
Can developers, residents agree on possible data center? Hancock County developer hopes so
A divisive conversation is erupting in Hancock County over how and when industrial development should encroach on rural land long reserved for agriculture. The debate raises the question: Can developers and residents work together to create a modern, industrial development that both sides like?
The developers behind a zoning proposal for a 775-acre Planned Unit Development, which could house a data center, hope so. Surge Development LLC held a town hall last week to gain feedback for its large proposed industrial center on the outskirts of Greenfield in the hope of winning over opponents to their plans.
But gaining community support could be an uphill battle. More than 400 people packed an auditorium at Greenfield-Central High School on May 8 to ask questions. Many thanked organizers for holding the two-and-a-half-hour forum — and providing a 27-page pamphlet answering frequently asked questions about the project — but expressed continued skepticism. Only a few spoke in support of the development.
Few developers of such projects take the extra time to engage with the community, said Surge Development LLC principal Chris King. Some never reveal themselves throughout the process.
"Our goal with this is to meet with people and to talk to people and try to understand how we can make this a better plan," King said.
Surge Development LLC, a Shelbyville-based company, has submitted a rezoning petition to build a MegaSite Planned Unit Development around the intersection of N 400 W. and W 500 N. on hundreds of acres of farmland. The 775-acre site would back directly up against the pick-your-own fields at Tuttle Orchards. The developers have noted the site, which is between the orchard and the Indianapolis Regional Airport, would help the transition the county from rural to developed land.
Many opponents came to support Tuttle Orchards, a nearly century-old family business that's one of the few tourism draws to Hancock County.
"We don't have a lot of tourism at all here, and we cannot afford to lose Tuttle's," said George Langston, a nearby resident.
The Roney family, descendants of the orchard's founder Roy Tuttle, began circulating a petition earlier this month against the development, saying it would ruin the tranquil aesthetic of their business. Mike Roney gave a statement at the meeting on behalf of the family saying that the family intended to remain open but were not sure if they could under the current proposal.
"We would ask our community leaders to seriously consider if this project brings such an overwhelming benefit to the community that it can constitute sacrificing a longstanding business in the community that cannot be replaced, "Mike Roney said to a round of thunderous applause from the room.
At the heart of the debate lies a struggle for rural Hancock County where residents have slowly watched urban sprawl and industrial campuses creep farther east into their quiet communities. Over the past several years, the county has become a hub for warehouses and logistical complexes ran by big box companies such as Amazon. Residents worry the Surge project could lead to more.
The Planned Unit Development, or PUD, process at this point will not result in approval for a specific development. Rather, it will allow the developers to prepare the land for industrial or manufacturing use. Any specific projects would still need to be approved by local officials.
Several property owners in the area Surge has targeted have already agreed to sell their land to make way for the development, including Tom Redmond's nearly 90-year-old mother. Redmond's mother was approached to sell her land about nine years ago, when a developer wanted to construct a solar field. She quickly turned down that offer, but now, she feels different.
"She didn't think that was the right thing for Hancock County," Redmond said, speaking on behalf of his mother. "And then along came this, and the reason it appealed to her is because it was a cohesive plan.... and so, she signed up."
Several renderings of the site depict a large data center, though King said no other companies have officially signed on.
In Franklin Township: A massive data center is planned for Franklin Township, but many residents are concerned
Data centers, which store the advanced technology to support nearly everything in the digital world, have been popping up around the state thanks to a 2019 law that essentially gives tax breaks to such developments for 50 years. There are currently 27 proposed centers in Indiana, according to the Citizens Actions Coalition.
Surge Development describes data centers as "today's equivalent to yesterday's railroads or highways," in the pamphlet given to community members.
Data centers drain communities of critical resources such as water and electricity. The site development plan calls for Citizens Energy Group to supply water to the PUD, and project leaders stressed that any water used at the site would not come from wells. A Citizens spokesperson said the company does not currently serve the site but would pull from its network of water basins around the state. They did not specific where such basins are located.
