Members of the public listen to a presentation about the proposed construction of a data center in Hancock County. A public information session to answer questions and voice concerns took place May 8 at Greenfield-Central High School.
Members of the public listen to a presentation about the proposed construction of a data center in Hancock County. A public information session to answer questions and voice concerns took place May 8 at Greenfield-Central High School.
Leah Lederman lost her house for a project that never came.

She, along with her husband, owned a house across the street from Indianapolis Regional Airport that they lived in for around a decade. Then, the land their house was on was targeted i3 Investors, being one of the many large warehouse proposals coming through Hancock County.

Throughout 2022, Lederman was one of the most prominent residents opposing the projected $104 million, one-million-square-foot industrial campus. At the end of the year, the county commissioners approved an economic development agreement for the project, and the county council approved a tax abatement for the proposed warehouses.

This left Lederman crushed.

But the warehouses never came.

Instead, the area has lain vacant, as houses such as Lederman’s were first boarded up and then demolished. Grass now covers the area meant to inhabit the two warehouses, with no sign of development.

During the fight against the potential warehouses, Lederman would post her messages about the proposed industrial park in various Facebook groups.

“Facebook is my comfort space,” Lederman, a freelance writer, said. “I needed a platform for the petition I was circulating.”

She created the “Save Hancock County” Facebook group during her petition, which grew slowly and steadily until April, when another industrial park proposal ignited discussion within Hancock County and caused more people to join the group than ever before.

Almost two months ago, developers pulled back on a petition to rezone 775 acres of agricultural land to a planned unit development geared toward a focus on data centers and industrial uses. The land in Buck Creek Township is immediately east of Indianapolis Regional Airport.

As more data center proposals pop up around the state and public backlash against them increases, residents of the county reflect on their fight, while staying vigilant for a potential next proposal.

‘I really wanted some answers’

The rezone of the agricultural land and the accompanying data center proposal, which would have covered more land than 1½ Indianapolis Motor Speedways, was brought forward by Chris King, principal of Surge Development and executive vice president at Runnebohm Construction in Shelbyville. The original petitioner’s proposal for the property called for a large-scale data center to be split up across several different buildings on the land.

Over the past several years, the Hoosier State has become a popular home for data centers, with major companies such as Amazon and Meta choosing the state to locate their technological infrastructure. In 2019, state lawmakers passed legislation allowing tax exemptions for data centers that invest between $25 million and $150 million within a five-year period.

The tax break has allowed for many companies to consider housing their data facilities in Indiana, with Fort Wayne, the Indianapolis metropolitan area and South Bend becoming some of the most popular places to break ground on data centers.

Some people first heard about the proposed MegaSite planned unit development for the first time on the evening of April 15, when Tuttle Orchards posted a statement of opposition to the proposal. In the letter, the Roney family, who owns the orchard, believed the proposed development — which butted up against the orchard property — would irreversibly damage the aesthetic and experience of the fourth-generation orchard.

This was how Greenfield resident Judith Gearlds first heard about the proposal. She saw Tuttle’s statement and became curious about how the proposal would affect the orchard.

“After a while, I really started learning about the project,” Gearlds said. “ Then I became more curious about how it’s going to affect the county as a whole. I really wanted some answers.”

As Gearlds began to learn more about the proposed project, she became concerned about the potential impact it would have on the county’s infrastructure and how much business and industry it would be bringing to Hancock County.

She would not be the only one with questions.

‘We need more signs’

Gary Kingen has lived in a red, round barn half a mile northwest from Tuttle’s all of his life. His ancestors first moved onto that land in 1903.

“My grandpa and my dad were both born and died there,” Kingen said. “My two sons are working the same ground.”

Kingen said if you look to the west from his house, there is nothing but farmland. He figured development was coming as housing subdivisions crept ever closer to the area, but he didn’t expect a potential development to be a large, windowless structure like a data center.

“I would much rather have houses there than a data center,” Kingen said.

Opposition around the proposed project exploded after Tuttle’s released a statement. Residents on social media would change their profile photos to a large red photo with the words “No Data Center” in white and share similar materials on their feeds.

In what Kingen describes as a spur-of-the-moment decision, he asked his sister to contact someone she knew to see if they could make “No Data Center” signs. Originally, Kingen made only about a dozen of them, but then people started reaching out to him asking for a sign to put in their front yard.

