On Tuesday the St. Joseph County Council is set to vote on a rezoning that a New York-based developer needs to build another data center near New Carlisle. Supporters held a last-minute press conference Monday hoping to persuade council members.
The group gathered at International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, a bipartisan mix of county, South Bend and Mishawaka elected officials, along with organized labor leaders.
Republican County Commissioner President Carl Baxmeyer called approving the rezoning of over 1,000 acres of farmland along Chicago Trail a “no brainer.”
“Several months ago the discussion centered on, is there enough water, is there enough power?" Baxmeyer said. "And those questions have been answered, using a closed loop system, not only for this but for the second data center. Is there enough power? Yes, we had the secretary of energy up here talking about that several months ago. As she said, if you have the power and you have the water situation, then it’s really up to the locals to negotiate the best deal that they can for the residents of St. Joe County.”
Republican County Commissioner Tony Hazen said the county hired Peerless Midwest to analyze the Kankakee Aquifer, the underground body of water that leaders boast is so plentiful. Hazen said Peerless determined the data centers could pull 44 million gallons per day without causing anyone else problems, but the county has chosen to set the yield at 24 million gallons per day to ensure there’s enough.
Hazen said some residential wells near the Amazon data center site dried up this summer, but that resulted from the climate, not construction.
“The Indiana Department of Natural Resources also studied the situation and concluded that the shallow wells and lower pond levels were brought on by the drought conditions that we all suffered from this year," Hazen said.
And Hazen said it’s not true the data center will demand so much electricity that it will increase other customers’ rates. He said state regulators and Indiana & Michigan have agreed to a special tariff that requires large load customers like data centers to pay the costs of the electric upgrades that they need.
”Those costs cannot be passed on to existing customers. In addition, these large customers must make long-term financial commitments and those commitments help support ongoing grid updates that benefit all ratepayers.”
The project’s opponents say data centers create a lot of construction jobs but not many permanent ones. The developer’s attorney, Brandon Dickinson, said they expect the project to create 100 to 125 full-time employees for each of two development phases.
As for the water, Dickinson said the developer has agreed to the county’s request to use a closed loop system, which he likened to occasionally adding some water to a swimming pool that recycles its water.
“They demanded that the project have a much lower impact on water so that future projects would also be viable, and that there would be plenty of water after this project was done, and the developer went back and worked on the request, and was able to meet it," Dickenson said.
No county council members attended. But Republican County Council Member Amy Drake, who says she’ll vote no, says with Amazon building the world’s largest data center, and Microsoft planning one for Granger, she wants to wait and see how those go before adding a third.
“We’re pretty well diversified already. If we go for full-out data center and the data center industry, for one reason or another, is a disappointment, well, we weren’t that smart if we didn’t diversify," Drake said. "That’s, I think, how I and a lot of the other council members are looking at this.”
But Democratic South Bend Mayor James Mueller says with the generative artificial intelligence revolution, this is the kind of large-scale economic development that’s happening.
”In this economy and where this economy is going, these are the investments," Mueller said. "It’s fictional to think there’s alternative billion dollars of investment waiting in the wings. This is where investment is happening right now.”
But Drake doesn’t agree.
“I think that there’s a lot of excitement right now but would they come back in six months? Yes." she said. "Do we expect if this data center doesn’t go through, another one is going to be right behind them? Yes. So I don’t think that we’re done with that excitement.”
I asked Baxmeyer, if the data center is good for the region, but the New Carlisle community would rather preserve that area’s rural feel and character, do they need to just take one for the team here?
”That’s one way to say it," Baxmeyer replied. "We had no control over where the company landed. They started talking to individual property owners and people have the right to sell their property to whom they want.”
Opponents of the project plan their own press conference Tuesday at noon.