Do data centers harm the environment? Indiana's data center boom could be disastrous for health and environment, advocates say
The debate over whether to develop the land reflects a discussion about the growing divide between the east and west halves of Hancock County. Contiguous to Marion County, the western half of the county has already seen urban sprawl.
The site in question sits in the western half of the county and the more than 700 acres in question were designated for future manufacturing use in the county's 2023 comprehensive land use plan.
"Everything east of State Road 9 is forecasted to remain agricultural for the next 20 years, but you get west of Greenfield, and it starts looking a little different." said Executive Director of the Hancock County Economic Development corporation Randy Sorrell said. "It is not a surprise that manufacturers and assemblies are starting to show up."
The Hancock County Plan Commission will have a public hearing on the proposal on May 27.
Past coverage: Tuttle Orchards not happy about prospect of getting new data center as next door neighbor
Hashtags

Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles


San Francisco Chronicle
23 minutes ago
- San Francisco Chronicle
AI chatbots need more books to learn from. These libraries are opening their stacks
CAMBRIDGE, Mass. (AP) — Everything ever said on the internet was just the start of teaching artificial intelligence about humanity. Tech companies are now tapping into an older repository of knowledge: the library stacks. Nearly one million books published as early as the 15th century — and in 254 languages — are part of a Harvard University collection being released to AI researchers Thursday. Also coming soon are troves of old newspapers and government documents held by Boston's public library. Cracking open the vaults to centuries-old tomes could be a data bonanza for tech companies battling lawsuits from living novelists, visual artistsand others whose creative works have been scooped up without their consent to train AI chatbots. 'It is a prudent decision to start with public domain data because that's less controversial right now than content that's still under copyright,' said Burton Davis, a deputy general counsel at Microsoft. Davis said libraries also hold 'significant amounts of interesting cultural, historical and language data' that's missing from the past few decades of online commentary that AI chatbots have mostly learned from. Supported by 'unrestricted gifts' from Microsoft and ChatGPT maker OpenAI, the Harvard-based Institutional Data Initiative is working with libraries around the world on how to make their historic collections AI-ready in a way that also benefits libraries and the communities they serve. 'We're trying to move some of the power from this current AI moment back to these institutions,' said Aristana Scourtas, who manages research at Harvard Law School's Library Innovation Lab. 'Librarians have always been the stewards of data and the stewards of information.' Harvard's newly released dataset, Institutional Books 1.0, contains more than 394 million scanned pages of paper. One of the earlier works is from the 1400s — a Korean painter's handwritten thoughts about cultivating flowers and trees. The largest concentration of works is from the 19th century, on subjects such as literature, philosophy, law and agriculture, all of it meticulously preserved and organized by generations of librarians. It promises to be a boon for AI developers trying to improve the accuracy and reliability of their systems. 'A lot of the data that's been used in AI training has not come from original sources,' said the data initiative's executive director, Greg Leppert, who is also chief technologist at Harvard's Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society. This book collection goes "all the way back to the physical copy that was scanned by the institutions that actually collected those items,' he said. Before ChatGPT sparked a commercial AI frenzy, most AI researchers didn't think much about the provenance of the passages of text they pulled from Wikipedia, from social media forums like Reddit and sometimes from deep repositories of pirated books. They just needed lots of what computer scientists call tokens — units of data, each of which can represent a piece of a word. Harvard's new AI training collection has an estimated 242 billion tokens, an amount that's hard for humans to fathom but it's still just a drop of what's being fed into the most advanced AI systems. Facebook parent company Meta, for instance, has said the latest version of its AI large language model was trained on more than 30 trillion tokens pulled from text, images and videos. Meta is also battling a