Plan Commission - Regular Meeting

AGENDA THIS EVENING WE ORIGINALLY HAD TWO SPEAKERS AND WE HAD ONE NOT ABLE TO ATTEND SO WE'LL JUST HAVE ONE SPEAKER WE'LL LET HIM GO AS LONG AS HE WANTS SINCE WE GOT SOME EXTRA TIME AND THEN THAT WILL JUST GIVE US SOME EXTRA TIME TO HAVE A LITTLE MORE DISCUSSION ON OUR FINAL MEETING AND HOW WE WANT TO CONCLUDE OUR TIME TOGETHER OR EXTEND OUR TIME TOGETHER WHICH IS SOMETHING ELSE WE COULD DO. I'D LIKE TO ADVISE EVERYBODY THAT THIS MEETING IS BEING RECORDED AND STREAMED FOR PUBLIC VIEWING. BY PARTICIPATING, YOU ACKNOWLEDGE THAT YOUR IMAGE, VOICE, AND COMMENTS MAY BE CAPTURED AND MADE PUBLICLY AVAILABLE. THIS MEETING HAS BEEN PROPERLY NOTICED IN ACCORDANCE WITH INDIANA CODE 514.1.5. SO WITH THAT, MEETING IS NOW CALLED TO ORDER. WE'LL TAKE A ROLL CALL SO THAT WE HAVE EVERYBODY IN ATTENDANCE. Do you have a list Maria? Yeah. Here.

Here. Present.

Here. Here.

He's virtual.

He is virtual.

Here. Ms. Jackson? Here. Overhauser?

Here.

Ms. . Here. Mr. .

Here.

I don't have an attendance sheet I've been going off of. You're not the first. Sorry. Ms. Gray?

Present.

Call Mary Zerbach. Ms. Zerbach?

So we just have one absence this evening and one virtual. Okay. With that, did everybody receive the minutes from the June 9th meeting? And if so, we need a motion to approve those or submit it electronically.

I'd make a motion to approve them as presented.

Do we have a second? All right, moving a second to adopt the minutes that were submitted for the June 9th meeting electronically. All those in favor signify by saying aye.

Aye.

Motion carries. Also for the roll call, I just wanted to also note that also present is Kayla Brooks, our planning director, Maria Enriquez, our assistant planner, and Rhonda Cook, our planning and zoning department attorney. first order of business was something that we started to talk about a little bit in our last meeting and it sounds pretty official appointment of scribe i don't know that it's terribly important but there's a lot of beyond our meeting minutes we have a lot of discussion and we need to start trying to get pen to paper on what our recommendation will be to the planning commission And how that needs to be put together. And I started to work on that a little bit and got a little overwhelmed with it. And then reached out to a few of you to see if you had any interest in doing that and received some feedback. very thorough information from a few of you so there's there's a lot of information on paper so we just need to figure out how to compile that and what what we want to have in our recommendation so i think that this position of scribe would kind of act sort of as a secretary for the committee but um it would also be to try to pull together all of the various information into a cohesive document that we could all discuss at our last meeting so With that I think, did we in our packets, did you guys put in any of the stuff that was, so Julie Sedam had submitted a lot of good information that she compiled. And then Kylie also did that just today. I don't know if that's not been distributed yet, but that's also something that we can distribute. And then, let's see, who else did I talk to? I think that was Ed. Oh, Paul Overhauser was also interested, right, or not interested, but willing to help draft some of that documentation. And one of the things I think that you would be working somewhat closely with Rhonda, who I think will help us to compile this into a more legal form that would make more sense and be a little easier to digest for the planning commission. So it would be a little work outside of the committee homework that we normally have. So with that, do we have any nominations for a position like that? Or does anybody want to make their case as to why they would just love to do that for us?

I'm going to speak first then, I think, if you don't mind. All right. I volunteered or said I would do that because I've spent a considerable amount of time doing research and coming up with just a high-level draft of what I thought the overlay could contain and then also tried to give you the supporting links that went along with that, which is in your packet tonight. So I'm more than willing, if nobody else wants to step up.

Can I ask you a clarifying question? So I guess when I heard about this first, I thought it was somebody that was just pulling all the information together. That person wasn't really going to draft anything. And so I guess there's a big difference by what Julie just said and what I thought that this gripe was. Yeah.

Well, I should just tell you that I did that on my own. Nobody directed me to. And I just did it because I thought it would give us something to work from and feel free. I mean, anyone can stab holes in it, poke holes at it, whatever. It's not going to hurt my feelings.

I guess I was just thinking, like, because we're trying to be non-biased, too, in the sense of, like, all aspects of it, that seems like it makes more sense to gather all the information and not any individual drafting.

Would the individual not compile all of our ideas? Is that what I'm understanding?

That's what I was thinking about, not that individual drafting anything or any type of recommendations that we didn't.

But we could essentially send information and then that person could compile Everything together, work with Rhonda, and then we can discuss here.

In a non-biased fashion, you have to collect and store and share information regardless of what you might lean towards.

Yeah, I guess like what you put together, Julie and Kylie, your information, there's a lot of time and thought put into that. maybe somebody needs, somebody that hasn't had that much thought should summarize those documents into kind of an executive summary that we, I think that's kind of what you're saying, like an executive summary that we could put together.

Mike, just a governance question. So what we had by sort of structure and governance is that the Committee will be chaired by representative of the Planning Commission and then Renee because of your role But because the recommendation of vice chair was coming up is there any type of structure if we're gonna name a secretary Required for that for that as well Just from a governance consistency.

Yeah, I think that's why we were trying to not use the term secretaries. It's a scribe position. Yeah Yeah As far as just experience of doing those sort of things, I touched base with Paul because he had a long career in law. Renee does this sort of thing for a living, and Lacey does as well. So those were the three people that popped into my mind originally, just that they would be able to probably put together a pretty clean brief for us for our next meeting. So those were the three people that I think we could consider.

Who did you say?

MR. OVERHOUSER, MS. WILLARD, AND MS. OLDHAM.

IF IT'S A GOVERNANCE, BECAUSE IT ROLLS UP TO BZA, AND I'M THE REPRESENTATIVE, I'M HAPPY TO DO IT. I DO SERVE IN A SECRETARY CAPACITY IN ANOTHER OF THESE BOARDS, SO IF THAT IS SOMETHING THAT IS CONFUSING WITH THE SCRIBE ROLL, I CAN RECUSE AS WELL. It's just a happy to do it if it's just compilation knowing that the drafting will be done by staff that the intent.

I think that I think we need to have more discussion on what what our recommendation how that's going to physically be done and presented. The Planning Commission will actually be responsible for the work of the ordinance, so under our normal process, I think. So we're gonna take this recommendation, have discussion, and then put together an amendment to the ordinance with Rhonda like we typically would. So I do think that the recommendation from this committee probably comes in the form of an executive summary or a brief of some type. Once you see some of the things that Julie and Kylie put together, I mean, it's good stuff. I mean, it's like drafts of how the checklist can look and things like that. And that could be supporting documents that could go along as well. It could be attached to this recommendation as examples.

And if none of the three that were mentioned are willing to do it, I'll also throw my hat in the ring. I have experience with technical writing and writing various ordinances and briefs on those things as well. So I can step into that if those three are not willing to do so.

I'm not used to so many people being willing to jump in.

What makes sense is that if we have sort of a subset, sort of a small group, because I could be willing to help. I just don't have the time to do all of it. But if I could partner with you. IT WOULD BE A MORE COLLECTIVE PIECE TO BRING BACK?

YEAH, THAT WOULD BE FINE IF YOU WANTED TO COLLECTIVELY WORK ON THAT. THE TWO OF YOU AND MAYBE PAUL. DEREK, IF HE WANTS TO BE INVOLVED, WE WANT TO MAKE SURE WE STAY UNDER SIX. MAYBE THE FOUR OF YOU COULD WORK AS A COMMITTEE.

JUST GOING TO SAY AS LONG AS YOU JUST DON'T HAVE A QUORUM.

So yeah, I think the four of you. So I guess if that's okay, you guys can amongst yourselves set up a process to discuss that and figure out how to pull that together.

Do we need a motion on that, Mike? Yeah. Okay. I make a motion that myself, Derek Adams, Ms. Willard, Ms. Oldham, and Mr. Oberhauser form a small subcommittee to scribe together the information discussed.

I JUST WANT TO SAY THAT YOU HAVE NINE VOTING MEMBERS, SO I WOULD NOT HAVE ANY MORE THAN FOUR.

NINE VOTING MEMBERS, SO FOUR IS OKAY, RIGHT? OKAY.

I THINK YOU ARE NAMING OFF FIVE, SO YOU MAY WANT TO AMEND YOUR MOTION. I DIDN'T HEAR WHO YOU SAID.

I'm just making a motion that myself, Derek Adams, that might have been what was confusing. Ms. Willard, Ms. Oldham, Mr. Overhauser form a subcommittee to scribe together the information that's shared with this committee to work with Rhonda to compile the information.

Not Julie? NO, NOT JULIE.

JULIE IS PRODUCING JULIE IS PRODUCING INFORMATION. INFORMATION. IT NEEDS TO BE REVIEWED. IT NEEDS TO BE REVIEWED. YEAH. YEAH.

WILL THE SUBCOMMITTEE'S WILL THE SUBCOMMITTEE'S COMPILATION BE STORED ON THE COMPILATION BE STORED ON THE WEBSITE SO WE CAN REVIEW IT? WEBSITE SO WE CAN REVIEW IT?

