Porter County postpones meeting on data center proposal to get more information
Porter County officials will not address a proposed data center possibly in Wheeler at the March 26 Plan Commission meeting, citing the need to do their homework on the proposal and not rob a previously scheduled item of its due.
'We never published the agenda with them on it,' said Mike Jabo, Porter County's director of planning and stormwater management. He said the petitioner, which has already filed with the county, requested placement on the March 26 agenda.
However, a subdivision seeking approval is expected to draw a large crowd that evening. 'I think the people who were already scheduled to be at the meeting would not get their due,' Jabo said, adding that the county might need a larger venue when the data center is discussed. 'The commissioners chamber would probably not be suitable to hold that meeting.' A date to address the proposed data center has not been chosen.
The Post-Tribune, through an Access to Public Records Act request, is awaiting an opportunity to review the data center application. Under the county's Unified Development Ordinance, a petitioner has to go before the Plan Commission if it does not meet the zoning requirements for a project.
Residents in Chesterton, Burns Harbor and, most recently, Valparaiso, have fought back against data centers proposed for land adjacent to residential areas over concerns about noise, bright lights, and their requirements for water and other resources.
A rezoning request would have a first hearing where the public may comment. Property owners within 500 feet from any property line of the parcel in question would receive a formal letter informing them of the hearing, while other forms of advertisement are also employed. 'What we have is a very publicly-involved process,' Jabo said.
The plan commission forwards a recommendation either favorable or unfavorable to the Porter County Board of Commissioners who would then have two readings, the first at a public hearing, while the second does not require a public hearing.
'They weren't happy that that meeting was canceled,' Board of Commissioners President Jim Biggs, R-North, said of the petitioner, 'but we need time to do some of our own homework. We're talking about a generational decision here.'
Biggs said several companies have expressed interest in developing data centers in Porter County, but he, Porter County Council President Andy Vasquez, R-2nd, and County Attorney Scott McClure have met with representatives from one of them. 'They're from out west somewhere,' he said.
'There was no talk of what they'd pay in taxes. There was no talk of where they'd be located,' he added. 'The rumor is it would be out there in the Wheeler area and it very well may be, but they had not disclosed that.'
Should a data center be approved for Porter County, Biggs said it would be a 'game-changer' and the largest economic development project the county has taken on since the development of Bethlehem Steel.
He said while the county is absolutely committed to responding to public sentiment – 'We've already done that with solar, telling them to go away.' – every option needs to be fairly considered to meet the state's growing demands that counties become more fiscally independent.
'We're already having the discussion on raising the income tax, which is going to be less popular than data centers,' Biggs said. Jabo and Biggs have talked about chartering a bus to visit a data center to witness noise levels and see how they're kept.
Biggs promises, particularly to the communities that would potentially be affected, that the county would not approve anything detrimental. 'I hope we have proven ourselves with solar,' he said. 'Please allow us just to do our job. Let us process this.'
