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Several Hobart city residents have sued the city’s plan commission and city council over the rezoning of residential areas to accommodate a new proposed Amazon data center.
The complaint was filed in the Lake Superior Court on Dec. 8.
It alleged that city officials violated the plaintiffs’ (four Hobart residents) due process rights when they approved rezoning hundreds of acres of land over the past few years.
According to the complaint, the plaintiffs are now asking the court to vacate the city officials’ actions.
David Dearing, an Indianapolis environmental and land use attorney representing the plaintiffs, did not immediately respond to comment.
An official with the Hobart Plan Commission told The Indiana Lawyer the commission has no comment on the pending litigation.
According to court documents obtained by an Indiana Supreme Court official, Hobart first approved rezoning 155 acres of residential area in Ross Township in 2022 before approving two more rezoning permits in the area this year.
In total, the city approved rezoning about 700 acres of R-3 residential land into M-1 light industrial property.
According to the plan commission official, property near 61st and Colorado streets was rezoned specifically for a new data center.
Last month, Hobart announced it had reached an agreement with Amazon to develop a next-generation data center in the city.
Inside INdiana Business reported that Mayor Josh Huddleston said the project would provide tens of millions of dollars of revenue for the city and would create thousands of construction jobs for local workers and “close to a thousand” long-term jobs.
“We sought to find good, strong development to kind of offset those losses, so that we didn’t have to turn to our residents and put everything back on the backs of our residents,” Huddlestun said in November. “And as luck would have it, we were able to engage with a good partner like Amazon.”
The plan commission official said on Tuesday that construction has not begun on the data center and that a full site plan has not yet been approved by the city.
At several hearings for some of the proposed ordinances in 2022 and earlier this year, an “overwhelming number of residents present voiced significant opposition to the rezoning,” the complaint stated.
However, the plan commission still voted to send the proposed rezoning ordinances to the city council for final approval.
At the council’s various hearings on the individual rezoning matters, demonstrators were present, but according to the complaint, the council did not allow them to speak until after it had voted to approve rezoning.
Now, the plaintiffs argue that the construction of the data center on the rezoned property will damage their property values and their use and enjoyment of their properties.
The case is Angelita Soriano, Albina Venegas-Roman, Barbara Koteles, and Joseph Conn v. City of Hobart Plan Commission and Common Council of the City of Hobart, Indiana. (45D11-2512-MI-000644)
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