YEAH, IT WILL COME TO US IN THE YEAH, IT WILL COME TO US IN THE NEXT MEETING.

NEXT MEETING. SO A MOTION IS ON THE TABLE SO A MOTION IS ON THE TABLE AND WE NEED A SECOND BUT IT AND WE NEED A SECOND BUT IT SOUNDS LIKE WE NEED TO HAVE SOME SOUNDS LIKE WE NEED TO HAVE SOME DISCUSSION ABOUT THAT APPROACH. DISCUSSION

second okay anybody want to have discussion i'm sorry what did you i didn't hear what she said a motion was on the table needed some a second and then discussion yeah any discussion in the discussion it'd be nice if we can open up some recommendations for the subcommittee and how we handle the scribes so if you have recommendations maybe we can jot those down any thoughts okay well we've got so

Can we go ahead and approve this subcommittee and then have that discussion? Or do we need to have that discussion before we vote that?

I just sensed that there was some concern. So if there is, now's the time to speak up about that motion. Okay.

OK, so is there any discussion regarding the motion of the four people working together to create an executive summary of?

I think possible recognition. I think Julie should be a part of it.

Well, we wouldn't want to make it. I mean, it can't be a quorum, so I don't know if you had. You can't add a fifth. No, for the balance.

I don't know who just voted up the four, but that's fine.

I don't have strong feelings about not being included as long as we as a committee have the ability to review whatever the subcommittee puts together and that I mean obviously there'll be conversations that occur outside the group amongst the subcommittee then sometimes you lose sight of things or maybe you know like I don't want to have to spend a lot of time catching up because I've missed out on things. Or being left out.

I'm trying to understand what the point of the supplement is.

Yeah, I think that their purpose will be to take all of the information that we've received and simply summarize it. I don't think that they're making any recommendations or making any new material. I think it's a summary of the speakers of the reading material that we've had and these documents that Kylie and Julie have put together.

IT'S JUST A PROCESS TYPE OF ITEM. YOU TYPICALLY HAVE SOME PEOPLE WHO ARE PRODUCING INFORMATION, AND YOU HAVE OTHERS WHO ARE COMPILING AND SCRIBING IT. SO FOR THOSE WHO ARE PRODUCING A LOT, THEY ARE GOING INTO A POOL, AND THEN YOU HAVE, I DON'T KNOW THAT ANY OF US HAVE PRODUCED ANYTHING WRITTEN OR SHARED ANYTHING, SO THEN YOU HAVE EITHER A MANDATORY OR DE FACTO RECUSAL FROM PRODUCING INFORMATION, YOU'RE REVIEWING ALL THE INFORMATION COMING IN. GOVERNANCE STEP, WHICH IS PROBABLY WHAT WE'RE LOOKING AT. THAT'S WHAT I WAS THINKING.

BUT IT'S NOT GOING TO BE ANY NEW INFORMATION THAT THE REST OF US DON'T HEAR ABOUT?

NO, THAT WOULD NOT BE THE INTENTION.

AND THEN IT'S GOING TO BE COMPILED INTO AN ORGANIZED THING?

ALL THE STUFF THAT'S ON, YEAH, I'M HAVING A HARD TIME PUTTING MY THOUGHTS OUT. SO IT'S ALL OF THE INFORMATION THAT HAS BEEN RECEIVED AND MADE PUBLIC AND DISCUSSED HERE SUMMARIZED FOR A FINAL DISCUSSION NEXT MONTH'S MEETING. And then we can make a determination on how we want to direct our work from there and what our final product would be in form of a recommendation to the Planning Commission.

And if I can test my understanding for a second of what I'm hearing. I'll give you an example. So I put together a bunch of stuff just based on my research. And then I also had the document that supported the information that I had drawn it from. And then maybe, I'm just gonna make a fake example, maybe Melissa would throw in some things too. The group would get together and review those things, eliminate redundancies, and say, here's what we now have. Here's what we had first, and here's the product now. So we have the capability then to look and say, well, what things were redundant or were removed? So we can also look for editorial changes, if there are any, or just corrections or whatever. Then that becomes an opportunity for us to, be able to see what was done by the subcommittee. Does that sound right?

Yeah, I think you're... And I think we all have input, like an example of something you put together here. I was reading existing vegetation will be preserved. I would say make it existing native vegetation, because if it's a field of Canadian thistle, we don't want that preserved. So we all would have an opportunity to have input on what is put together.

And that makes good sense to me. Also, it's nice to have experts who know the law who can say, you know, vegetation has been defined this way. Therefore, we're not going to use that word. We'll use a different word.

All right. Any more discussion? We're feeling our way through this stuff. So it's a little all new stuff here. But so our motion is to appoint Ms. Oldham, Ms. Willard, Mr. Adams, Mr. Overhauser to a subcommittee to create a summary, executive summary of the material received to date for the review of this committee. All those in favor signify by saying aye.

Aye. Opposed?

Motion carries.

Can we call the roll, please?

Mr. Long?

Yes.

Ms. Oldham?

Yes.

Ms. Fuller? Yes. Ms. Blattlock? Yes. Ms. Herbo? Yes. Mr. Hayes?

Yes.

Mr. Adams?

Yes.

Mr. Jackson? Mr. Overhauser?

Yes.

Ms. Savan? Yes. Mr. Smith?

Non-voting.

ALL RIGHT. WAS IT 8-0? BECAUSE WE HAD ONE ABSTAINING THAT'S VIRTUAL, CORRECT?

WHAT ABOUT THE PERSON ONLINE?

IT'S JUST LISTENING IN.

AND THEN LET THE RECORD REFLECT THAT MARY ZERBUCK IS PRESENT AND VOTING.

Okay, for our next meeting, our fourth meeting, I don't want to drag it out too much, but I think we probably should allow that group of people to determine how much time they need to complete that task, and then we can start our meeting from there. So if you guys want to talk about that this next week, and then let us know how much time you need, and then we'll send out a SCHEDULING EMAIL AND SEE IF WE CAN'T GET THE FINAL MEETING SCHEDULED. I THINK WE NEED TO PROBABLY TRY AND HAVE THAT MEETING SOON. YEAH, I DON'T WANT TO DRAW IT OUT TOO LONG BUT MAYBE THE LAST WEEK OF JULY, FIRST WEEK OF AUGUST WOULD PROBABLY BE GOOD FOR THE SCHEDULE THAT WE'RE TRYING TO MAINTAIN.

I also had a question about just general timing. So this committee is supposed to make a recommendation to the Planning Commission by October, correct? Are we leaving extra time if we need to consider having additional meetings? Is that why we're putting these together? Okay.

Yeah, I suspect that it's possible that when we see this summary that some new questions will arise and we might have to have another meeting for some additional discussion as to, you know, there's still kind of a question now, are we talking simply about the overlay itself and the checklist? Or are we actually wanting to dig into development guidelines and things like that? So I think once we see that summary, it'll kind of help us to determine which of those things are the most important to move forward with. And that could drive us into another meeting.

Is it possible for us to have the findings or the summary of the subcommittee furnished in advance of the meeting so that we can have time to review it and not come in? Like, you know, I apologize. You came in cold with it. You didn't get a chance to see it in advance.

Yeah, I think that would be the goal.

I think I would suggest at least a week before that is submitted and when we have the meeting.

How do we handle feedback to what we might get outside the meeting so that it can be made available or ready for the meeting? IS THAT A BLIND CARBON COPY?

I THINK YOU JUST BRING YOUR I THINK YOU JUST BRING YOUR COMMENTS TO THE NEXT MEETING.

COMMENTS TO THE NEXT MEETING.

OR YOU COULD SUBMIT IT TO KAYLA OR YOU COULD SUBMIT IT TO KAYLA AND SHE COULD BRING A LIST OF AND SHE COULD BRING A LIST OF DISCUSSION POINTS TO THE MEETING.

DISCUSSION POINTS TO THE MEETING. I WAS TRYING TO SEE IF THERE COMPRESS THE NUMBER OF MEETINGS WE HAVE TO HAVE SO THAT WE CAN DO MORE OUTSIDE THE MEETING, PREPARE FOR THE MEETING, COME TO THE MEETING AND THEN DISCUSS IT BUT HAVE IT SUMMARIZED.

YEAH, WE COULD MOVE IT DEPENDING ON HOW MUCH TIME THOSE FOUR PEOPLE NEED. I THINK WE WOULD BE OKAY SOMETIME THOSE FIRST COUPLE OF WEEKS OF AUGUST IF WE WANTED TO HAVE TWO WEEKS TO DIGEST WHAT THEY PUT TOGETHER AND THEN BE PREPARED.

IS THERE ANY URGENCY I'M HEARING WORD THAT THERE'S A DATA CENTER MAKING INQUIRIES ALREADY, AND THAT MAYBE, I DON'T KNOW THAT THEY'RE TO THE REQUEST STANDPOINT, BUT MY UNDERSTANDING IS THAT WHAT WE'RE COMING UP WITH HERE WILL APPLY TO ANY REQUEST GOING FORWARD.

IS THAT CORRECT?

YEAH.

EXCEPT FOR A P.U.D.

AGAIN?

EXCEPT FOR A P.U.D. Can you speak a little bit more about what that means? So a planned unit development is its own zoning. It has its own zoning. So the rules are kind of made up as you work with the developer.

Okay.