lawsuit from comedian Sarah Silverman and other published authors who accuse the company of stealing their books from 'shadow libraries' of pirated works. Now, with some reservations, the real libraries are standing up. OpenAI, which is also fighting a string of copyright lawsuits, donated $50 million this year to a group of research institutions including Oxford University's 400-year-old Bodleian Library, which is digitizing rare texts and using AI to help transcribe them. When the company first reached out to the Boston Public Library, one of the biggest in the U.S., the library made clear that any information it digitized would be for everyone, said Jessica Chapel, its chief of digital and online services. 'OpenAI had this interest in massive amounts of training data. We have an interest in massive amounts of digital objects. So this is kind of just a case that things are aligning,' Chapel said. Digitization is expensive. It's been painstaking work, for instance, for Boston's library to scan and curate dozens of New England's French-language newspapers that were widely read in the late 19th and early 20th century by Canadian immigrant communities from Quebec. Now that such text is of use as training data, it helps bankroll projects that librarians want to do anyway. 'We've been very clear that, 'Hey, we're a public library,'" Chapel said. 'Our collections are held for public use, and anything we digitized as part of this project will be made public.' Harvard's collection was already digitized starting in 2006 for another tech giant, Google, in its controversial project to create a searchable online library of more than 20 million books. Google spent years beating back legal challenges from authors to its online book library, which included many newer and copyrighted works. It was finally settled in 2016 when the U.S. Supreme Court let stand lower court rulings that rejected copyright infringement claims. Now, for the first time, Google has worked with Harvard to retrieve public domain volumes from Google Books and clear the way for their release to AI developers. Copyright protections in the U.S. typically last for 95 years, and longer for sound recordings. How useful all of this will be for the next generation of AI tools remains to be seen as the data gets shared Thursday on the Hugging Face platform, which hosts datasets and open-source AI models that anyone can download. The book collection is more linguistically diverse than typical AI data sources. Fewer than half the volumes are in English, though European languages still dominate, particularly German, French, Italian, Spanish and Latin. A book collection steeped in 19th century thought could also be 'immensely critical' for the tech industry's efforts to build AI agents that can plan and reason as well as humans, Leppert said. 'At a university, you have a lot of pedagogy around what it means to reason,' Leppert said. 'You have a lot of scientific information about how to run processes and how to run analyses.' At the same time, there's also plenty of outdated data, from debunked scientific and medical theories to racist narratives. 'When you're dealing with such a large data set, there are some tricky issues around harmful content and language," said Kristi Mukk, a coordinator at Harvard's Library Innovation Lab who said the initiative is trying to provide guidance about mitigating the risks of using the data, to 'help them make their own informed decisions and use AI responsibly.'

Yahoo
25 minutes ago
- Yahoo
J.W. Mays: Fiscal Q3 Earnings Snapshot
BROOKLYN, N.Y. (AP) — BROOKLYN, N.Y. (AP) — J.W. Mays Inc. (MAYS) on Thursday reported profit of $87,000 in its fiscal third quarter. On a per-share basis, the Brooklyn, New York-based company said it had profit of 4 cents. The commercial real estate leasing company posted revenue of $5.6 million in the period. _____ This story was generated by Automated Insights ( using data from Zacks Investment Research. Access a Zacks stock report on MAYS at Error in retrieving data Sign in to access your portfolio Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data

Yahoo
27 minutes ago
- Yahoo
America's Car-Mart: Fiscal Q4 Earnings Snapshot
ROGERS, Ark. (AP) — ROGERS, Ark. (AP) — America's Car-Mart Inc. (CRMT) on Thursday reported profit of $10.6 million in its fiscal fourth quarter. On a per-share basis, the Rogers, Arkansas-based company said it had profit of $1.26. The auto retailer posted revenue of $370.2 million in the period. For the year, the company reported profit of $17.9 million, or $2.33 per share. Revenue was reported as $1.39 billion. _____ This story was generated by Automated Insights ( using data from Zacks Investment Research. Access a Zacks stock report on CRMT at