A data center won’t be coming to the  Leesburg area anytime soon.
By a 3-0 vote Tuesday, the Kosciusko County Commissioners upheld the Area Plan Commission’s 8-0 recommendation to deny rezoning over 500 acres from agricultural to industrial-3. The property is on the north side of CR 700N, west of CR 300W, in Prairie and Jefferson townships.
The owners of the property are Tim Polk, Polk Family Farms and Murphy Place LLC. Prologis, a real estate company, is the company that wanted to build a data center on the land. On April 2, after hearing nearly three hours of comments, the Area Plan Commission (APC) voted to recommend to the commissioners not to approve the rezoning request.
In making the motion to accept the APC’s recommendation, Commissioner Bob Conley said there were three reasons to not rezone the ground - the citizens have spoken, APC spoke and now the commissioners are speaking.
Commissioner Sue Ann Mitchell seconded the motion, saying, in part, “To be clear, I support development and growth when done properly. I support data centers in logical locations. Keeping an open mind, I have heard from both sides of the issues and have tried to respond to everyone who has sent me an email, a text or a call.”

    Attorney Steve Snyder (R) listens as JC Witt, Prologis, tells the Kosciusko County Commissioners Tuesday why the location near Leesburg is the best possible location for a data center in the county. Photo by David Slone, Times-Union
  

She said she met in person with Prologis to get answers to her questions and to look at the financial benefits of the development.
“Understanding the assessment process is critical to understanding the tax calculations and their accuracy,” Mitchell said. “I’m just glad that I have the knowledge of historic facts on how this process should work, which has helped me sort out the facts to be considered.”
She watched many online webinars on data centers. In the last few weeks, she watched as many Indiana counties worked to approve or deny data centers with many more tagged for future locations.
“This has not been a small task and has pretty well consumed my days since we first started this process,” she stated, adding she believes the Area Plan did their due diligence on the issues and provided the right decision. “I believe I have done my due diligence and I have arrived at the same decision. The rezoning of property should be denied because it is not a reasonable and prudent location for this type of development.”
Commissioner Cary Groninger said the commissioners must priortize the county residents’ needs and gather the information needed to make an informed decision that will “propel” the county forward.
“This zoning request process was time-consuming, involving multiple in-person meetings, phone conversations from both parties. Additionally, I took the time and visited five data centers located in Indiana and Illinois to observe construction, the operations ... of these projects completed. Furthermore, I met with commissioners in St. Joe and Allen County where multiple data centers currently are being built,” he said.

    Hayden Stookey was one of 10 people who spoke against data centers at Tuesday’s Kosciusko County Commissioners meeting. Photo by David Slone, Times-Union
  

He also conducted his own research to verify the information presented by both sides of the issue.
“I reviewed the revenue projections provided, made some edits to ensure conservative estimates,” Groninger stated, adding he read numerous emails, texts and listened to voice mails from concerned residents on both sides.
“As a forward-thinking commissioner, I believe that continued growth is a key to maintaining our low tax rate and ensuring the sustainability of the services as commissioners we are to provide,” he said. “If we fail to grow, we risk becoming irrelevant in the face of growing communities. As a county commissioner, we must be open to embrace change as it is the only constant in life. To maintain and enhance the quality of life that our next generation requires, we must be consistently improving and embracing change.”
Kosciusko County has much to be grateful for, including over 100 lakes, a rich orhopedic history and a strong agricultural heritage, Groninger continued.
“As a commissioner, we have to seek to encourage a business-friendly mindset that will help us wisely steward these natural resources and this heritage. In this stewardship, we are pro-business, pro-growth, pro-data center, however, this unique challenging project and the limitations and problems associated with the current proposed location have not been overcome by the petitioner. In light of these considerations, I concur with my fellow commissioners ... to deny the rezoning petition,” he concluded.
After the meeting, Chris Polk stated, “I hope this commission understands: They tried to say that they were for all of this, but what you’re saying to the rest of Warsaw businesses looking in is that Kosciusko County is closed for business.”
He said one speaker mentioned what would happen if Zimmer Biomet and the rest of the orthopedic companies would leave Kosciusko County.
“I hope that we just didn’t lose them,” Polk said, because the orthopedic companies were in favor of and wanted the data center.
For The Rezoning
Attorney Steve Snyder presented the petitioners’ case, acknowledging that there’s been a vast amount of study on the project and what the commissioners wanted to hear was anything that might be new or different.
“There are some additional things that have come up in various conversations. But one of the things that was presented to the plan commission was, of course, the voluntary conditions that were offered by the petitioners in order to limit the use of the area in question if rezoned to an I-3, limit its use to a data center only. That eliminates a significant number of uses that might be available through the zoning ordinance because we’re not requesting any of those uses,” he said.
The key to the project is “location, location, location,” Snyder said. “We have the convergence of three 345,000 watt transmission lines on these parcels, and that is what is essential to what is being proposed.”
He noted there is an industrial use immediately adjacent to the parcels in question, but that use doesn’t require any zoning approval because it’s in use by NIPSCO for a substation that occupies a 20-acre tract. There is an additional 15-acre tract immediately adjacent to it, also owned by NIPSCO.