But the guidelines in the overlay will be something that can guide the commissioners and the plan commission as they develop the PUD. Those can be incorporated into the PUD. But it's its own zoning ordinance.

Oh, I don't know that I understood that before when we were compressing down to just one IG. I don't think I understood that, but that makes... That's clear now. I don't like it, but it's clear.

Just for a clarification point, Mike. So I'm just trying to understand about what the executive or the subcommittee would do. So like I myself too have done, I don't know other people, I've done a lot of research too, but I haven't put it into... anything yet because I'm just trying to, I want to listen to what other people said. So it is a task that we only look at what everybody's seeing. So if we haven't submitted everything for everybody to see, we need to do that before the committee meets. Does that make sense?

Yeah, that's a good point. If you have additional information that you want the whole committee to have and for it to be in that, I think everybody has to see it before it goes to the committee.

I would agree with that. I just wanted to make sure about that clarification.

I think I need to offer a disclaimer. What I put together is not because I want what I put together to be passed. It's because I was constantly reading and finding and analyzing and researching and just going down rabbit holes that I sat down and thought, I'm just going to try to put it together in some fashion, at least something to start with, because I just keep hearing more and more and more, and it was overwhelming. Have you ever heard of analysis paralysis? Yeah. That was me. Yeah. And every day I'd see more stuff, and I'd document it again, document it again, put it in a spreadsheet, and I finally just said, I'm just going to throw it together.

Throw it out there and say, here you go. Something to start with. I would agree with you about that, Julie. That's part of the reason I put it out there, because at the beginning, the things that I learned, are very different as we've gone through this process about other people's perspective, other information, other communities, what they're doing. So what I thought, meaning that first summary, would not be accurate now. Does that make sense? Because I thought, like, instead of bombarding everybody, I kind of wanted to hear what all our speakers said and then kind of put that in my mind about what I thought I was hearing and trends. But I think it's really important that we're not We're not adding things to that everybody hasn't seen and make sure we have clear guidelines for transparency about anything that we would read and summarize.

Okay, yeah, I appreciate you guys doing that. Like I said, I kind of ran into the same issue that Julie did, only I didn't.

ACT ON IT QUITE LIKE SHE DID.

I JUST WAS TRYING TO SUMMARIZE ALL OF THE INFORMATION, AND I BECAME OVERWHELMED WITH IT, AND I THOUGHT, WELL, THIS NEEDS MORE HELP. SO I REALLY APPRECIATE YOU GUYS AGREEING TO DO IT AS A GROUP. THAT'LL MAKE IT A LOT EASIER.

CAN I CALL OUT ONE ITEM IN THAT, MAYBE JUST A FOOTNOTE? SO WHAT WE'RE SAYING RIGHT NOW IS THAT AS WE SCRIBE, WE CANNOT CALL OUT ANY ADDITIONAL INFORMATION THAT HAS NOT TO THIS DATE BEEN PRESENTED. That's what I was trying to determine. We are. Okay. I just have a, so if we have conflicting definitions of height requirements, for example, I've never seen this ULI document before, which, you know, so can we note it as something that has not been presented so we can have defined it? I think our time is kind of wasted unless we can truly, you know, get rid of some of these rabbit holes if possible.

Yeah, I guess that's a good point. You could footnote some things. It's like they were talking about definitions and things like that. If there's some things that you can clarify.

For those who love footnotes, we can note it as a new source. I do love footnotes. You're great at that, Lacey. I do love footnotes.

She's awesome at that.

Good footnote.

I just think that's really important. Like she said, there can be things that we don't see that we need to identify that bring back to the committee and say, Like she was saying, definitions or concepts or things like came across information. Just like our speaker this evening, I heard him last week. He was phenomenal, and he opened my eyes to a lot of different things. So I'm so glad that he's here in person because he brought a lot of things into perspective I hadn't thought about. And so that's why I was saying, like, what I thought in the beginning might be a little bit different once you get more information. Once you know more, you do better, right? So, yes.

All right, so with that, look for an email from Kayla's office in the next week or so for scheduling of our next meeting. And it's 6 o'clock, so to be respectful of Dr. Gallardo's time, we'll go ahead and have him up to get started. So we're very thankful you're here. I've got your bio here, but I won't read it. I'll let you explain your background and begin your presentation.