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Miami Herald
4 hours ago
- Miami Herald
More federal workers are flooding the job market, with worsening prospects
After Matt Minich was fired from his job with the Food and Drug Administration in February, he did what many scientists have done for years after leaving public service. He looked for a position with a university. Minich, 38, was one of thousands swept up in the mass layoffs of probationary workers at the beginning of President Donald Trump's second administration. The shock of those early moves heralded more upheaval to come as the Department of Government Efficiency, led by tech billionaire Elon Musk, raced through agency after agency, slashing staff, freezing spending and ripping up government contracts. In March, about 45 minutes after Minich accepted a job as a scientist in the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health, the program lost its federal grant funding. Minich, who had worked on reducing the negative health impacts of tobacco use, observed that he had the special honor of 'being DOGE-ed twice.' 'I'm doubly not needed by the federal government,' he said in an interview. He is still hunting for work. And like hundreds of thousands of other former civil servants forced into an increasingly crowded job market, he is finding that drastic cuts to grants and contracts in academia, consulting and direct services mean even fewer opportunities are available. Some states that were hiring, another avenue for former federal government employees, have pulled back. So, too, have the private contractors typically seen as a landing place. The situation is expected to worsen as more layoffs are announced, voluntary departures mount and workers who were placed on administrative leave see the clock run out. With Musk's time in Washington now done, a fuller picture of just how completely he and Trump have upended the role of government is coming into view. Federal tax dollars underpin entire professions, directly and indirectly, and the cuts led by Musk's operation have left some workers with nowhere to go. In Washington, D.C., and the surrounding area, the disruption has the hallmarks of the collapse of an industrial cluster, not unlike the disappearance of manufacturing jobs in the upper Midwest during the 2000s. Except this time, it is moving at lightning speed. In January, just as Trump was taking office, the civilian federal workforce across the country had reached a post-World War II peak of 2.3 million, not including the Postal Service. Few agencies have publicly stated how many people have been fired or voluntarily resigned, but a rough count shows that federal agencies have lost some 135,000 to firings and voluntary resignation, with another 150,000 in planned reductions. Contracted and grant-funded workers -- which the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta estimated to be as many as 4.6 million people -- are harder to track in official data. The first contractor layoffs began in February with organizations that received funding from the U.S. Agency for International Development, like Chemonics and FHI360. As more grants and contracts that were under review across government are terminated, job cuts have gained steam. Booz Allen Hamilton, a consulting firm based in Northern Virginia that gets 98% of its revenue from the federal government, announced that it was cutting 7% of its 36,000-person staff. Even providers of Head Start, the low-income preschool program, have issued layoff notices because funding has been in doubt. While the national labor market remains stable, job loss is starting to become notable in the capital region. Unemployment rates in the District of Columbia and most of its surrounding counties have been on the rise since December. The number of people receiving unemployment insurance has been elevated in Virginia and D.C. over the past several months. Job postings in Washington have dropped across the board, according to the hiring platform Indeed, including in administrative assistance, human resources and accounting. Local government agencies around Washington are hosting dozens of hiring events, and most of them are packed. Elaine Chalmers of Woodbridge, Virginia, was among 750 people who attended a recent resource fair in Arlington, Virginia, just outside Washington. The event offered free consultation for updating resumes, as well as professional headshots and workshops, including one on managing personal finances during a transition in employment. It was the fourth one she attended in the month since she left the Agriculture Department, where she had worked for 20 years, most recently in the division that ensured equal access to grants for rural communities. She resigned to escape the stress and uncertainty created by new mandates, such as erasing words like 'equity' and 'diversity' from department communications. 'It just became almost a character question for myself,' said Chalmers, 53. 'I couldn't honorably stay.' Like many of the federal workers who chose to take a deferred resignation or early retirement, one of the tools the administration has used to shrink the workforce, she is on leave and will be paid through September. It is a relief, she said, because she is the sole caregiver for her mother and 15-year-old son. But the prospects do not look good. Chalmers said she expected to have to take a pay cut. She said she applied for more than 100 jobs in the week before the job fair and received several automated emails informing her that she did not get the position. For many government workers, career transitions can be especially daunting because their jobs are often extremely specific, performing functions that do not exist in the private sector. 