    Keep Leesburg Rural, a group opposed to a data center near the town of Leesburg, offered stickers like this one to those opposed to the data center at the Kosciusko County Commissioners meeting Tuesday. Photo by David Slone, Times-Union
  

Snyder said the rezoning request was a very preliminary phase because if the rezoning were approved, they would have to go before the Board of Zoning Appeals (BZA) for a special exception request.
JC Witt, Prologis data centers vice president, said he read all the letters that were written to the Times-Union on the rezoning, noted all the comments that were made at the APC meeting and read most of the posts online.
“A lot of those issues that were being brought up, or concerns that were being raised, are not at the center of the ask today. The ask today is merely to start the discussion about us potentially redeveloping this site and asking for the rezoning. A lot of those issues around water use, around the construction routing, around the planned improvements outside of the site are things we would address in the future as we work through it in a partnership with the county to get those things done,” Witt said.
The location was chosen specifically because it’s the least disruptive location for the county, he said.
“If you look at it from the perspective of the power lines, this is the location that does not require additional high-voltage lines to be (tied) to our site. It merely requires connection to the existing substation and the 345 lines that exist there,” Witt said.
The tax revenue from the project is substantial, he said, providing tax revenue in excess of millions of dollars a year in exchange for 0.15% of the agriculture land in the county.
Snyder said the project would diversify industry in the county. Not only would $10 billion be invested to create the data center facilities, there would be 30 jobs per each of the 10 buildings. Each of the 300 jobs would generate a salary of over $100,000.
Tim Polk said the project would be good for the community and its future.
“We don’t always get an opportunity like this in the county, to bring this kind of money in for the future. This is something that will last 30-40 years, not 5-8,” he stated.
Against The Rezoning
Attorney Jack Birch represented those against the rezoning, bringing up the comprehensive plan and saying that the key was the district - all the surrounding property - not just the property in question.
With respect to the voluntary conditions that Snyder mentioned, Birch responded, “All the voluntary condition is saying is that it’s a data center. All the other things are not binding.”
The only reason the property is significant is because of the power lines, he continued, but power lines can be moved or extended and utility companies will make a lot of money off that.
“We’re not against a data center. We’re against a data center in this location,” Birch said. It is over 500 acres and not near any other I-3 districts.
The proposed data center has been described as a hyper data center. Birch said he found online no existing data center that comes close to this one in the world. “It may be wrong, but that’s the information I found,” he said. “I don’t think we want to be the experiment.”
Witt later pointed out others around the country that are just as big or being planned that are bigger.
Birch also pointed out the potential for national security issues with a data center.
Remonstrator Beth Lamb said Prologis projects the timeline for construction would be 10 years. She said with the tariffs and the economy, that timeline could not be relied upon. The 300 projected employees can’t be depended on. She said the comprehensive plan for the county made the decision easy, though it’s not a legal document.
Another remonstrator, Courtney Van Cleave, not only listed a number of issues with the data center, but also asked the commissioners to put a one-year moratorium on data centers in the county while they’re further researched.
Randy Warren, the agriculture teacher at Wawasee High School, advocated for the preservation and protection of prime farmland.
Hayden Stookey, a member of the Tippecanoe Valley High School FFA, said he wasn’t completely opposed to a rezoning in the county, but the rezoning of the land in question was not necessary. It’s prime farmland, he said.
Jared Templin, local resident, referenced a decision by Valparaiso to decline a data center, reading a statement from Valparaiso’s mayor.
Other remonstrators who spoke against the rezoning included Joe Shepherd, Luke Wilkinson, Robert Kelly and Emmon Schmucker.
Rebuttal
The public comments concluded with a rebuttal from Witt and Snyder.
Witt reminded everyone that a data center was not contemplated in the county’s comprehensive plan so it has less relevancy in the case.
“I’ve heard multiple times that we’re okay with data centers, but it just can’t be in this location. I would just tell you from the individual who’s trying to build a data center, it’s not going in another location. This location wasn’t chosen because the land is cheap or we’re trying to take advantage of the county or it’s easy to push around an agricultural community to put something we want there. That’s not at all why we chose this land. This land was chosen because it was the least disruptive way to access a unique resource that this county has, which is massive amounts of power in that location, those lines converge at that location,” Witt said.
He noted the reason the property is 535 acres is because the excess land would include setback provisions or maybe some provisional use for agricultural uses.
Snyder brought up the use of AI and technology by farmers.