The Data Center Debate comes to Owen County
The Aug. 20th meeting of the Owen County Board of Commissioners started off with a warning: everyone stay civil, everyone stick to their three minutes, if they don’t they will be removed. Commissioner Sam Hobbs recalled the Aug. 6 meeting, where decorum was harder to come by, and apologized on behalf of himself and the other commissioners for letting the previous meeting get out of hand.
“We aren’t always going to agree on everything, and we can disagree, but we don’t have to get nasty about it,” Hobbs said.
Public comments stayed civil, but the opinions of nearly every resident were similar. Nine residents expressed their support for either a temporary moratorium on data center development in Owen County or an outright ban. Concerns stated were noise, excessive water use, electricity costs, and property value decreases.
While there are currently no plans from any developers to build data centers in Owen County, many residents expressed their concerns that without a formal prohibition, data center development could happen at any moment.
Local resident Mike Broach has seen the results of this development come to pass in his former home of Boone County. The LEAP facility including a Meta data center began construction two miles from his former home near Lebanon. He moved to Owen County last December from his family home to get away from the mass construction that he says disrupted his life.
“We had started noticing infrastructure changes: a lot of construction, basically on our front doorstep,” he recalled. “The main highway into town changed from a two land road into a four lane road.”
Broach also remembers the constant traffic that was involved.
“They had specific construction routes, but those routes were busy and congested, so those guys would juke these routes . . . and so that puts construction traffic driving right by the places they shouldn’t be driving. . . one of those places was my home,” he added.
Another concerned citizen, Judy Morris took it upon herself to investigate the data center issue after hearing about devastating effects on other rural communities. At this point, she told The Owen News that she would rather be enjoying her retirement, but she is concerned about what the future would bring if a data center came to Owen County.
“Just looking at stuff, how could we bring [this] stuff into our county without messing up our farmland, messing up all this rural beauty that we have around us and just what everybody's here for,” she said. “You're gonna run everybody out with it.”
Her investigations led her to send three messages to the Owen County Board of Commissioners citing sources from government reports around the state. The first email contained information about data center water usage and the effects on groundwater, the second information about the effects a data center build can have on farmland and the third, information about environmental impacts of a so-called “closed-loop” water cooling setup.
The State of the State
Data center development is accelerating across the state and the scale of some projects is staggering.
According to market research firm Cleanview, Indiana currently has 23 operating data centers with an electrical capacity of 1352 megawatts. The largest operating data center, a Meta-owned facility in Jeffersonville, consumes 108 of those megawatts alone. In comparison, the planned Takanock-owned facility in Elkhart County is estimated to consume a whopping 1500 megawatts alone. According to Cleanview, there are 130 planned data centers for Indiana with a total estimated capacity 10 times higher than current consumption.
If all these data centers are built, their total electricity usage at full capacity would account for 13.2% of the entire state of Indiana’s total 2024 electricity use (an estimated 13,140,000 mWh for the data centers vs 99,219,607 mWh of state electricity use per a 2024 EIA report.)
At an EDC Access meeting on Aug. 21 at the Owen County Methodist Church’s In God’s Arms (IGA) building, State Treasurer Daniel Elliot spoke at length about how much data centers could benefit Indiana residents and how, in his opinion, short-sighted that it is to try to ban them.
“I'll give you a perfect example,” he said to a crowd of community leaders and local government officials. ”Indianapolis said, they were gonna do a data center, and they said, no, we're not gonna do it–too much heat, too many people get mad at us. They made a bad business decision based on politics. Morgan County, where I'm from, they were already in the middle building one. They said, okay. We'll just make this one bigger. So who benefited? Morgan County did.”
Elliot was most likely referring to a proposed Google project in Franklin Township near Indianapolis that Google cancelled due to strong local backlash, and an approved 390 acre Google-backed project near Monrovia in Morgan County.
Keeping up with the neighborhood
According to 2025 reporting from the Morgan County Correspondent, there was strong local opposition to the development due to non-disclosure agreements signed by county officials with Google and the same concerns about utility use and property value decline cited by Owen County residents. Morgan county officials went through with the proposal despite its unpopularity citing the increases in income tax and the deal they made with Google to provide donations to local charities in lieu of higher tax rates. Officials there stated that even if they were voted out of office due to the unpopularity of their plan, they considered the additional income coming into the county to be worth the sacrifice.
2025 Reporting from Fox 59 details a similar story in the rural Franklin Township of Marion County: local officials signing non-disclosure agreements, farmland getting rezoned for data center use, and local residents voicing grievances. If Google hadn’t formally withdrawn their proposal, Franklin township likely would have had their own 460 acre Google data center to contend with.
On Aug. 19, 2026, Marion County banned all new data center construction through Dec. 31, 2027. Marion County data center projects already in progress can still continue, but new construction cannot begin until at least January of 2027.
Meanwhile, back in Owen County
Broach brought example legislation before the commissioners at their Aug. 6th meeting. The draft he presented was based on a Marshall County ordinance that bans all data center development in the county. Since that meeting, he also presented example ordinances to the Gosport Town Council and the Spencer Town Council.
Broach’s proposal is not the only one being considered by the county. The first, a moratorium on data center development based on a similar Putnam County ordinance and the second is the total ban on data center development first presented by Broach.
“I’m not asking [them] for a moratorium, I’m asking them to ban it,” he said. “People are concerned that with a ban it can’t be undone. . . essentially a ban can be overturned at any time. With a moratorium it guarantees it’s going to be undone.”
The process to pass either ordinance requires a legal review from county officials, the ordinance to be passed by the Owen County Plan Commission, and finally a motion to pass the ordinance by the commissioners.
In response to worries about transparency in relation to land development, all three commissioners promised at their Aug. 20th meeting to avoid signing any non-disclosure agreements with any potential future data center developers.
Almost half of Indiana counties currently have ordinances that prevent new data center development but state legislation has the ability to override them.
The 2026 Indiana State Legislative Session included House Bill 1333 that would allow developers to use property zoned as farmland for data center development. If that bill had been passed, data center developers could buy farmland directly from the owner and begin construction, bypassing any rezoning process that has prevented construction in other counties. While most residents are in favor of a county ordinance that would prevent data center construction, a state law like House Bill 1333 or a state law preventing data center bans would supersede it.
“The problem is, if they go down [that road] then we can moratorium and resolution all we want and it won’t matter,” commissioner Norm Warner said.
Alternative ordinances such as water use limits for business use, noise ordinances or electricity use limits were suggested at the meeting as ways that Owen County could be made inhospitable to data center development without creating a ban that would be overturned at the state level.
Still, most concerned residents want to see official county action taken to stop data centers now.
Judy Morris plans to continue her pleas to the commissioners to keep data centers out of Owen County.
“[The benefits of data centers] all seem great until you've got no more clean water to drink,” Morris said. “I’m hoping that more people will get involved and that I won't be up there by myself.”
Broach feels similarly and thinks the aggressive pace of datacenter buildout is excessive.
“I think that the destruction outweighs the benefit heavily,” he said. “At the very least I think we should slow down and think [about] what we are doing.”
