St. Joseph County Commissioners Tuesday will consider an agreement with the city of Mishawaka over serving the proposed Microsoft data center with water and sewers. And the deal could have broader impact, paving the way for the city ultimately to serve and annex parts of unincorporated Granger in the county’s northeast corner.
For now the agreement would head off a fight before state regulators over who will serve the Microsoft site, the city or the county’s Regional Water and Sewer District. The district now pipes Granger business wastewater to Edwardsburg for final treatment in Elkhart. The city says it planned and built its $40 million Juday Creek Wellfield and filtration plant over the past decade partly to serve expected development along the Capital Avenue corridor. That means projects like the planned Microsoft data center site northeast of Capital and Cleveland Road.
An agreement before county commissioners Tuesday will address that, establishing that the city will extend water and sewers to the 900-acre site. The city says that would cost tens of millions of dollars and they’ll be negotiating with Microsoft for funding.
But the agreement also states that the county, the district, and the city will work together to identify a service territory for the city’s water and sewers across the county’s larger northeast area, to promote more economic development. This would start with extending city water and sewer lines on undeveloped land in Granger, but it would also include serving existing homes that have failing septic systems and contaminated water wells.
The agreement says a study by the Lochmueller Group would help identify those existing homes. The problem of septics contaminating wells in Granger isn’t new. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency documented it as far back as 1983. And in 2014 the South Bend Tribune reported on a study commissioned by the county health department that found high levels of nitrates, chlorides and pharmaceuticals in some Granger wells, resulting from wells and septics being placed too close to each other.
The agreement also states that the county will establish a tax incremental financing district at the site to capture new property tax that Microsoft pays and use it to pay for infrastructure around the site. The final line of the agreement reads, “As part of any infrastructure agreements that may be presented to Microsoft for consideration, the parties shall also address the long-term growth and annexation needs of the city while also not hindering the county’s ability to collect tax increment financing.
Ken Prince, the city’s executive director for planning and community development, recently told state regulators that the city built the Juday Creek plant large enough to serve existing Granger subdivisions if there was ever determined to be a need, based on water quality issues. The city is asking the Indiana Utility Regulatory Commission to approve a service territory of a four-mile radius from current city limits.
