Following a contentious, nearly six-hour-long meeting, the Yorkville City Council has OK’d further approvals for a roughly 1,000-acre data center campus that has drawn the ire of numerous area residents.
The proposed data center project, called Project Cardinal, is being brought forward by Pioneer Development, LLC, along with the property owners.
The development site is just over 1,000 acres in the northwest corner of Yorkville on the border with Sugar Grove, generally located northwest of Route 47 and Galena Road, south of Baseline Road and east of Ashe Road. There would be a total of 14 data center buildings at the site, along with two electrical substations, a utility switchyard and stormwater detention basins, according to plans.
Approved on Tuesday was the annexation of the land into Yorkville that will one day hold the Project Cardinal data centers, a rezoning of the area to a general manufacturing zoning district and utility, infrastructure and development agreements between the city and Pioneer Development.
But, before the matters came to a vote, this project and other local data center proposals once again drew sharp criticism from residents of the area at Tuesday’s meeting.
Yorkville has become a sort of hub for a number of data center projects, in part due to the area’s proximity to a ComEd substation. The project under consideration Tuesday would join what may one day be a corridor of data center campuses in Yorkville in the northeast quadrant of Eldamain Road and Route 34.
But, like other communities in Illinois where data centers are being considered, with these proposed developments has come
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significant resident opposition.At Tuesday’s meeting, Yorkville City Administrator Bart Olson provided details on Project Cardinal, as well as offered some comment on the data centers planned for Yorkville generally.
Project Cardinal, which already secured preliminary approval from the city in November, would be made up of 14 buildings, Olson said, with one to two buildings constructed per year as the campus is built out. The project would total over 17 million square feet.
Olson also described some of the features of the proposed campus, and some of the steps the city has taken to evaluate this project and others.
The development would feature a shared path around the property and landscape buffers to mitigate noise and the visibility of the data center buildings, Olson said. He said noise has been a major concern when it comes to data centers, so Yorkville is looking to evaluate that in advance and plans to monitor noise during construction and after. He also noted that the campus’ power supply capacity would be dictated by ComEd, and that generator testing would be restricted to only non-holiday weekdays to mitigate the noise people would hear.
As for the items on Tuesday’s agenda for the project, Olson noted that the development agreement includes offsets for the project, essentially a “list of donations and materials that the developers are planning to give to the city and the community to offset any issues that they might have, and also just to invest in the community.”
He said on Tuesday that the developer intends to pay all relevant development and building fees, and that the city is not giving the developer any utility or property tax rebates.
The developer is also promising to pay $51 million to the city over the course of the next few years of the project. By far the largest share of that is set to go toward Yorkville School District 115, with some going toward the fire protection district, parks and recreation projects, nonprofit organizations serving Yorkville and some set aside as non-directed funds that the council would discuss how to use — potentially for tax or utility bill relief, Olson noted. In the agreement, the developer is also proposing to set aside a parcel of the project area for a public park.
As for the utility and infrastructure agreement, Olson noted that the developer is agreeing to pay for all costs for city infrastructure projects related to the development. He said the city plans to do the design for this, with the developer covering those costs, and then construction of the needed infrastructure would be managed by the developer.
The developer is also paying a water connection fee, Olson said, and contributing to the city’s ongoing Lake Michigan water project. He noted that water use for the campus is limited to 42,000 gallons per day on average once the data center buildings are fully built, which is comparable to 150 to 200 homes’ water use.
Speaking to the data center projects slated for Yorkville more generally, Olson noted that landowners have come to agreements with developers to turn portions of nearby land into data centers, and have then come to the city for things like rezoning and annexation. The city, in response, has to review and vote on these proposals, and indicated that the city simply voting against data centers without considering them seriously could open Yorkville up to legal action from a developer, which could overturn their decision and lead to the projects getting built anyway.
Olson also emphasized the steps the city is taking to review the noise these projects are expected to generate.
And, in terms of benefits, Olson largely framed the pros in terms of property tax relief and revenue generation for the city and other taxing bodies.
Olson said that data centers in different states can impact power bills locally, and that “really one of the only ways to offset data center development” is to allow a data center in one’s own municipality and obtain the utility taxes and property taxes it’s expected to generate. He went on to point out that the primary property tax burden residents bear is for the school district, and claimed that the entrance of a data center could provide tax relief to residents, additional revenue for the school district — or both.
“The cost of educating students is very high, and so it’s a widely accepted practice within development nationally that residential development does not pay for itself overall,” Olson said. “You need commercial industrial development that has no school kids … to come into a community, pay property taxes and then either generate new revenue that the school district can use or to offset some of the tax burden that residential properties are currently bearing.”
In the public comment portion of the meeting later on, Yorkville School District 115 Superintendent Matt Zediker was among those who spoke. He said that, at recent town halls for the district’s proposed bond measure that seeks to build new district school buildings, the question of data centers and how the district would spend money received from the developers has come up frequently. Zediker said that, if the project ultimately comes to fruition and the district does receive additional funding, the money it receives would be used to potentially borrow less money for the planned facilities projects, or to give tax relief to the community.
Olson also noted that data centers have high security, so the need for police presence would be reduced. The project would also result in road improvements not paid for by the city, and could lead to the creation of jobs locally.
Following Olson’s presentation, several dozen individuals spoke about the proposed data centers — the majority opposing their development — in a public comment period that stretched for over three hours. Their concerns included issues like water usage, noise, resident health, potential effects on wildlife and animals and what the future of Yorkville would look like if the proposed corridor of data centers in the area takes shape.
An online petition seeking to stop Project Cardinal and another proposed data center development, called Project Steel, has garnered more than 4,000 signatures since it began circulating.
On Tuesday, a number of residents urged the city to take more time to consider the projects before voting on them.
Also at the meeting, Matt McCarron, a representative from Pioneer Development, LLC, addressed some components of the project.
Regarding air quality, for example, McCarron said that a majority of data center campuses use diesel fuel and Tier II controls for their generators. But Pioneer, he said, is planning to use Tier IV controls, which essentially have higher pollutant controls. They’re also planning to use hydro-treated vegetable oil, which he said is a type of synthetic bio-diesel. McCarron also reiterated that backup generators would only be running during testing and maintenance.
And McCarron said the developer plans to use a solid oxide energy server, rather than a combustion process, to reduce pollution from the development.
Following some questions from the council, the city’s aldermen ultimately voted in support of the measures allowing the project to move forward. Each of the measures were voted on 7-1, with only Ald. Rusty Corneils voting against them.
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These measures essentially give the developer full approval to move forward. But, from here, the developer still needs to seek approvals from ComEd and close on the sale of the land in order to progress with construction, Olson said.
Also discussed Tuesday was another major data center project that may be coming to Yorkville: Project Steel.
That project, which is being brought forward by Prologis, L.P., is a proposed 540-acre campus, totaling around 6.8 million square feet and made up of 18 buildings, according to documents from the city. A representative from Prologis noted that, like Project Cardinal, the developer plans to give the city $40 million in impact fees.
Prologis is seeking annexation, rezoning and approval of a preliminary Planned Unit Development, or PUD, plan for the proposed project from the city.