“Then I started getting calls, and people were saying, ‘We need more signs,’” he said.

Kingen says he made about 50 “No Data Center” signs, and believes it was his opportunity to contribute to the growing opposition to the data center. His own concerns with the proposed MegaSite lay with drainage.

“It doesn’t flow very good from 500 North all the way to 900 North,” he said. “They’re talking about dumping water into their wastewater, and then it’s not going to handle it.”

After a week, King announced a public information session for the project, inviting the public to learn more information about the project and to ask developers and officials questions.

Facing the music

The public information session for the proposed data center took place May 8 at the Greenfield-Central High School auditorium. Several hundred people filled the auditorium with questions, concerns, comments or just curiosity to learn more about the project.

Many members of the audience wore red to symbolize their opposition to the proposal, while stickers were passed around reading “no data center” with a large stop sign on it.

Lederman, Kingen and Gearlds all were there at the public information session. The meeting became a four-hour-long marathon session as around 70 residents stayed to ask questions and issue comments about the data center proposal.

At the meeting, developers and officials told residents that the PUD would try to encourage water reuse through sustainable practices and to not overload the power grid, while also stressing that the proposed PUD would be bringing high-quality jobs to the area and open the door for future economic success in the county. King said even though it was geared toward being a data center, there was not an end user, and he was considering other uses for the space.

Gearlds said she was not impressed by the information presented, feeling she did not hear any information leading her to believe residents of the county at large would benefit from the construction of the data center.

“When you live in an area, you want the things that go in there to be beneficial for the people who live there, not just for the companies that come in and are looking to make a profit. That was all I was hearing at the meeting, was the benefits that would come for the companies that build it and that would go in there,” she said.

Lederman said she left the auditorium that night with more questions than answers, but she said the people who spoke and asked questions did so in a respectful manner and did their homework.

“There was certainly emotion there, but it was backed up with, ‘Well, what are you going to do about this?’ It was clearly people who had read the arguments against data centers and knew about the impact that they could potentially make,” she said.

‘If you think they’re not listening, speak louder’

Five days after the public information session, Surge Development pulled the petition from the May 27 Hancock County Area Plan Commission agenda. King said in a statement that the project was withdrawn so that Surge could work with users who expressed interest in the MegaSite area, while adding that the MegaSite proposal was still a “strategically important opportunity to advance the County’s economic development and infrastructure goals.”

When Lederman first heard that the proposal was withdrawn, she was shocked but proud of the community’s work to ask difficulty questions of the developers and community leaders.

“I told people, ‘You guys did it because you came prepared and we’ve gotta keep watching,’” Lederman said.

Hancock County is not the only community in the state that has been pushing back against data center proposals. Pittsboro, Franklin Township in Marion County and Kosciusko County have seen large public turnout to meetings discussing data centers. Commissioners in Kosciusko County unanimously voted down a proposal to rezone over 500 acres of agricultural land to build a new data center in April.

Since the data center proposal was made public, the Save Hancock County group grew from around 700 members in April to 1,700 members currently. People still post in the group, and Lederman uses it as an informative base for people to be informed about various development projects throughout the county.

Like Lederman, Gearlds was also shocked when Surge withdrew their proposal, but she reminded people there could be another proposal coming in the future and to stay vigilant. Gearlds hopes she learns more about how local government works.

“I just want to know more and be involved and be able to give input if I think that there is a problem as a resident of the county, and I think it’s important that we all share that in a productive way,” she said. “I’m watching it unfold, and I’m learning as I go.”

Kingen said he believes that the project will come back in some shape and form, and he is worried it will be snuck past the public.

In late June, King was appointed by Gov. Mike Braun to the Indiana Economic Development Corp. for a four-year term. The IEDC is not bound to the same transparency requirements as local units of government in the Indiana Open Door Law, and IEDC approved $168 million of tax incentives for data centers just a couple of days after King was appointed.

“We have got to stay alert,” Kingen said.

When opposition first started to grow about the data center project, Lederman said she expected the same situation that had happened before, where a project would proceed through and win approval despite public concerns.

That’s when she adopted a motto to guide her: “If you think they’re not listening, speak louder.”
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