Good evening. Can you hear me? I am Roberto Gallardo. I'm an associate professor at Purdue University. I'm also an administrator, so I want to offer a couple of disclaimers tonight. First, I'm speaking as a faculty member. I'm not representing the administrative views of Purdue University at all. Second, don't shoot the messenger. This is a new topic that's evolving quickly. Data and information is changing weekly, if not daily. So I'm presenting to you the latest, but it will change by next week or next month. And the stats that I'm presenting here in the slides are typically U.S. averages. So every data center is different, and so we've got to keep that in mind. And I'm going to wrap up the presentation by including some questions that you need to have, you know, have ready when you are talking to whomever you're talking. This will be a 30,000 feet view. Again, every data center is different. Every community is different. I'm just going to present the pros, the cons, and then obviously let you all discuss further. Next slide, please. So what is going on is it's massive, folks. The questions we get constantly is why Indiana? And I will say that it's Indiana and a lot of other states. It's huge. Just in 2024 alone, $241 billion. are being invested by the top five tech companies in data centers, 320 billion projected for 2025, and 2.5 trillion worldwide by the end of this year. The total corporate AI investment between 2013 and 2024 feeds the Manhattan Project, Apollo Program, and the Interstate Highway System combined. So it is massive. It is a significant development, and it varies by communities and so forth. The data centers are the backbone of AI, and I'm going to get into that shortly. And I always get the question, what if AI is just a fad, right? What if it goes away? And we can see through history that this would not be the first time that happens, but something bigger and better follows. And I'm going to follow up on that shortly. Next slide, please. As to why it's kind of really, we have seen this movie play before with the steam engine, with the railroad, electricity, computing, and AI now. It's what economists call general purpose technologies or GPTs. And what that means is it just trickles and it goes everywhere. And you don't know it's there until it's not there. And then you miss it, and you don't have it, and you realize how dependent you are. It takes time. The electricity, it took roughly 40 to 50 years for the manufacturing industry to adapt to electricity back in the day. AI is not following that trend. It's going a lot faster. So this is what contextualizes and kind of explains why the massive investment in AI as I shared earlier with some of the stats. Again, if AI ends up being a GPT, it has tremendous potential. And so one of the things I want to leave with you today is whatever decision is made down the road from your, you know, from your community on data centers, it will affect positive or negative for generations to come if it does play out to be a GPT. And please, if you have any questions, ask. Next slide. So what is a data center? kicker data centers have been around for a very long time it's just that the ones that are now getting all the attention are called hyperscalers but I'm going to get into that shortly and so the data center is the backbone it's where the atoms meet the bytes basically it's the digital and the physical it's where they they meet and they are just huge processing centers really it's what it is it's a lot of servers they crunch a lot of stuff and I'll explain a little A subtle difference that's emerging now that may make, you know, generate a different approach. But anyhow, it's just a bunch of computer. The shell, the building remains. The electronics will be updated constantly. And so that's an issue that other communities are flagging. Again, this is so new, right? We're two years in. In the social sciences, we take time. And we're not going to arrive at a definite conclusion like the natural sciences. But that is why it is moving. From economic development, I want to just make a very, very important distinction. My area is rural development, regional development. I've been doing this for 20 years and studying it. And this is not your manufacturing situation of the 90s or the 80s. It is totally different. And it's just that many people have that as their point of reference, but it's incorrect. These facilities will not create the same number of jobs as manufacturers did back in the day. They have other needs, but one key advantage that we did not have in the 80s, 90s, and whatever is that the community does have a little bit more leverage. It does not have to be a race to the bottom with the fiscal incentives and so forth, but I'm going to get into that. later on. Next slide, please. So these are the type of data centers that have been around. Hyperscale, the third to my right, that one is the one that's causing all the, you know, conversations and the headlines and a lot of other stuff. Enterprise, Colocation, and Edge. They've been around for a very long time, particularly if you guys have Netflix. Netflix relies on these other types of data centers, and they've been in your community for a while. It's just these hyperscale ones that are massive, right? But they will vary. Again, these are U.S. averages. There's going to be a lot of variance of which type decides to look at your community. And yes, electricity is a big, big issue. That is always kind of causing conversations and questions and so forth. But the point here is the concept, the infrastructure has been here for a long time. It's just the scale and just how significant the hyperscales are. But even within hyperscale data centers, you have smaller ones as well. Next slide, please. So the number one issue, like I said, I'm here to present the facts, pros and cons, and this is really an issue that is being looked at. It just consumes a lot of electricity. All those servers, all those chips, it's just insane the amount of electricity they consume. 183 terawatts consumed. per hour is typically what a data center electricity consumed in 2024. That's roughly equivalent to 17 million households. So it's massive. Now, in another community that I presented, they took this number and they said that the data center at that community was going to consume 183 terawatts, and that's not accurate, okay? This is just in general for the U.S., what we are seeing hikes electricity prices may go up if it's not done correctly it will cause additional demand and stress on the current grids but there are now playing with something called active demand response and that's the type of data center hyperscale one that is inference not training I'll get into that shortly but the point is that active demand responses if the community negotiates this beforehand the data center can literally buffer or limit its use during peak hours and then kind of ramp it up during off not non peak hours right so that kind of balances out the demand but it is a significant significant issue. They are working on making them more efficient, but it is really a massive energy situation. Now, Indiana did pass HEA 1007. I don't know if you're familiar with that, where they do ask that any additional construction or electricity needs up to 80% needs to be paid for by the data center. And that's something that the state of Indiana said, okay, you want to build here, okay, but the majority, we need to increase the capacity. It's on your bill, not ours. There's a little bit of nuance there. I'm not a policy expert, not this policy expert, but I know Farm Bureau has a policy expert that can walk you through all the details, but that is law right now, and I think Indiana is one of the few states that really came up first and foremost to demand or require that from potential data centers. Next slide, please. Beyond electricity, this is, again, emerging stuff, water, noise, and land. Water consumption, it is significant as well. However, the technology is improving too. Closed-loop systems are decreasing the need for water by 50% to 70%. There's ongoing research at Purdue, I know, and other universities of using other stuff that's not water. to cool these things. So my guess would be just because of the issue around water, that the water consumption by these centers will increase, will become a lot more efficient down the road. Again, it's kind of developing as we speak. But closed loop cooling plus what's called deploying zero system waters, for example, water systems, Microsoft and Oracle, the data centers they're building are now going to minimize the use of water to cool the chips and the servers and so forth. One of the things that's emerging louder and louder is noise and air quality. Because of the lack of infrastructure, many of these data centers have generators. And when they kick on, you know, they produce noise and air quality issues. And so it is an issue. There's anecdotal reports of a humming sound that happens in nearby data centers. It's being investigated. It's being researched. Again, it's an ongoing situation. But the one that I've seen, given this presentation across the state, is that third one, that land use and character, right? Many times the community does not want to do this because it feels it'll change its character, and that's totally valid. And it's really up to you guys, the community, to discuss and decide on if that's going to be an issue. It can go from very big, a lot of land to not a lot of land to be used. They're like boxes. They're not like the smokestack coming out from the middle of it. So they're not as nice or like we used to think of the industrial manufacturing base back in the 70s and 80s. They typically target green areas with access to water, sometimes electricity. As I said, they may bring in their own generators. And so this, again, generates valid conversations among the community to say, do we want this? Do we not? Not looking into the water or the electricity. It's more about rural character. And really, that's up to you guys to discuss and define and so forth. Next, please. The economic trade-offs, again, this is ongoing research. If done correctly, Lodon County, Virginia, which is the data center capital of the world, has been able to lower property tax over the past 10 years because of the way they negotiated the revenue stream and so forth. It is now 95% of their county budget, what the data centers provide to the community. Louisiana was just in the news. It's creating a lot of chatter. They negotiated previously with the data centers and that resulted in bonuses for teachers of up to $50,000 just based on the revenue by the data center. And here's where I want to make the distinction again. that it's not the same situation as manufacturing in the 70s, 80s, and 90s, where every state, every community was kind of racing to the bottom through fiscal incentives. This time they are in dire need, the tech companies, to build these things. And so you as a community can really say, if you want to come here, if you decide to have that conversation, you need to make sure you mention this upfront. And I'll give some examples down the road. One of the emerging areas that's a kind of case study, Southeastern Wisconsin. If you can do more additional research on that, take a look at it. They're taking a regional approach. It was not planned that way. It has grown that way organically, but it's having a positive impact. Other community benefit agreements include money for healthcare, money for schools, community grants that the community decides what to use it on, workforce, hiring, kind of local or not local, and investing back into the community. If AI ends up being a GPT, and if what the technology companies, notice it's a big if, are saying will happen, the revenue is going to be insane. It's going to be super, super high. Right now, not even 10% maybe are paid subscribers to AI. Businesses are adopting it more and more. Citizens are adopting it more and more. The point is they know the demand will increase and they will have to build these things. And then there's the other angle that's being surfaced now is a national security component, right, of the race with China. And, you know, should we think about that when we say no or should we think about that when we say yes? The risks and concerns, obviously state fiscal policies may undermine the revenue capacity of you at the local level. That can be negotiated. Again, electricity bills can go up. When they're up and running, they really do not create job growth. They just move existing employees within industries to work. They're better paying jobs, but they're not even close to the number of jobs that manufacturing facilities produced back in the day. You're going to incur in infrastructure costs, water, substations, roads, et cetera. And e-waste is something that also was unheard of, really, six months ago, a year ago. These chips, they vary by type and whatever, but on average, every two years, they need to replace the chip. the hardware in those servers and so forth. So the e-waste, who's going to take care of that? Is it going to be them? Is it going to be the community? These are conversations you need to have beforehand, right? At the get-go. Transparency, that one from a community development perspective is super important. I know that many times the developers or the economic developer of the community are tied by NDAs, but try to be as transparent as possible with your citizens, with your residents, and kind of just let them know what's happening to the extent possible. Nobody likes... right, like shady deals and kind of over there and nobody knows what's going on. So that's very important to try and do these when you're looking at this. Next slide please. Here's just a, I'm not going to nerd out too much on you guys tonight, but up until about six months ago, most of the data centers being built were to train the models that we're using now. But now they're shifting to actually what's called inference or inference. They use They use the AI, right? Every time you go to Gemini or chat GPT and it answers back, that's what's happening. It's not being trained. That's a misunderstanding out there is that people think that the model that's out there is learning more and more. It's not. It has learned what it has learned. That's why they upgrade. right, the models every time, 4.5, 4.6. But when you use it, it does need to go and get the information for you. That's the inference part. And this one is very sensitive to latency, which is related to upload and download speeds on broadband. And that one, they may require, they will require being closer to urban areas. So that advantage of the green spaces, right, and cheaper electricity that they were looking for in the training models, now this may change with this type of use for the data centers. Next slide, please. Again, I want to emphasize from an economic development perspective that this is not your traditional smokestack chasing. This really can be different. There's now examples about this, and I can share some resources. Again, it's evolving, but they're called community binding agreements, CBAs, and Penn State has phenomenal resources on this. Brookings Institution also has a lot of information on this. If you set it up right, if your community decides to start talking, if you get approached or are approached by somebody that wants to build one, make sure that you really, really do not be afraid to say, if you want to come here, this is what we want and this is what we need. and then start from there and walk your way back. Believe me, this was not a conversation you had in the 70s, 80s, and 90s. And so we're seeing more and more communities taking advantage. That southeast Wisconsin example I shared with you, some data centers resulted being close to community colleges, and so what the community colleges negotiated was free access to the latest models by their faculty and their students and their residents to do whatever they need to do free of cost to the latest models that are available. There's a lot of nuance there, and like I said, there's a lot of communities that continue to learn on this. And you can see, you can read more here on the slides. I don't want to go into a lot of details, but those binding CBAs, I think that it's a must if you are to have that conversation to begin with. Again, like I said, they, they need to build these things. And so they're going to come to you sooner rather than later or at any point in time. And to wrap up, yes.

Are there any examples of the lengths of those? Are they annual? Are they 10 years? Are they in perpetuity?

So that's a good question. The ones we've seen are they're like, okay, we're going to agree to this, and then some factors may be annual, some may be every three years. One question I got up in Fulton County was, what happens if AI ends up being a bubble, right, and it bursts? What's gonna happen to the facility, right, to the data center? And so we have, as I said earlier in history, the exact same thing happened with the railroad, right? And the exact same thing happened with the internet. So it may be painful, it may hurt, but this can be in the CBA as well as to say, if you go out of business or whatever happens, what's gonna happen to the facility? Who's gonna take care of that? And these are conversations, again, you need to have. But back to your question, is really a framework, right? Of, okay, community benefits agreement, and then depending on the elements in that framework is that it may be annual.

Thank you.

Yes. Let's see. So anyhow. Next slide, please. These are some areas that are emerging from the CBA's workforce development. They pump money back into your community colleges, back into your schools. Fiscal transparency, environmental, who's going to take care of the e-waste, right? Are you going to pay for the electricity and a little bit more? There's a lot. Really, the sky is the limit. I mean, you can ask whatever you want, and then they'll say yes, no, or negotiate. Community investment, there's a couple of examples where they create a fund and then the community, a body like you guys, go ahead and decide what to use the money for. In general terms, I don't think that's the situation here in your community, but there are communities that their tax revenue is just declining. I mean, they don't have any additional revenue, so some of them are taking this as an advantage to help with their revenue. Accountability. In ongoing engagement, the CBA can say, okay, we're going to meet annually to see where you guys are, kind of like any economic developer does with any other industry, right? Are you planning to grow? How are you doing? And that ongoing engagement is very, very important because it tells the developer or the data center that you guys, you know, obviously you care about your community and you want to make sure that they are on the same page. So these are examples. Again, there's a lot of other stuff. There are the sources there. You can Google and or I can send the link so you can take a deeper reading to this. To finalize, next slide please. These are not meant to be comprehensive, but these are the ones that I would definitely ask if I were in your shoes were a data center start to show interest in your community, right? The electricity question, will this facility consume and who pays? for grid upgrades, but not only pays, but maintain for maintenance of this. What is the projected water demand? What is the source? Will it compete with residential supply? Sometimes they're going to share this information with you, but like I said, the water demand is improving every day, right? They're getting better at it. They still use water, but it's becoming less and less. And what specific tax revenue will the community receive? Not the state. You guys, right? You can ask that upfront. How many permanent local jobs? What qualifications are needed? Can I, you know, as a community, you can say, you know what? I would like to 20% of the workforce be local. Let us know what they need. We can work with the community colleges, with the schools to make sure they're ready while you're building. So by the time you start hiring, you hire local, right? And what happens to infrastructure costs if the operator downsizes or leaves? That's a conversation that needs to happen from the get-go. And, you know, if you want to come here, you know, you need to, you know, be part of that community benefit agreement, and that's where you can get into a lot of other details. In summary, from an economic development perspective, AI, if it turns out to be a GPT, has a transformational potential, right? Depends how you set it up and so forth. And like I mentioned earlier, for good or for bad, it's going to have an impact for generations to come. So anyhow, it's a very fluid, dynamic situation. And it's really every data center is different. Every process, every engagement with their host communities is different. This is just a 30,000 feet view. With that I'm done. So no do I stay here or do I go sit down?