'For a lot of them, it's almost like starting from scratch,' said Laura Moreno-Davis, a spokesperson for WorkSource Montgomery, a workforce agency for Montgomery County, Maryland, just outside D.C. 'If they really have a wealth of experience and knowledge, how can we best use that?' A new group formed by two former federal employees is trying to help people do that. 'How do you translate these skills that you've learned in the federal government that are so complex and seem to be so unique into something that can be communicated easily outside of the federal government?' said Julie Cerqueira, co-founder of the group, FedsForward. Cerqueira's partner, Karen Lee, said that people who worked in federal disaster recovery and resilience jobs, for example, had expertise that could easily transfer to private-sector work in contingency planning and supply chains. But it is not so simple for everyone. Chelsea Van Thof, 33, is a public health veterinarian who focused on diseases that spread from animals to humans, and humans to animals -- a niche job even in government. A few weeks after the inauguration, the contract she worked under at the State Department was placed on hold for a 90-day review and ultimately terminated. Van Thof immediately lost her health insurance and took on a housemate to cover her rent. Plans for the future changed, too, as she had been counting on public-sector loan forgiveness to pay off her $250,000 in veterinary school debt, a prospect that now seems increasingly remote. She sometimes feels as if she is sending resumes into a void. 'I was just thankful when I got a rejection because it meant they saw my application,' she said. Like others in the science field, including Minich, she is looking for jobs outside the country. And in the meantime, she helped form a support group of about 80 wildlife protection conservationists who are in similar predicaments. People working on government contracts are hit especially hard because they are not eligible for the deferred resignation plans available to federal employees and cannot look forward to their pensions. Todd Frank, of Westminster, Maryland, was given just a few minutes' notice before he was laid off as a technical writer on a contract with the Department of Homeland Security's science and technology directorate, helping get the appropriate gear out to military personnel in the field. Frank, 54, is now wrestling with whether to uproot his family to find a new job, which would come with steep trade-offs. His wife runs her own business -- a licensed day care out of their home. His teenage sons do not want to leave their high school, he said. Lately, he is looking at the family's budget for where to make cuts. 'Not being able to buy a suit for prom sounds like rich people problems, but you don't want to turn around and tell your kid, 'You can't do this,' or, 'You can't do that,'' Frank said. Several states had advertised their eagerness to hire people laid off by the federal government in the early days of federal cuts. In March, Gov. Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania said the state would give hiring preference to former federal workers. Since then, the state government has received more than 7,300 applications from people who said they had federal experience, his office said, and so far, state agencies have hired 120 of them. But state jobs have gotten a lot more popular in recent months. Since March, former and current federal employees have sent in nearly 700 applications, California's human resources office said. Some states are having their own budget problems, in part brought on by uncertainty around the continuation of federal funding. Alaska, Massachusetts, Indiana, Louisiana and New Hampshire have implemented hiring freezes. Public health agencies in Ohio and Alaska have laid people off as grants were canceled. And a broad swath of universities have also paused new hires, including the University of California system, the University of Pennsylvania, and Emory University in Georgia. With the Trump administration's firings of scientists and grant cancellations from agencies including the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health, science and consulting have been hit especially hard, according to Indeed. Companies and nonprofits that helped evaluate whether federal programs were working, like American Institutes for Research, have let go up to a quarter of their payroll. Paro Sen, a research scientist in Cincinnati, was laid off in May along with most of the people in her office at the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health. She worked on industrial hygiene, studying worker exposures that cause chronic health problems, and visited Washington in May with her union to talk to members of Congress about the need to restore these jobs to the federal government. 'This was my dream job that I have been ripped from,' she said in an interview. Sen and her colleagues work in such a specialized field that they are competing for very few available jobs, especially if they want to stay where they are. 'The job market right now is not amazing,' said Sen, 29. 'Cincinnati is not a very big city, and you've got, suddenly, some of the smartest people in this field all applying and competing for the exact same jobs at the same time.' This article originally appeared in The New York Times. Copyright 2025
