This week Republicans on the St. Joseph County Council had a press conference where they called for a two-year data center moratorium.
Leading the moratorium effort is Republican Amy Drake, who faces a re-election challenge in November from Democrat Ranjan Rohatgi. A political candidate coming out against data centers may not seem real daring these days.
But with the Amazon Web Services data center already running near New Carlisle and Microsoft building theirs in Granger, you might wonder if it’s too late for a moratorium. Drake doesn’t think so.
“You know a lot of people continue to be nervous," Drake says. "We hear about, when is the next data center coming? Whether you like data centers or not, I think it is reasonable to see how these two data centers function before we say yes to anything else. We don’t know how they’re going to impact our environment in general.”
But Democrats on the council have spoken against a moratorium. Democratic Council President Bryan Tanner says he agrees with the sentiment behind a moratorium.
“At the same time I don’t necessarily agree with the mechanism of a two-year moratorium," Tanner says. "I don’t think that an arbitrary time clock is a replacement for good judgment and a sound alignment with the five components of rezoning and land use that the state of Indiana ascribes local government with.”
Tanner says the Indiana General Assembly, which passed a sales tax exemption for data centers, almost passed a bill this year – it failed by a slim margin – calling for state government under certain conditions to remove local control of land use and rezoning decisions for major projects.
“If they’re showing a willingness to do that as a response to local governments passing moratoriums, I think it is the state illustrating that they believe local government is refusing to do their job, and our job is to review the petitions that come in in good faith," Tanner says. "It just undermines our ability to actually perform our duties when we’re the closest to the constituents that we serve.”
Tanner says the council has shown it can reject data centers, as it did in December when a developer was denied rezoning of over 1,000 acres east of New Carlisle. But Drake doubts data center opponents take much comfort in that.
“New Carlisle is really, really nervous that somebody else is going to come in there, and I think this just kind of helps put a pause to all the rumors, gives people a chance to breathe. Well I don’t think people trust a lot of the decisions that have happened on the council. Some people have felt like the decisions that were made were rushed. I mean we had economic development kind of pushing the Granger data center down our throat. And I think people just want to be confident that no matter what happens after the election, the data centers are just not going to keep popping up in St. Joe County.”
The business community also opposes a moratorium, says South Bend Regional Chamber President Jeff Rea. This week he wrote a column for the chamber newsletter titled, “Pressing pause on progress isn’t a growth strategy.”
Rea says a moratorium would send the wrong signal to employers considering entering the county.
“I’m a little worried," Rea says. "There’s about a trillion dollars worth of data center projects that are going to advance in the next couple years and a two-year moratorium basically takes us out of the game forever, probably. And some would say that’s OK, that’s kind of all they want. I don’t think you would see any more projects the size and scale that we have with Microsoft and AWS but I think there are some other potential opportunities and us putting a pause on that will mean they’ll go to our neighboring communities, and neighboring states and communities will benefit from it. I’d like to see us benefit.”
