Neighbors shout out their questions when data center meeting is cut short

GRANGER — The packed room of more than 150 residents weren’t ready to quit after a consultant’s half-hour presentation Thursday about the proposed industrial rezoning of more than 900 acres at St. Joe Farm.

They wanted to ask their own questions. So, when one county official said that wasn’t the plan for the meeting, they started to bellow them out across the cafeteria room at St. Pius Catholic School.

“Who’s the buyer?” one person asked about the data center that the unnamed developer wants to build there.

April 17, 2024: Revealed: Data center and farmer's woes at St. Joe Farm as county advances rezoning

“Are you going to talk about how much power is used to run the data center?” another asked.

“How much water is going to be used?”

Ultimately, St. Joseph County Council member Dan Schaetzle, who represents the area, took the microphone and started fielding some questions from the audience. Several other council members and county officials were in the room, too.

Another council member, Amy Drake, said she’d accept and write down questions after the meeting.

The proposed rezoning for the site, east of Capital Avenue and Cleveland Road, will come to the council for a vote at its meeting at 6 p.m. May 14 in the County-City Building in downtown South Bend.

“I don’t have the answers,” Schaetzle told the crowd. “We will go into the meeting with as much information as we can. If you have more questions that were not answered tonight, email them to me and I will try to get answers.”

One of the biggest, most frequent questions is the impact on the local water supply. Data centers are known for using a lot of water. Schaetzle said he would try to get some answers to the water questions before Tuesday’s vote.

Afterwards, neighbor Amy Sanders, who is among the organizers of an effort pushing the county to deny the rezoning, said none of the specific questions that her group had submitted were answered at the meeting. Questions like: If the data center takes up less than 200 acres, as proposed, what will future phases of development look like?

Consultant addresses some questions

At the meeting, the organized opponents gathered signatures for a petition urging the council to vote against the rezoning. A separate, online petition, which was started a few weeks ago simply to urge more answers, had gathered 380 signatures as of Thursday afternoon.

The consultant who spoke was Mike Danch, with the local firm Danch, Harner and Associates, who’d organized the meeting. He’s representing the development and St. Joe Farm, whose owners want to sell the farmland.

He moved through a presentation that was a series of responses to previous questions, some of them apparently submitted by email.

Here are some of them.

∎ Who would the electricity come from to power the data center? Danch said American Electric Power would provide it, and the company would have to figure out how to tie into two transmission lines that cross the property.

∎ How would roads handle the increased traffic? Danch said the data center would employ up to 300 workers, saying that isn’t much. But the developer would do a traffic study for the county’s engineering department, which wants to see what road improvements would be needed. If any, those improvements would be paid for by the developer.

∎ How will light and noise pollution affect residents? Neighbors have raised concerns about added lights, along with a persistent noise that data centers can generate, as they’ve read about in one article from an anthropologist/doctoral candidate from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Danch responded that the county has restrictions on light and noise. Lights cannot spill into a neighbor’s property. Also, he said he lives near the toll road, and the noise from the data center would likely be less than that.

∎ Wouldn’t the area lose prime farmland if it turns industrial? Danch replied that the land tends to need special management, because it is prone to having water-logged soils. About half of the land’s water table is just one foot below the surface, he said. It means having pipes to drain the water. As well, he said, the soil tends to have a high acid content, making it difficult to grow corn or soybeans unless it’s managed.

∎ What would happen to liquid waste from the data center? Danch said wastewater from the facility would go to a city sanitary sewer, not into the ground, but he added that regulations list several chemicals that cannot be discharged into such sewer systems.

Area as a target for development

In their planning efforts over the years, public officials have looked to this corner of the county as a potential for economic growth. The proximity of the Indiana Toll Road and the Capital Avenue corridor makes it appealing. So does the proximity of Mishawaka’s new water plant off of Douglas Road.

But many of these neighbors aren’t ready to disrupt the rural surroundings that had drawn them to live there.

Steve Francis, who lives in this portion of Granger and has advocated for saving agricultural land from development, referred to the massive developments near New Carlisle and its Indiana Enterprise Center.

“When this happened in New Carlisle, it started with one property and 600 acres,” Francis told the crowd. “Now it’s 11 square miles. If you think this is going to stop with one property, you’re fooling yourself.”

∎ More information: The county has a page on its website, sjcindiana.com/stjoefarms, where it offers several documents, reports and maps for the proposed rezoning.

South Bend Tribune reporter Joseph Dits can be reached at 574-235-6158 or jdits@sbtinfo.com.

This article originally appeared on South Bend Tribune: St. Joe Farm meeting in Granger short on answers on industrial rezoning