Vice President of Province Group Tim Ramm speaks to members of the public and the council during a Bristol Town Council meeting on Thursday. Dani Messick | The Goshen News
The data center would be located on the property that is currently Wilhelm farm, on the north side of C.R. 23, 1,875 feet north of C.R. 14 in Washington Township.
Project overseers from Province Group spent nearly three hours at a packed house at Bristol Town Council on Thursday defending their position to dozens of community members who brought forward their concerns.
Rebecca Yeater was just one of many who expressed concerns about the lack information and formal agreements in the request.
“It’s easy in a meeting to say you will do something and then as soon as you get approved, ‘Well now we’re going to do it because this says by how the ordinance was written on the night it was passed,” she said. “I’m not saying they would do that. I’m saying they could do that. … There’s a lot of things up in the air.”
The data center can only be constructed on the property if it is rezoned from A-1 agriculture to M-1 manufacturing by the Bristol Town Council. While it’s known that Province Group is overseeing the project with Gensler and Jones Petrie Rafinski as the architectural and engineering firms, it’s not known what company the data center would be built for.
Bristol resident Lester Otto argued that without knowing the name of the company hoping to be housed in the data center, the town officials have a right to be concerned.
“How can you make a proper decision not knowing who or what is coming into town?” Otto said. Dozens of Bristol and county residents expressed similar concerns, stating that not enough information about the project or the company was presented to the board ahead of the vote.
A data center campus is a series of buildings made of a concrete or steel frame that have systems for air circulation, fire suppression, cooling, climate control, in order house information technology infrastructure — computers, processors, and equipment — to deliver software and applications such as the cloud, social media, online banking and healthcare, credit card transactions and more.
“Modern society really does run on data centers,” said Vice President of Province Group Tim Ramm.
Ramm said the plan is to construct 800,000 to 1.2 million square feet across several structures on the former farmland, and the use would be limited to a data center only. The data center would use Bristol municipal water and sewer infrastructure. The facility would sit on a property that’s just under 250 acres and is already annexed into town limits.
“A lot of jurisdictions find that these data centers are the single best real estate use that they could ask for because they’re very low impact but very impactful in terms of the fiscal side of things,” Ramm said.
Ramm also said the data center campus would create 125-150 jobs over a five- to seven-year period and capital investment for the project is expected to be around $1 billion.
In August, the Elkhart County Planning Department voted unanimously in favor of rezoning the farmland from A-1 to M-1 with a limited use as a data center to allow the project to move forward.
Ramm admitted that at the planning meeting, the main concerns were surrounding the issue of noise from the generators on campus. Ramm also said the expected sound level at the edge of the property with only minimum standards would be around 75 decibels, or similar to a food blender, milling machine, or vacuum cleaner. Listening to sounds over 85 decibels for extended periods can cause permanent hearing loss, and the generators would run 24/7. The current Bristol ordinance allows for 85 decibels.
Ramm explained that the generator for this property would be housed in an enclosure to help with sound attenuation, mufflers would have exhausts, and Ramm also said the company would be willing to include buffers, berms and other mitigations at the edge of the property to further decrease noise.
“The equipment selection itself is a meaningful part of the process,” he said. “Some generators are louder than others.”
At the Bristol Town Council meeting, public outcry left the council with questions of their own. Bristol resident Brian Rogers asked about water and electricity usage, questioning whether the two had enough infrastructure to maintain the load.
CEO of Province Group Mark Kerslake explained that the data center would be air-cooled, not water cooled, dramatically reducing the water consumption.
“Older generators of data centers did use tremendous amounts of water,” Kerslake said. “A data center today is not much like a data center of even several years ago as the cooling systems have evolved. Now, it’s very similar to an industrial or manufacturing type of use so for a facility of this scale, the order magnitude would be more like 100,000 gallons per day.”
Kerslake said the estimated sewer discharge would be around 70,000 gallons per day due to evaporation and said the company could easily work within the capacity of the town’s limits. He also said the well on the property would be capped and remain unused.
Ken Jones of JPR explained that the town of Bristol is currently working on a water and sewer major upgrade project which would better accommodate all the new factories and housing developments over around 30 years, with a million gallon elevated storage tank, upgraded wellfields, lift station upgrades, and more.
“The water system has never been as strong as it’s going to be at the end of next year,” Jones said. He added that the anticipated usage from the data center is less than an RV factory. “We can handle that all day long.”
Austin Mullins recently moved to the neighborhood, and said that he’s scared that his property values will decrease.
Lester Otto said he lives near a factory and when it was put in, his property value decreased.
Originally the Bristol Town Council meeting agenda had a motion to waive the second reading and adopt the rezoning on first reading. But by the end of the public hearing, council members voted unanimously to accept the first reading only, and hold a second reading at the next meeting.
Council president Jeff Beachy told members of the public that meeting on Sept. 19 will also allow for public comment on the matter.
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