You made mention that electric if it's done correctly doesn't affect the normal residential uses Expand on that what is correctly done?

Yeah, so they need to be very transparent on the load they're going to need, right? And that variable, what's called active demand response, you can include that from the get-go and say, would you have an active demand response plan in place? Meaning what they're going to do is when the peak hour comes, they will decrease their load. on the grid, right? They may restrict access to the data center, whatever algorithms they're running, and they kind of play that out, right? That has to be obviously planned out with the utility, but that's one way to approach it is if done correctly means Will you be able to have an active demand response in your data center? If it's the inference one, more than likely they really can throttle use. I don't know if you guys have used AI. Sometimes it tells you, I'm a little bit busy at the moment, come back later. It is because of peak demand on the EAI, but sometimes it's because the data center, right, it's peak hours in that community.

Now, are you familiar, another subject, anything that if they decommission a data center, It's a lot of that going on after so many years. They're just non-existent anymore and they need newer, better, and greater

So that's a great question. I get that a lot. The physical building will not change. It's the electronics inside of it, right? I have not heard yet of a data center that's being decommissioned. I think they're desperate and they're just trying to keep whatever they have up and running. But there may be cases down the road. But it's important to distinguish that the facility will remain, right? It's the electronics in the inside that are going to be upgraded constantly. on average every two years and so if for whatever reason that data center is no longer needed right maybe through the CBA you can say one of the items is to say you will let us know like with any other industry right give us a heads up if this is going to be the case and then we've got to agree what happens with with the facility and the e-waste particularly.

questions have you done any research on the benefits of how it affects the community if the developers involved or if it's directly with the data center if it's with meta direct or if the developers involved has there been any research or done on that, how those deals are structured, how the community... You talk about transparency. I feel like if a developer's involved, how transparent is it? I just am curious of why would they use a developer or why they wouldn't? Understanding building components, but the building itself is such a...

it's in the way of the investment right the investment or the guts right i have not seen any research on that to be honest with you but if we apply that same rationale to other industries they typically use the developer because their expertise does not lie in right in working with communities and building it their expertise is running it and utilizing it and so they outsource that to the developer Sometimes bigger companies may have a community liaisons, whatever branch, like Meta, right, that they know, they act like the developer. But I have not seen any study that shows which one is more efficient. I'm more of the less cooks in the kitchen the better, right? So, but it's going to vary substantially between case studies.

And a follow-up question real quick. Have you seen any community in your research actually do a 3PL with the data center, state control of the land, therefore have more part of the deal and get more of the revenue long term from it. Do you see what I'm saying? Yes. And I'm structuring these around economic development. How can a community be involved transparently, get the most bang for their buck, but still stay in control of the land moving forward?

Again, it varies so much by project, so there's no general case studies that we can tap into. I do know Northern Indiana with Amazon, they did negotiate it, and I can get back to you on more information on that, but the economic developer up there really... was very smart to negotiate not only the utility rates that are being paid for in part by, I think it's Amazon, but they also negotiated a tax revenue in the land lease agreement as well. But again, it's kind of really... Was that in Hebron? I believe so. Yeah, yeah.

Thank you.

Yeah. Your last page says that Brookings, I presume, is that the think tank in Washington, D.C.? It says they recommend legally binding CBAs with public dashboards, tracking jobs, tax revenue, resource use, et cetera. Can you give us a URL for any of these public dashboards?

Lowdown County, Virginia has one. I will track it down and send it to you. What that means is it's helping on the transparency piece. Residents can see real time, right? Maybe the consumption of the data center, how many jobs it's created, how many people are employed in the facility. HOW MUCH REVENUE IT'S CREATING, HOW MUCH REVENUE IS ENDING UP IN THE COMMUNITY, AND YOU CAN HAVE THIS PUBLIC-FACING DASHBOARD. IT'S THE INTENT OF THESE.

IT DOES THE CODING FOR THAT.

I MEAN, YOU CAN ASK IN THE CBA, HEY, META, YOU'VE GOT A LOT OF SMART PEOPLE. YOU CAN BUILD A DASHBOARD.

I WOULD THINK IT NEEDS TO BE AN INDEPENDENT AGENCY TO CREATE IT.

Yeah. Yeah. Well, the data is going to end up coming from them to be right at the end of the day. So but then again, it's just another attempt of making as transparent as possible because understandably people get nervous. Right. So.

I have two follow up questions. The traditional handling of power generation has been through the PPAs or. RECs are on-site. Where, and this is a fast-moving conversation, where does nuclear fit into that? Is that the on-site generation category? And are you answering questions about this now in Indiana?

Yes, I do know that the governor is very interested in nuclear. The technology, it's small modular reactors, SMRs. Purdue is working on that technology, but in all honesty, I don't think we can deploy those quick enough. It'll take time to get there, so you'll need a bridge between when they get here and when that technology becomes available. The other big issue with nuclear is its reputation, right? It's not the same technology as the 70s or the 80s, but it is a priority for the governor, I know, and I know at Purdue there's a lot of research going on around SMRs.

So is it best for us to stay silent on that topic or try to address it given it's such a fast-changing, which we really don't understand.

I'm afraid I cannot answer yay or nay on that one.

Then I have one more question. This slide is actually what I was going to ask about, and I'm just going to give a quick example, then ask the question. So when we did our comprehensive plan, and which rolls up to the planning commission, we had an appendix, a chapter, that was a playbook for the economic development. We did not adopt it, but we said, hey, we found some great things that MIGHT BE INSTRUCTIVE TO ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT ALONG THE WAY OF COMPREHENSIVE PLANNING. IT SEEMS TO ME FROM A GOVERNANCE PERSPECTIVE FOR TAX AS WELL AS CBAs WE MIGHT NEED TO DO THE SAME THING HERE BECAUSE THE PLANNING COMMISSION HAS NO JURISDICTION ON APPROVING BUT THERE MIGHT BE A PLAYBOOK FOR US TO SAY AND THESE THINGS ARE GREAT THAT SHOULD BE SHIPPED OFF TO A REALLY CAPABLE DEPARTMENT SUCH AS MAYBE ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT OR THE COMMISSIONERS WHO CAN HANDLE THAT. SO HAVE YOU RUN INTO THAT QUESTION IN OTHER COMMUNITIES AND HOW IS THAT HANDLED?

No. What I've heard, that's a good idea, by the way. What I've heard, what I've seen is I point them to, again, it's evolving. The case studies are starting to materialize, right? These types of resources are starting to come online. But I think that you're exactly right. It has to be very clear within the community who has the authority to And that could be part of the community getting ready by the time this gets serious, if the community decides to pursue this, because that's the other big if, right? The community may decide, we're not interested, thank you very much, and that's valid enough. But no, I have not seen, we're monitoring, it's early, right? I mean, it's just a year and a half, two years old, and in social sciences, that's too fast. It's too soon, yeah.

Thank you.

Yeah.

If you could make a next slide and one column was, you know, put your crystal ball on 10 or 20 years. One column is communities that said yes to data centers and AI takes off a GPT like we thought it would. What are they going to look like? And then the other column is communities that said, no, we don't want data centers, and they're a complete bust, and they're sitting here saying, yeah, glad we said no. What do those two sides, basically the highest of highs and the highest of highs because we said yes and because we said no?

You just stole our research idea.

You grabbed what I married a Purdue girl, so.

IU, I'm not sure I can share that with you, but yes, that's the closest you can get to a natural experiment. And there's been technologies that we've seen that we now know what happened, and that's the railroad and the interstate. Communities and neighborhoods that fought are now, on average, way behind. And so if we apply the same rationale to AI, The AI is going to have, it has tremendous, that's what investors are betting on, tremendous revenue potential, like huge. You now see the amount of money they're pouring into it. That means they're expecting a lot more back in return. And if the CBA is well designed, that community like Lowden County, Virginia, will have a steady source of revenue for decades to come, right? And then the community can do whatever they want with that money. On the other hand, communities that choose not to participate in that, if their tax base continues to decline, then they're gonna, you know, they're gonna have issues with their tax revenue in other situations. Now, the environmental side is also going to play in the favor of those that said no, right? But if we assume that because of the priority and the urgency, they're going to research to death how to minimize water use, how to make the chips more efficient. So there are case studies that make it very clear on what has happened to those communities that decided not to partake of the emerging technology back then. And I think if I had a crystal ball based on some research that has been done is that those communities will be left behind.

What if, you know, I want to go back to the water piece. If you have a closed loop system and that initial water usage was trucked in like you would your swimming pool at home or what have you, does that make a difference in water usage in the community?

I would assume yes, but that could be a question you can ask and say, look, you're not going to take this from whatever our water source is right now. You truck it in, keep it in your closed loop system, and then whenever you need to renew, it's on you. Communities have a little bit of the upper hand in this particular situation compared to, as an economic developer of 20 years, I have not seen an industry where the community has a little bit of more leverage than the industry itself. And so, if done correctly, I think that the community can benefit.

