearly a year ago.
"From their original contact they referenced data transfer fiber from Chicago to Columbus," Wiechart said.
Mercer County officials proceeded carefully as they explored their options and by no means rubber-stamped the permits, Buschur said.
"We've been pushing back," he said. "We've held them off because our concern mostly is them hitting drainage."
Buschur said it's easy to take for granted just how different one county can be from another.
"There's a lot of drainage in this county, and I think there's probably more drainage in this county than there is in a lot of them that they've gone through in Indiana," he said. "We want to protect that drainage because that's an investment that farmers and the residents that live out in those areas have made."
Commissioner Rick Muhlenkamp emphasized that the board of commissioners conferred with Wiechart and the Mercer County Prosecutor's Office and did its due diligence researching the request to protect the property owners of Mercer County.
"We've been hesitant to make sure we have our ducks in a row to help protect our local landowners with this coming forward," he said. "It's a major conduit of what we presume is data transmission. It's four components."
Other counties, Muhlenkamp said, granted permission right away.
"We've been trying to make sure everything they do is done professionally," he said.
There's also a concern that a property owner could be held liable if they inadvertently hit the Zayo Group LLC's underground fiber-optic cabling.
"In the future after it's installed, Rick's grandson goes to put a new tile in and he hits that - that's not like hitting Wabash Telephone Company's (lines) around here. You're hitting a big artery," Buschur said, stressing the importance of properly marking the locations under which the cabling sits.
"Liability is tremendous," Muhlenkamp agreed. "That's the biggest thing. You hit it in the future the liability is crazy."
But in the end, Muhlenkamp said commissioners really didn't have much of a choice.
"More or less it came down to they can pretty well force our hand, and they can come here being (registered with) the Public Utilities Commission," Muhlenkamp said.
Though he did not provide a clear timeframe, Wiechart noted that Zayo Group LLC has already received permits from the Ohio Department of Transportation and neighboring counties.
In January 2025, Zayo said that as the only digital infrastructure company to build long-haul networks at scale in the last decade, its investment will be critical to averting a potential bandwidth gap in the U.S. as AI-driven data center capacity is expected to grow two to six times over the next five years.
"Keeping pace with the next wave of AI growth will require new long-haul networks to enable the rapid scaling of capacity needs in both existing and emerging AI data center markets. In 2024, Zayo saw significant AI-driven demand for long-haul routes, including more than $1 billion in AI-related deals and an additional $3 billion in pipeline. This demand shows no signs of letting up," Zayo CEO Steve Smith said in a statement. "As the complexity of long-haul builds continues to be prohibitive to many providers, Zayo remains the only company building long-haul routes at scale to lead this next phase of infrastructure growth."
The Zayo group of companies reportedly connects 400 global markets with "future-ready" networks that span over 18.7 million fiber miles and 146,000 route miles. Zayo's tailored connectivity solutions and managed services enable carriers, cloud providers, data centers, schools and enterprises to deliver exceptional experiences, "from core to cloud to edge," according to the release.
