The Pelko family would like to sell their farm, but the government just won’t let them. (Photo provided)
Fishers Kiwanis landowners & local water both tied to Google data center debate
By STU CLAMPITT
news@readthereporter.com
Data centers are coming to Indiana, and while they are not being built in Hamilton County, two of them will have impacts here. The Meta data center coming to Lebanon is a near-certainty, while a Google data center in Marion County is still being debated. The Hamilton County impact from both the Meta and Google date centers can at least be quantified in gallons of water. All the water in both Geist and Morse Reservoirs belongs to Citizens Energy Group, which will supply water to both data centers.
Information directly from Citizens on their water utilities and the LEAP district, which may require up to 25 million gallons of water per day, is available at this link.
While there has been much talk and reporting on the negative aspects of the Google data center, the side this newspaper has not seen explored is that of the current landowners. This week, both The Reporter and our newsgathering partners at WISH-TV spoke with Cathy and Kevin Pelko, who own approximately 170 acres of what could become Google data center land to get their side of the story.
Cathy and Kevin Pelko own one of the last remaining farms inside Marion County. As they continue to age, they look for good potential stewards for the land that has been in the Pelko family for generations. Government officials have repeatedly denied them the option to sell their land to other developers, and farmers are not interested in buying land in their area.
“One of the things about Marion County is they’re just really not that farm friendly anymore,” Cathy said. “Most of the farms are gone that were actually in Marion County. That’s been true for a while.”
Unable to sell to anyone else
Farmland is more expensive than ever. A 40-acre plot of farmland near East Troy Avenue and Davis Road, near the Pelko home, was up for sale in recent years and received zero bids.
“That went up for sale a few years ago,” Cathy said. “We didn’t own that at that time. It went up for sale and nobody called about it. Nobody even looked at it – even other farmers. It was 40 acres and they didn’t buy it, so we bought it. I don’t know why another farmer didn’t try to buy it, but Kevin’s the only one that even called.
Kevin said his farm and others around him are too expensive for other farmers to buy.
The Pelko land is near I-74 and I-465, making it a good location for development, driving the value up. The Pelkos cannot sell their land to another farmer and have thus far been denied the option to sell their land to any non-farmer.
“Kevin gets approached constantly for these high-density [housing developments] when builders that want to come in and buy it for that,” Cathy said. “Franklin Township has rejected that. They’ve rejected warehousing in the area. They’ve rejected everything, and you ask them. ‘Well what do you want?’ They can’t tell you.”
One of the appeals of the data center for the Pelkos is, as they told The Reporter, that they want the land to go to someone who will use it to benefit the community.
“Franklin Township needs a business tax base in the worst way,” Kevin said. “They don’t really need more housing. They need a business tax base.”
No one has spoken to the landowners
“Not a single person has spoken to us,” Cathy said. “And the councilman even – I sent him an email because I was concerned that he hadn’t even bothered. He’d been giving all this negative information and a lot of it was misinformation and I was concerned about it. So I wrote him and I said, ‘You haven’t even bothered to come out to talk to any landowner. You haven’t bothered to ask our opinions of why we are doing what we’re doing or any reason for this.’ His response to me was, ‘I’d be happy to come out and talk to you, but I’ve already made up my mind.’”
The Pelkos said that left them stunned.
“How do you make up your mind without even speaking to the people who’ve grown up here, who were born and raised here?”
After other developments have been denied in their area, in this instance, the Metropolitan Development Commission voted in favor of the data center by an eight-to-one margin.
Franklin Township Community School Corporation also supports the development. The district had not supported it as recently as last month, but voted to approve it on Sept. 16.
Now, the future of this sale rests in the hands of the Indianapolis City-County Council, which will vote on rezoning the land on Monday, Sept. 22. That rezoning is necessary for the sale to move forward.
Fishers Kiwanis connection
Cathey is a member of the Fishers Kiwanis and told The Reporter that if the Google sale is approved, she would like to make a donation to at least one of the annual projects that has touched her heart.
“I’ve been with them for a little over the past year and they do so much, especially there in Fishers,” Cathy said. “A friend of mine was asking me if I would come help with some projects because they didn’t have that many members at the time. We’ve done Holiday Hopes where they provided Christmas shopping for kids in the area. We volunteer for some other things, too.”
The Fishers Kiwanis chapter is much larger than it was when she started helping them, but she still wants to give back.
“A while back when this came up – it was before really any of this got hot and heavy – I talked to Lisa [Burd, from Fishers Kiwanis] and I said, ‘I don’t know what’s going to happen with this, but I know that you guys need money for Holiday Hopes.’ I said if this goes through, I want to talk to my husband because we had mentioned each year that we would like to do some type of charity donation.”
Who gets to choose?
In the end, the Pelkos are not going to be able to farm forever. Without this option, they do not know how long it might be before they get another offer to buy their land for a project that they themselves would approve of, much less the various government entities that have final approval on anything other than a straight farmland transfer.
“I understand that people will have concerns when you sell to a business or even housing, but ultimately it is our farm,” Cathy said. “I know that things affect other people, but we’ve been trying to address all of that and trying to make good decisions for the people that are left here.”