I have a few questions. Sure. Actually, first of all, thank you for coming. Yes. I had the opportunity here with the State Farm. It was like phenomenal.

Thank you.

I told my husband you were sort of like the Walter Cronkite version of data centers because you showed both sides of the story, but you didn't have an opinion or wasn't guiding, so it was kind of refreshing. But some of my questions really go towards how do communities that are a rule of nature, maybe have the suburban ring around them, because of the sophistication of these tech companies that have been doing this for a long time, how do we get the resources that we need? And what are the, what could those resources be to make the best decisions, the best yes or no for our community? Because they come in and, you know, uh, when I sweep you off your feet and on dah, dah, dah, dah, it sounds great. Or they tell you all these things and then you're afraid of all of this stuff. And so like, how do you find the right people and who should be a part of the, THAT RIGHT PEOPLE TO HELP YOU MAKE THESE DECISIONS THAT PERHAPS YOU DON'T HAVE ANY SOPHISTICATION IN BECAUSE IT'S A DIFFERENT EMERGING TECHNOLOGY. HOW DO YOU ADDRESS THAT OR IS THERE ANYTHING THAT YOU WOULD SUGGEST OR RECOMMEND?

Well, I think you guys have done the first step with this advisory committee. That kudos to you guys. I have not seen that very often. So that puts you ahead of the curve. The other thing is, at the end of the day, we all have a little bit of homework to do, right? And constantly there are now emerging trusted sources you know objective unbiased sources that your homework would be to check on those sources frequently to inform yourselves because like I said it's a very highly dynamic situation research is ongoing case studies are emerging failure successes are just all over the place and so it'll take time to take that information and make it you know easily accessible to people like you So I would say what you've done here, what you guys are, that really sets you apart. And number two is just constantly inform and educate yourselves. And I'm speculating, this is my opinion, there will be consultants that will arrive, emerge to precisely help in this type of situations where the community better really, really negotiates a good CBA. The state, I know, is a priority for the state, so additional resources may come from the state to add capacity to communities because one of the, I'm not familiar with your community in that aspect, but many communities really have the best intentions, they just don't have the resources, right, to kind of take care of that. And so that capacity building, I think the state is serious of helping with that as well.

I guess that's what concerns me about AI is such a It's an emerging technology, obviously, but the rapidness of how it's emerged, you know, it hasn't followed any traditional cycle of anything before it. So trying to keep up with it, trying to have accurate information, which is or isn't always there, can be super challenging. I guess I wonder, like, trying to think ahead, you know, one of the things you said, the question is not whether AI will transform the economy, it's whether your community can leverage this technology to transform itself. I think it's really an interesting insight about how do you envision communities using that but protecting themselves because it's not going to go away. It's just obviously going to ramp up. And the five big tech companies are going to invest a lot of money in it. And although it's not going to create a lot of jobs afterwards, the emerging technologies, just like all the ones before it, there are going to be a lot of opportunities for startups, small business development, reinvestment in a lot of different ways if you have those type of facilities. The challenges, the risk that you see, that are building those heads of the companies, they know they have to figure out quickly how to mitigate those risks because it doesn't allow them to grow at the capacity that we need as a country to compete with the world around us.

Yes.

I mean, is that close to an accurate kind of interpretation that we need to be more proactive but protective at the same time and think about things like clawbacks or performance evaluations or those kinds of things?

So that was a long question. I know, sorry. I'm going to try and...

I don't have a historical problem like that.

It's all good. I'm going to try and break it up in bits and pieces. It is an emerging technology. I don't think it'll go away. There's, like any technology, what use you make of it makes a difference. For good, are you going to use it for good? Are you going to use it for bad? There's emerging research that is showing that productivity in the U.S. for the first time is gaining speed. And there are economists that are arguing that it is because of AI. And again, the adoption level is nowhere close to where we should see that in the national statistics, but we're starting to see it. And so a lot of question marks are popping up, right? Like, is it AI? Then you have the job discussion right at Purdue, you know, entry-level positions, what's happening with those young educated folks, are they not going to get hired because, you know, the AI can do what they were hired to do in the past, and I can tell you a quick story about my research. I've been doing the digital divide research for many, many years, and I developed a database, and one day playing with Claude, I'm like, okay, show me what you've got, right, and I Started interacting with it, and by the time I was done, I was so impressed. I got home, and after 20 minutes, my wife is like, just be quiet. I've heard enough of AI, enough. But what I told her is, what I asked Claude to do, and did it correctly because I could fact check it, that's how I started my career 20 years ago. And if that technology would have been in place, then I'm not sure I would have gotten a job. But the point is, it may not replace the job entirely. That's what many economists are arguing. It may replace tasks within a job, making that worker more productive. And so that's one of the arguments that is ongoing. At the community level, obviously, just like there's a huge discussion going on with social media right now. Is it good? Is it bad? Devices in schools, you've seen that kind of come up again. There's going to be pros and cons of the technology. But what I think, based on previous trends of technology, is we have not seen it accelerate like it can. And it may accelerate that quickly. And there will be growing pains. But it'll really vary by community. Now, on the regulation side, that's another whole conversation. Should the federal government regulate? Whatever. But I think that... You're right, the ecosystem of startups, we're not seeing anything yet, but many economists argue it's gonna explode soon of just businesses that rely on AI to provide a specific service that we don't even know exists today.

I know two points that you made in your State Farm presentation. One was about the reuse, like the chip scenario. So afterwards, I went and did my research on it too. And there's a lot of companies already emerging to figure out how to address that. and which would not have been around. And I think about like when the internet first came out, communities that didn't get on board with brand bandwidth and a variety of other kinds of things, they really got left behind because development went where that infrastructure was taking place or that mindset took place. A lot of people, you know, in the eighties thought computers were going to replace jobs and we were going to, our economy was going to fall apart. And then you've seen all the different kinds of pathways of, come from that and of course all the new startups and the new businesses that supported that. So I know it's a paradigm shift and we need to be really responsible about how we move forward and protect our communities, but it's not gonna be something that's gone away. And you mentioned Claude, which I thought was really interesting in the first time because Claude has a limit of how long you can use it. It's because you don't have the capacity.

And it's the business model.

And so they shut down, and you're blocked for I don't know how many hours. But it's because when I researched that, they said it's because of not enough AI capacity to be able to hold the demand that they're being asked for. And I'm making the assumption, and I could be wrong, that we're a global economy.

Right.

China doesn't play by the same rules that we do. Other places in the world don't play by the same rules that we do. or have the same concerns about their people and their environment and all that. And you mentioned in that session about it's not only economic development, workforce development, all those kinds of things, but there's a security capacity thing that we really need to consider as a country, as a locality. How are we gonna best protect ourselves? Do we feel like having data? You didn't say this, so I don't want you saying your words, but how we preface about keeping our country, our people safe.

Yeah, given the demand potential, data centers will be built here or elsewhere. Period. Yeah.

Do you have time for one more question?

Yes, of course. Until you kick me out.

Especially with you being in education, has there been any DISCUSSION OR PLANS FOR LOOKING TO SEE WHAT THE IMPACT WILL BE TO THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE BRAINS OF OUR YOUNG PEOPLE. I LOOK AT MY GRANDCHILDREN AS AN EXAMPLE, AND WE TRY TO LIMIT SCREEN TIME IN ELECTRONICS BECAUSE I'M CONCERNED ABOUT WHAT IT WILL DO TO THE DEVELOPMENT, TO THEIR DEVELOPMENT. AND I CAN'T HELP BUT WONDER IF THAT'S BEING EXPLORED. IF YOU'RE DEPENDING ON AN AI AGENT TO DO STUFF FOR YOU, YOU'RE NOT OBVIOUSLY GOING TO BE THINKING QUITE THE SAME, BUT WHAT'S THE IMPACT TO OUR CHILDREN?

Yes, that question is very, very timely. There's a lot of research going on on that. I don't have a definite answer. It's not my area of expertise, but there is that concern, and there is a lot of research being used for that to try and answer that question. I will say, though, that Socrates in Greece was pretty much opposed when writing came out and books came out. because he said that the oral abilities of his students would be lost. So my point is we've seen this movie play, right? There are issues, don't get me wrong, and there are people that, you know, feel that, oh, my God, this is the end of the world. And there are people that think, oh, my God, I'm going to be a millionaire from my living room, right? So yes, that digital is now, you know, the iPhone came out in 2007. It's been 20 years next year. We're now going to start to see research on that. Another just fun stat for you is there was a study on Facebook and it concluded that Facebook knew you better than your spouse. And that's simply because of what you scroll and stop a little bit or like or dislike or comment on. And so technology can be used for good, can be used for bad. But at the end of the day, it really is something that will it make you more productive? Can you put any type of safeguards and use it responsibly, right? And that really boils down to the individual.

Thinking about our farmers, if you talk about being reliant on China, go back to 2021 and ask a farmer what the cost of glyphosate was. And that issue was glyphosate comes Luling, Louisiana and China. Hurricane hit Louisiana. COVID had already hit. Glyphosate skyrocketed 10x in price. So just a lot of our neighbors could tell you the impact of that. But thinking of that, you work with the likes of Dan Quinn, Sean Castile, Dr. Brett Marsh. Yes. What are those folks, Bernie Engel, what are they asking you? You know, they know the farming community really well. What questions are they asking? What do they want to know about AI's impact on agriculture?

