Chillicothe 3rd Ward Councilman Gunner Barnes says he walked out of a planned tour of the former Pixelle paper mill on Friday after being asked to sign a nondisclosure agreement. Hours later, U.S. Paper Mill Company LLC sent a written apology and invited him back without that condition.
The clash, described in a public statement Barnes posted with a copy of the company’s letter, lands two days before a public review meeting on a proposed high-performance computing campus and related industry at the mill site.
What Barnes says happened
Barnes wrote that he agreed to a walkthrough on Friday, Sept. 4, because he believed he was the only sitting council member who had not been asked to tour the facility. After checking in, he said a man at a window asked him to sign an NDA.
“I said, ‘I am not signing an NDA. I’ll see you all later. Thank you and goodbye.’ And out the door I went,” Barnes wrote.
He said a company representative later caught up with him on his walk downtown, apologized, and told him he did not have to sign but would not be able to tour the whole site. Barnes said he declined again. A few hours later, he received the email from the site’s owners.
What the company wrote
The letter, dated Sept. 4, 2026, is addressed to Barnes at Chillicothe City Council and signed by John Todoroki of U.S. Paper Mill Company, LLC (USPM), with the company’s address listed as 232 E. 8th St., Chillicothe, OH 45601.
Todoroki apologized “for the misunderstanding that occurred during your visit this morning regarding the signing of a Non-Disclosure Agreement (NDA).” The letter states that the company reviewed the situation and confirmed that “elected officials are not required to sign an NDA to visit our facility.” It called the request “a security mistake,” said the company had spoken with its security team so it would not happen again, and invited Barnes back “at your earliest convenience.”
The letter does not identify which staff member asked for the signature or describe what the NDA would have covered.
Questions Barnes is raising
In the same statement, Barnes called the episode “insane behavior” and posed two questions he said the public deserves answered:
1. Which city officials have signed NDAs?
2. What was discussed at an Aug. 28 meeting at the paper mill that he said was set up by U.S. Sen. Bernie Moreno’s office, a meeting he said he was not invited to and that “a few members of council” attended?
Those claims about who has signed NDAs and about the Aug. 28 gathering come from Barnes. Independent public reporting has not confirmed a roster of NDA signers or independently documented that Moreno’s office organized an Aug. 28 mill meeting. Local coverage has separately reported that Todoroki has given tours to at least two council members.
A private company may ask visitors to sign confidentiality paperwork. Ohio’s Open Meetings Act generally applies when a majority of a public body has a prearranged discussion of public business, not to a single official touring a private site. That law does not, by itself, ban an elected official from signing an NDA. Officials who do sign one can still face practical and legal tension if the agreement limits what they may later discuss in public about city business. USPM’s own letter now states that elected officials are not required to sign an NDA to visit.
Why the mill site is under a microscope
The former Pixelle Specialty Solutions mill closed in August 2025 after more than a century of papermaking, eliminating hundreds of jobs in Ross County. Pixelle sold the plant in October 2025 to U.S. Paper Mill LLC, an affiliate of U.S. Medical Glove Company. Pixelle said it directed $5.5 million in net sale proceeds to a fund for local unions and affected workers.
Moreno publicly backed efforts to keep industrial work in Chillicothe and later welcomed the sale. Company and chamber announcements have described glove manufacturing already underway and later partnerships that include Amphibian Aerospace Industries, U.S. Box Company, and Aligned for a planned high-performance computing campus. The July 2026 announcement described that computing project as an anticipated $1.5 billion investment. Job estimates attached to the various pieces of the campus have been project-specific and have not restored the mill’s former employment level.
City officials and residents have pressed for more detail on water, power, land use, and what portion of the site would be a data center versus manufacturing. On Aug. 24, council passed a 60-day moratorium on approvals for auxiliary and large-scale data centers, with the pause running through Oct. 23.
Barnes, a Democrat first appointed to the 3rd Ward seat in 2025 and then elected that November, tied the NDA dispute to broader frustration among former mill families. He wrote that Moreno “promised my family and friends who worked at the mill jobs,” and that some of those workers took early retirements, left town, or started over later in life. That is Barnes’s characterization of community impact. Public records of the sale and later company announcements document new hiring at a smaller scale than the closed mill’s workforce, not a guarantee of one-for-one replacement jobs.
Public meeting is Tuesday
Council members Jeff Creed, Dan DeMint, Richard McQuirt, and Greg McKeever have called a review meeting for Tuesday, Sept. 8, at 6 p.m. in the Chillicothe High School auditorium, middle school entrance, 381 Yoctangee Blvd. The announced agenda includes a presentation by Alignment Engine, questions about the facility and site improvements, and discussion of possible Unified Development Code changes tied to the data center moratorium. Council has said the session will be video recorded.
Barnes said he will attend and ask questions. He framed the fight as neither a Democratic nor Republican issue, writing that he works for the whole city, “not a corporate entity.”
USPM’s letter leaves the door open for another tour without an NDA. Whether other officials signed confidentiality agreements, and what if anything was said at the Aug. 28 gathering Barnes described, remain unanswered in the public record as of this writing. Tuesday’s hearing is the first scheduled chance for residents to hear from the computing-campus side in a large public setting and to put those questions on the record.
