A large slice of Amazon’s planned $15 billion data center pie is on Hobart’s plate, Mayor Josh Huddlestun confirmed Tuesday.
The city is finalizing a development agreement with Amazon Web Services that will be presented to the City Council when it’s done, he said.
The site at 61st and Colorado Street is about 500 acres, nearly half of the 1,100 acres that Brandon Oyer, head of Americas water and power at AWS, said would be needed to fulfill the company’s plans for the $15 billion investment in Northwest Indiana.
The financial impact for Hobart can’t be determined until the final numbers are crunched, but it’s going to be big money.
“I don’t think it’s out of the ballpark to think this thing could bring $20 million, $30 million a year,” Huddlestun said.
Hobart has been buffeted by a series of financial hits, from the Southlake Mall property tax appeal to Senate Enrolled Act 1, which will offer property tax relief to taxpayers by reducing revenue local governments use to provide services to residents, he said.
“Hobart, residents are struggling,” Huddlestun said. “I want to actually give them relief.”
“We’re going to provide relief to our community,” he said, with money to solve flooding issues through the city as well as improving parks, police and fire protection and other services.
The Hobart data center complex is not without opposition. Angelita Soriano, a coordinator with the No Data Centers Hobart Indiana group, gathered some of her colleagues at her Eagle Creek home Tuesday afternoon to plan next steps.
The group planned to protest outside City Hall at about 3 p.m. Wednesday and downtown on Small Business Saturday.
“We were hoping it wasn’t Hobart, but then we got this leak email from Mayor Josh telling the city employees that it was Amazon that the information was about yesterday, that it would be here,” Soriano said.
“We’re disappointed just because of the wording saying it was approved,” she said. “We haven’t seen a site plan; we haven’t seen anything.”
“Where’s the democracy? We have over 3,000 members in our FB group, we have almost 3,000 signatures on our petition,” Soriano said.
Their goal is “just informing the public who’s actually coming in and putting pressure on Amazon and its shareholders,” she said.
“We’re being forced into a development that the residents don’t want,” she said.
In Porter County, residents’ opposition caused data center plans for Chesterton, Burns Harbor and Union Township to be dropped. “They’re forcing themselves into a community where they’re not wanted,” Soriano said.
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“This is not a light industrial development. It’s a heavy industrial development right next to homes,” she said. “I’m sure it doesn’t coincide with their social responsibility guidelines.”
A bald eagle nest is right next to where Amazon plans to build its data centers. Indiana Dunes National Park and lakes are nearby, too. “They’re going to destroy the environment that’s in that area and all around,” Soriano said.
Her home is across the street from the proposed development. Nearby Deep River Estates is on well water, which has some residents there concerned. Dewatering for the $11 billion New Carlisle data center campuses “messed up a lot of people’s wells,” she said. “Who’s to say they’re not going to do it here?”
“The concerns of our residents were not taken lightly,” Huddlestun said, including lights, water and noise.
Huddlestun went to Loudon County, Virginia, where there is a heavy concentration of data centers for the Washington, D.C., area. He went to Ohio, too, to check out claims about data centers.
“They’re not drawing the same amount of water resources they used to,” he said.
“We realize that not all data centers are equal, and some are built different,” Huddlestun said. “This is an economic development project that we have researched a lot.”
“It’s been over 20 years that this parcel has been developable site for industrial,” he said, with plans going through a series of mayors. “This isn’t just a Josh Huddlestun plan. This has been in the works for 20, 25 years.”
It was initially zoned for an industrial trucking facility with semis and bay doors. Huddlestun cast one of the dissenting votes on that. The data center complex won’t have the truck traffic, noise or diesel fumes associated with a warehouse or distribution center.
Randy Palmateer, business manager with the Northwestern Indiana Building and Construction Trades Council, knows something about data center construction. “We built the one in Hammond under a project labor agreement,” he said. Northwest Indiana tradesmen are also working on the massive New Carlisle project.
“Data centers, the building community supports them 100%,” he said. “I think the Hobart location is a good location. It’s meant for that type of development.”
Construction of data centers is where you see all the jobs, Palmateer said. Unlike building a warehouse, “it’s more labor-intensive. There’s high-voltage electrical, there’s precision electrical engineering” and other high-tech systems.
“All of these people think they’re water-cooled. They’re not. They’re air-cooled,” with complex HVAC systems on the roof, he said.
Palmateer is working closely with Hobart officials to ensure there is a local union workforce on the project instead of importing workers as was done for the Michigan City data center, he said.
He’s bullish on Northwest Indiana construction trades. “That’s part of the reason why these data centers want to locate here,” proximity to Chicago plus the highly skilled workforce, Palmateer said. “We can build these things. We built oil refineries. We built steel mills.”
“We can build anything from a birdhouse to an oil refinery in Northwest Indiana,” he said. “Some parts of the country, they can’t. That’s why they have to bring a skilled workforce in.”
The jobs pay well, too. “We’re in Northwest Indiana, so we command a Chicago wage,” Palmateer said, often $10 to $15 an hour more than elsewhere.
“We do have the manpower,” he said. The construction industry was gearing up to build the hydrogen hub, upping the number of apprenticeships by 30% before President Trump cancelled the highly anticipated high-tech hydrogen hub project.
“Now we have these projects coming to fill the void.”
Palmateer said while economic incentives are often used to lure companies to the region, “a lot of these companies are frickin’ trillion-dollar companies. I don’t think they need any financial help.”
NIPSCO’s Schaffer Generating Station in Wheatfield is the site of a $7 billion combined cycle gas turbine project to generate the power needed for data centers that will be coming online, Palmateer said. “They’re all commingled. It’s NIPSCO getting ready for the data center boom.”
Huddlestun is excited about Hobart being included in this high-tech boom.
“This is the new industrial revolution, the data centers, the tech world,” he said.
Doug Ross is a freelance reporter for the Post-Tribune.