So AI has a very good ability, which is to take a lot of data and synthesize it. And farmers produce a lot of data, and there's a lot of insights to be discovered. And so everybody's looking at AI. Now, you have to know... what to expect, because it hallucinates, right? It may make something up. And not on purpose, it's just the way it works. And that's another misunderstanding that, oh my God, it's conscious, you know, it has a conscience and it's, no, it's just, it's all about probabilities within the model, right? But those are the things that I've seen ag focusing on big time is all the data that we have. Can we run it through an AI and obtain insights about farming, marketing, weather? The weather comes up every single time, right? And so anything that can help them is what they're looking at.

When you talk about communities that if AI is successful and they don't have a hyperscale center come, how will they be left behind? Could you quantify that?

So this is based on assumptions, right? The theory goes that if it follows what other technologies did, that technology itself will result in additional economic development, right? Startups and other stuff. And with AI, of course, you have that potential. You're going to have to develop a training and supporting ecosystem that will generate jobs to support the businesses that are adopting AI. You will have a couple of entrepreneurs that will use AI to create products and services you don't have. Now, the physical locality of the hyperscale, right, the big, big bonus in theory that you will obtain from that is the revenue. and whatever comes in and they can share it with your community at times when tax revenues continue to go down. So over time, if you extrapolate that over time, the community will have less money to do whatever they need to do, either to offer incentives or bring more people. On the economic development side, because of the digital age, you don't necessarily have to be in close proximity to the hyperscale, right, to develop. But then again, if you have it right there, you may be able to access and have other type of benefits that other communities don't. And so down the road, the assumption is if it behaves like the railroad and the internet, You will see pockets that opted not to participate or adopt at the level of others that they will, if it becomes a GPT, they will have a harder time. Maybe not left behind, but they will have a harder time.

So the tax benefit?

I think the tax benefit is the most palpable, tangible one of the physical location. The adoption and use, that's a little bit more muddier regarding local impact.

Economic development is crucial for any community, and I know the creation of a data center creates all kinds of construction jobs, but once that's all said and done, are there any other ancillary services that will come to your community because of that?

Yeah, so that's a great question, and research now is emerging on that front. The big job boom is the construction phase, but the operation of the center really is not resulting in the growth of jobs. Too early to tell if you're going to end up being the new ecosystem of AI entrepreneurs, you never know, right? And also if you negotiate through the CBA that whatever model is being run in that facility, if you can have access to that free of charge, that may open up other opportunities for your entrepreneurs and faculty and students, kids, whatever the case may be. But at the end of the day, the operation is not going to be a net growth of jobs. And that's a big difference with manufacturing. Manufacturing had a huge multiplier. Data centers, as of now, as of right now, we don't see that multiplier. It may change. We don't know. But if you ask my opinion, I think they're so efficient at running that A tech guy in San Francisco can run it remotely, right? It's part of it.

Well, outside of your building maintenance services, which, you know, there's quite a few of them that we have here in our chamber of commerce.

Electricians, plumbers, they are going through the roof, and that stays local. That's a good point.

That needs to be local. That needs to be negotiated that they use local firms. That's correct.

What's the outlook? Do you know the outlook for this? I know it takes thousands of workers. If we're training them today, once these are built, where do they go? All those workers, the electricians, the construction, we don't have those jobs to fulfill today and we hire and train in 20 years. Are those jobs still there for those workers?

I think the maintenance piece, yes. You're going to have to keep that thing running.

So that level volume of workers is...

Maybe not as much as when building, but there will be a steady need of maintenance.

I think that ties... We don't yet have a clear picture of what the recycling costs are for all of the chips that...

The e-waste, yeah, that's an issue. E-waste, it's...

Sizable.

It is going to be.

I think of myself, I'm an IT person and a techno geeky person. The amount of electronic devices that I have, I went through like an electronic purge in January. You have to find a place that's willing to take it.

Correct. And so that's a conversation you need to have and maybe the tech company takes it. And they may have superior recycling facilities or they may be able to salvage whatever. But if you negotiate that through the CBA, you can say, hey, whatever e-waste is generated, you take it. Because really local communities don't have the expertise, not even the capacity. And they will learn, they will know if they can recycle it and reuse it in whatever the case may be.

I was just going to touch base on talking about like the local maintenance and stuff that's going on. I think Sam touched on that in a previous meeting that some of these data centers can only be down for like 27 minutes a year. So you're not going to bust somebody in from California in time to fix that. Right. So I do think that, you know, over the lifespan of that, there's got to be at least some kind of local input.

They usually have like a redundant, another center they can offload to. So you wouldn't experience the outage. The center might experience the outage, but it's so quick because it immediately transitions to the backup center. Like in my case, my past life, we had one in Chicago and one in Houston. They were mirrored, but if Houston fell down, Chicago was up. Right. And vice versa.

But you have to bring the one that. Yes. You have to bring it up online.

But you have a very limited amount of time to do that. And there might be degradation, but you don't want, like you say, 20 minutes of downtime perhaps, but really it didn't happen that way. Because if it did, heads would roll.

But anyhow, my.

Maybe one follow-up question about the e-waste. So traditionally in an industrial center, that would be considered FF&E, which would BE A PART OF THE BUSINESS AND THE OPERATIONS. CAN YOU MAYBE GIVE AN EXAMPLE OF HOW A COMMERCIAL REAL ESTATE STANDARD WOULD ADDRESS THAT? IS THE E-WASTE TYPICALLY DISPOSED OF STORED IN OUTDOOR STORAGE ON THE GROUND? I'M TRYING TO FIGURE OUT HOW IT'S NOT A BUSINESS PIECE AND HOW WE WOULD REGULATE THAT.

I don't know. I'm not familiar with e-waste. It's an emerging issue and a significant one, particularly, you know, your iPhone. It starts to act up every two years, right, mysteriously. These chips will also be outdated as the technology continues to improve. So there is a significant e-waste, but I don't know the process. There may be a possibility to start a business here and become specialized on that, for example. I don't know.

We could ask them to tell us what their process is and then also tell them what we expect them to do with it so that it doesn't fall upon us because it's very expensive to repair.

It is and very complex, yes.

I was curious, you use Luton as like the data center of the world kind of place. So they've been doing it for about 20 years? Is that in that range?

Give or take, yes.

So have they seen like a decrease in population or growth? I think the other industry is not coming there because of it?

It is crowding out other industry just because of the electricity piece, right? But I was reading recently the steel mills are starting to say, hey, hey, what's going on? That electricity's ours, right? So you're gonna start to see that conversation unfold. But for this particular county, what I'm told and the case studies I've read of that is that their quality of place has increased exponentially because they've been able to put a lot of money into the community over time. Their property tax has decreased. And so that gives more money to your residents, right? But there's also the noise issue, the pollution issue when the generators kick on. There's a, I don't know how accurate it could be, but one of the reports I read said that at one time something happened and like 20 data centers kicked on their generators at the same time. That must have been loud. But anyhow, they are an outlier. They're just so intensively built around data centers. But they've been at it for 20 years.

The quality of life has improved?

The investment in the community parks, trails, schools, you name it, yes.

Has it decreased?

Mm-mm.

I was going to say, you say noise. We live close to our... a train that goes through our county, and it's loud. But after a while, you don't hear the train. I mean, it's the weirdest thing. You don't hear it after a while. Kind of tone deaf, I'll tell y'all.

So it does kind of seem like when you read about all the various projects around the country that some of the, what you might call the more successful data center projects have been the ones like Loudoun County, Virginia and Albany, Ohio. And it seems like that's where a community has deliberately said. Correct. We're going to do this and we're going to do it right here and we're going to do it this way.

These are my terms, yes.

Right. Is there some data on that? I mean, that's just opinion, I guess, at that point, but is that an approach or as opposed to so much of planning and zoning is reactive? It seems like we're constantly reacting to projects and we don't want to react to this type of project. SO WHAT WOULD BE LIKE AN IDEAL, CAN YOU WRITE A ZONING ORDINANCE FOR A DATA CENTER? IS THAT EVEN POSSIBLE BECAUSE CAN GOVERNMENT MOVE FAST ENOUGH TO UPDATE THE ZONING ORDINANCE TO BE PREPARED FOR THE NEXT TECHNOLOGY?

Yeah, I'm not sure I would trust whatever they tell you.

Yeah, build more of me, build more of me. I mean, if we looked around our county and said, you know, we want to pick 100 acres and say this is a data center area, you know, what would you?

I think from a land use perspective, you need to be proactive, particularly because you're seeing the tsunami coming, right? So the question is, will you build a raft? to kind of ride that tsunami or not. And that part of that raft is the land use piece. If for example, the community agrees and everything is done correctly, transparently, whatever, you may designate, right? Like the industrial parks back in the day, you may have like a data center park, right? Which is far enough. It has ample water and electricity, et cetera, et cetera, that I think there's more and more communities that are looking at developing these kind of, not free trade zones, right, but kind of data center zones that will deliberately not allow any other, right, development around it so it can be kind of on its own over there, but still generating the revenue in other situations. Again, it's really on a case-by-case basis how this plays out, and it can go, you know, a thousand directions.

