“Simply put, the only thing county and state governments here in Indiana see is dollar signs and they could care less about their constituents.”
That’s exactly what I’ve seen in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho and our small town on the San Francisco Peninsula. The developers get their proposals approved no matter what.
Same thing happened where I live. Over 50 of. us showed up at the meeting to ask questions about the data center, all of our concerns were brushed aside. In fact, we weren't even allowed to talk, but to write out a one sentence question on a card for them to answer, and then didn't even get to all the cards. Here's the weird part — that meeting took place sometime around 2015-2016 and they told us they would break ground in late 2017. Then Donald Trump unexpectedly won the election. They never started construction throughout the entire first Trump administration. They finally broke ground in 2021, after the election had been stolen. So everyone in my neighborhood was going crazy working from home during the pandemic with the insane construction going on all around us.
Also, I noted they had huge black coach buses going back and forth between the center and the airport. I would see them every time I drove out of our place and down the road. After James O'Keeffe's expose on the usage of a data center in Arizona to house illegal immigrants before getting them to the airport, I am convinced that is exactly what was happening at the data center in my neighborhood.