Axios
7 hours ago
- Axios
Proud Boys leaders pardoned by Trump sue over Jan. 6 convictions
Five leaders of the Proud Boys sued the federal government on Friday, alleging their constitutional rights were violated when they were prosecuted for their actions on Jan. 6, 2001. The big picture: The members of the right-wing extremist group, four of whom were convicted for engaging in seditious conspiracy, were among those pardoned in President Trump 's unprecedented act of clemency for defendants charged with participating in the Jan. 6 Capitol riot. They're seeking $100 million in restitution from the government. Zoom in: The federal civil rights suit, filed by Henry "Enrique" Tarrio, Ethan Nordean, Joseph Biggs, Zachary Rehl and Dominic Pezzola, also names individual FBI and DOJ employees. The Proud Boys members claim there was an "egregious and systemic abuse of the legal system and the United States Constitution to punish and oppress political allies of President Trump, by any and all means necessary, legal, or illegal." Between the lines: The Trump administration will now either have to defend the prosecutions against the men or pay damages from taxpayer funds to the extremist group. The DOJ did not immediately respond to Axios' request for comment. The FBI declined to comment on the pending litigation. Context: Prior to being pardoned, Tarrio was sentenced in 2023 to 22 years in prison after being found guilty of engaging in seditious conspiracy related to the Jan. 6 riot — the longest prison sentence handed down in the Jan. 6 cases. Biggs and Rehl were sentenced for seditious conspiracy and other charges in their Jan. 6 cases, with Biggs was sentenced to 17 years in prison and Rehl to 15 years in prison. Nordean was sentenced to 18 years in prison after also being found guilty of seditious conspiracy. Pezzola was sentenced to 10 years. While he was found not guilty of seditious conspiracy, he was convicted of of obstruction of an official proceeding, conspiracy to prevent Congress and federal law enforcement from their duties, and destruction of government property.
Yahoo
7 hours ago
- Yahoo
Afternoon Briefing: Harvey alderwoman faces felony charge, announces mayoral run
Good afternoon, Chicago. U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement subpoenaed the Chicago city clerk's office in April for the personal information of applicants to a municipal ID program popular with immigrants, an apparent new tactic in Republican President Donald Trump's plan to target Chicago as he seeks to ramp up deportations. The clerk's office received the summons April 17 requiring the city to turn over the past three years of CityKey records, according to a copy obtained by the Tribune in a Freedom of Information Act request. The program was launched in 2017 by former Mayor Rahm Emanuel and city Clerk Anna Valencia as part of a stand against Trump. Here's what else is happening today. And remember, for the latest breaking news in Chicago, visit and sign up to get our alerts on all your devices. Subscribe to more newsletters | Asking Eric | Horoscopes | Puzzles & Games | Today in History Colby Chapman's arrest came just one day after Cook County prosecutors dropped misdemeanor charges of disorderly conduct and resisting a police officer brought against her following a City Council meeting April 28. Read more here. More top news stories: Smoky air from Canadian wildfires envelops Chicago for 3rd day. What does this mean for summer? Security guard hurt, one in custody after Evanston Hospital emergency room shooting Eight months after launching, the Chicago Sports Network will finally hit the airwaves on Comcast, but it's going to cost subscribers more to watch the White Sox, Bulls and Blackhawks. Read more here. More top business stories: NASCAR Chicago Street Race course 'puts on a great show,' Jeff Gordon says South Shore Line seeks public input on future improvements Without any real information, we only can speculate that the new dream stadium at The 78 will be Justin Ishbia's Great White Whale now. Read more here. More top sports stories: Chicago Cubs cruise to a 7-1 win over the Washington Nationals for their 7th straight series victory 5 observations from Chicago Bears minicamp, including Caleb Williams' growing pains in Ben Johnson's offense This week, Symphony Center saw a one-two punch of good news and bad news. Read more here. More top Eat. Watch. Do. stories: 'Life of Chuck' review: It's a wonderful, apocalyptic life in Stephen King land Review: 'Alice's Adventures in Wonderland' is Joffrey Ballet's wacky and wonderful season closer As the Republican Party braces for aftershocks from President Donald Trump's spectacular clash with Elon Musk, lawmakers and conservative figures are urging detente, fearful of the potential consequences from a prolonged feud. Read more here. More top stories from around the world: Trump administration asks Supreme Court to leave mass layoffs at Education Department in place Arise, Sir David! Beckham to be awarded a knighthood by King Charles, according to reports.