Yeah. And that's one of the things we sort of struggled with is what, when you look at our zoning ordinances, we just, we just picked our worst one, you know, our most intensive industrial use and said, we'll start there. You know, we could put one there because that land is set up for big setbacks, smokestacks, ugly stuff, but maybe not needed, you know, maybe it could happen other places. I don't know. That's, I guess I don't know how to figure that all out or, WHAT ARE SOME GOOD EXAMPLES. BUT IT DOES SEEM LIKE THESE BUT IT DOES SEEM LIKE THESE COMMUNITIES THAT HAVE TAKEN BIG COMMUNITIES THAT HAVE TAKEN BIG AREAS AND SAID, DRAW A CIRCLE AREAS AND SAID, DRAW A CIRCLE AROUND IT, AND IF YOU WANT TO BE A AROUND IT, AND IF YOU WANT TO BE A DATA CENTER, YOU HAVE TO BE HERE. DATA CENTER, YOU HAVE TO BE HERE. AND REGIONALLY, HAVE YOU SEEN AND REGIONALLY, HAVE YOU SEEN ANYTHING WHERE COMMUNITIES LIKE, SAY, Where does it stop? If Greenfield says we won't do anything, but the county says we want to, and then we put one right next to Greenfield, you know, that's not fair, you know? So it's like regionally planning all the way to the state level. Is that happening in any communities in the country?

Not that I know of regionally. The only one that has been successful organically is Southeast Wisconsin, uh, What I'm told from colleagues up there is they did not plan that. It just happened, right? And they're like studying what happened. That was good. Let's try and replicate it. And so everybody's looking at Southeast Wisconsin as an example of a regional approach. But from an ordinance, land use, I think it's too early right now. I don't think people are just kind of like reacting at the local level. And I don't think communities have had the chance to elevate it at the regional level.

But there are some telltales, right, to some of these corridors. There's infrastructure availability to feed on and off grid systems because of the electricity component. There's natural resource availability. There's just some telltales that say, hey, this is primed for this type of development. Right. And adjacency to other uses, to similar uses. Yeah.

And right now, I mean, you know this, data centers are not popular. the latest Gallup poll came out and it's like three quarters of respondents said no. And from a psychology perspective, there are some theories that people are spooked about the jobs and so they relate that nervousness about the jobs implications with data centers. But it's not that the data centers themselves are opposed, they're just tied to the technology they help run. And so my job, what I'm trying to do as an educator here is the negative, typically at the beginning of everything, negative, right, is louder than positive, but there are positive stuff. And at the end of the day, it's really up to you guys, the community, to decide. But the positive, I think, is not getting the spotlight that the negative is. And I think that'll kind of fizzle, hopefully, and it'll balance out in the future. And hopefully, communities can make informed decisions, whether yay or nay, right? But at the end of the day, it's really up to you guys.

A lot of the negativity is fear of the unknown, right? And so that's one of the things we're trying to do is get real information available. And I guess, is that possible with a community benefit? You call it a community benefit agreement, but maybe also a community benefit analysis. Is that done by the data center developer, done by the community, or together, I guess?

Yeah. Something like that, yeah. I have another question about the community benefit agreements. I was watching C-SPAN this morning, and they had a little miniature press conference with President Trump, who was patting himself on the back, about this deal they did with Intel last year in which some loan was made to the company. And he said that at the end of the negotiations, and he said, and as a part of this, I want 10% of your company. And Intel said, sure, you can have it. And Trump said, now we've made $80 billion off that investment. I'm skeptical of that, but notwithstanding that, are you aware of any community benefit agreements in which the community has asked for and received stock in the company that's coming in to build a data center?

Yes, and that would be something I would strongly recommend. Ask, shoot for the sky, right? Shoot for the moon. There are examples, I think, and I need to go back and send them to you, but of the profit sharing agreement with the data centers themselves or the company that's running them, right? Maybe not stocks, but do say, okay, aside from the tax revenue that you're going to be paying, what about you give me, and I'm making this up, right? I don't know, 1%. of a profit or whatever. Again, they may say no, right? Or they may say, actually, okay, what about 0.5%? And if you happen to nail that, you're gonna have a steady source of income for years to come. But do you know of any communities that have been able to negotiate that yet? I need to go and check. I've heard rumors and stories that there's been a couple of successful ones. The one in Louisiana that I shared, it's based on their tax agreement that they have, but it's a very juicy tax agreement to the point that it resulted in very large bonuses to their teachers because of state law or something. I can go back and check. But that is certainly a possibility, yes.

Central Indiana, we have CERTA. Are you familiar with them? Central Indiana.

Yes, the planning. Yes, yes.

And data centers, to my knowledge, haven't come up in those meetings yet. But I'm sure that that is a collaborative effort right there between all these different counties right here in central Indiana. So that is probably a good place to start when it comes to the bigger conversations about regional.

I think we're going to start to see very innovative ordinances and policies around this at the local and regional level. Again, right now everybody was caught by surprise of the speed and the urgency, right? That these guys are like, hey, can we build, can we build, can we build? But the community is going to catch up.

Does it behoove us as a county, as we're putting this overlay ordinance together, to have in the ordinance itself saying that we want to review this policy every year because of the technology and all the things changing fast. You know, it's kind of as a stopgap, kind of like, oh, we're seeing this, we need to correct this, versus just waiting for something to come up reactively and say, oh, we need to make this change. We're constantly reviewing it, not just letting it sit on a shelf, so to speak.

Actually, even...

I don't know.

legal question for Rhonda changing things from your Whether we can update our overlay we can we have to go through the process but it would be through the plan Commission Changing the ordinance and then having the commissioners approve the ordinance. I

Sounds like an administrative item that might bring us out of compliance pretty quickly. We've tried these things before, and we're immediately out of compliance. A better option might be to say I should review it, or if SIRTA comes out with a guidance document, perhaps you should review it. So that might be a good governance item, but we haven't fared well. It's just administratively burdensome to require

Yeah, which I totally understand. I just thought because of it changing so quickly, what we know today is going to be different from tomorrow or a year from now if we've locked ourselves in and we don't have a way to kind of review that and update it.

I have a question. Purdue has a program called LTAP that most everybody knows in local government for roads and bridges. Do you think there's any desire at Purdue University to help to create a local, an LTAP, local technical assistance program for data centers?

That is a magnificent idea. I will convey your message back. Okay.

You could talk to your people about that and work on legislation for that. I think it's a need in the whole state and we just don't have the resources locally in the expertise and we want information that is not biased. Right. coming from that type of source would be better for us.

Definitely. Just don't tell IU. We will get on that.

Okay. Thanks for coming tonight. We really appreciate it. Thank you.

Thank you. That is our last agenda item. As I was listening to all of that, I was wondering about what we asked this little subcommittee to do. And I was wondering if it would make sense for each of us to send an email to Kayla that she could send to the group of just the ARE MAYBE YOUR FIVE, LIMIT IT TO YOUR FIVE BIGGEST CONCERNS, I GUESS, AND THE FIVE THINGS THAT CONCERN YOU THE MOST THAT YOU'VE HEARD SO FAR THROUGH THESE MEETINGS AND THESE PRESENTATIONS AND THE THINGS YOU'VE READ, AND THEN THEY CAN LOOK AT EACH OF THOSE AND TRY TO tailor that summary, executive summary to that I guess to some degree. That might be a helpful guidance maybe for as you're trying to undertake that task.

Do you want the scribes to recuse from that or participate?

I'm sorry, I didn't hear you.

Would you like the scribes to recuse or participate from that?

You could participate in that, yeah. Thank you. Yeah.

Can we also share what opportunities that we think might be available that we want to think about?

Sure, yeah. So just maybe send that in the next week or so to Kayla and she can distribute that to that committee. Our next meeting, I wanted to get the group's opinion on how they feel about it, but would you be open to having a public input session? So we would just allow anybody from the public that would like to come and speak about any concern that they have about data center and data center siting. IT COULD EITHER BE A SHORT THING OR IT COULD BE AN ALL-NIGHT THING. YOU NEVER KNOW WHAT YOU'RE GETTING INTO.

I THINK IT'S A GOOD IDEA.

OKAY.

I THINK WE SHOULD PROBABLY OPEN you know, have concerns and people that are pro.

Yeah.

There will be. I would think there would be some that will come in. Oh, absolutely. We can get them to participate and use their voices.

Yeah. The nice is if that is within a framework of a larger next steps and engagement plan. But those have worked really well. You know, we have this, this, and this opportunity. You have... so just maybe if there's a larger plan for that engagement and instead of sort of the one-off because we'll probably kind of get that question and that that's been really helpful to us in developing from the planning commission um sequential input on on these types of items yeah so what we might want to do once we get that did kayla disappear once we

OKAY, ONCE WE GET THAT, MARIA, OUR DATE SET, WE MIGHT WANT TO GET THE AGENDA OUT QUICKLY AND ONLINE AND THEN MAYBE WE COULD PUT ON THERE SOMETHING ABOUT REQUESTING PEOPLE TO, I DON'T KNOW IF THEY COULD SIGN IN ONLINE OR SOMETHING LIKE THAT SO WE GET AN IDEA OF HOW MANY PEOPLE MIGHT WANT TO SPEAK SO WE COULD DETERMINE HOW MUCH TIME WE NEED. We were just talking about putting public input on the agenda for the next meeting and then trying to find a way to gauge how many people might want to speak and discuss things so that we can plan for that. I don't know if our technology would allow some way to digitally sign in prior to the meeting or something like that. All right, any additional discussion for this evening? We have 14 minutes to talk about anything except IU football.

Motion to adjourn? Second.

All right, moving second to adjourn. All in favor signify by saying aye. Aye. Same sign. Thank you very much for coming out.

Thank you for everybody that came.