From Chris Cobb, from the Open Space and Agricultural Alliance:
I am writing with important news about stopping the IEC. After 21 months of delay, the Economic Development Division has finally released the “Indiana Enterprise Center Area Master Plan” for public comment. It’s been 21 months since the general public last had a chance to weigh in on the IEC, so now we need to make our voices heard!! We can get this plan sent back to the drawing board, if we clearly demand responsible community development in St. Joseph County that protects farms, rural communities, and open space!
This e-mail contains detailed information about what’s in the plan and how to submit comments, but there are also several important events next week where we need to turn out strongly, so I am going to give the information about those events first. Then the rest of the e-mail will address the plan.
Key Turnout Event!
Tuesday, March 10: 6:00 p.m. County Council meeting. Members of the New Carlisle Town Council will be bringing their resolution for a moratorium on IEC development to the County Council to urge the County Council to act on their resolution. We need to turn out to this meeting to show our support for the resolution and for the Town Council for listening to their constituents and taking a stand against the IEC. OSAA will also be urging the County Council to take action on our resolutions that the Council to take oversight of Redevelopment Commission spending and protect farmland by initiating a new Comprehensive Land Use planning process. If you can be there Tuesday night, please come! This is a great opportunity to make sure the Council knows that we expect them to take action!
Turnout Event
Tuesday, March 10, 9:00 a.m. Redevelopment Commission meeting. The first check point for the IEC management plan will be a vote by the Redevelopment Commission. They won’t be voting until after the public comment period on the plan ends on April 10, but OSAA will begin reaching out to the Redevelopment Commission about the problems with the IEC plan at their meeting next week. If you don’t have work obligations, please consider joining/supporting other OSAA members in addressing the Commission. Full disclosure: this is likely to be a long meeting—it is listed as 9 a.m. – noon—and we may not get to speak until the end, so this may be an all-morning commitment.
Commissioner Candidate Debate
Monday, March 9, 6:00-7:30 p.m. Indiana University South Bend, 1001 Wiekamp Hall. Sponsored by the League of Women Voters, this debate will feature candidates running for the District 2 Board of Commissioners seat. This is an opportunity to hear the positions of candidates Jordon Budreau (R), Oliver Davis (D), Derek Dieter (R) on the IEC and other county issues. (As of this writing, Dave Thomas (D), who is running for reelection, is not scheduled to be present.) By attending the debate, we show the candidates we are paying attention to what they say. OSAA is a bi-partisan organization, so we don’t endorse candidates, but we will publicize the candidates’ statements (and, where applicable, their records) on development issues.
Responding to the “Indiana Enterprise Center Master Plan”
You can find the plan on the St. Joseph County Website at https://www.sjcindiana.com/1798/IEC-Area-Management-Plan-Draft
On that page, you can find links to each of the plan’s chapters, and there are links to forms that you can use to submit comments on every chapter. Please submit comments! The more comments they receive, the harder it will be for them to hide the fact that people don’t want an industrial megaplex. Because Bill Schalliol and the consultant team will do everything they can to spin the result of the comments to make them look better than they are, we recommend the following strategies to keep them honest:
1) Save your comments in a file of your own and pass them on to County elected officials. The comments are being handled by consultants—The Antero Group, to be precise—and the current plan appears to be for them to “collate” the comments, so if a lot of people make similar comments, they may just record them as a single comment. We’re going to be pushing for full transparency – every comment received should be made public – but until we get a commitment to full transparency, we recommend that you e-mail copies of your comments to the Board of Commissioners (sjccom@sjcindiana.com) and the County Council (cocouncil@sjcindiana.com). That will ensure that all the comments are in the public record.
2) Take control of the conversation. The comment form on each chapter includes 3-4 questions. The last question in each set is an open response, but the earlier questions all ask for very specific types of information that the IEC consultants are looking for. We recommend that you use the open response question to give your real responses, in your own words, rather than letting them control the conversation with narrow questions.
3) Don’t limit your comments to fit in the small boxes. Although the comment form only shows a small space, there is actually plenty of room for as long a comment as you would like – you just can’t see it all in the window. You can enlarge the window by pulling on the triangular lines in the lower right corner of the box.
4) Don’t get overwhelmed by the size of the document: keep your comments focused on the crucial issues of the size and location of the IEC. Read as much of the document as you like—I’ve read the whole thing twice—but realize that most of what’s there is just PR: it’s all is designed to try to make the same big, bad plan Bill Schalliol has been pushing all along look new and better. You can find everything you need to know on page 7, where the plan states: “At 7,200 acres, the IEC is the ninth largest industrial megasite in the US.” The approved Comprehensive County land use plan limits industrial development in the New Carlisle area to 2,000 acres, and there’s already 2,000 acres of industrial development there. The county should be putting industrial development where it will actually benefit the community: on reclaimed brownfields in South Bend that will bring jobs where they are needed! That’s the bottom line. Everything else in the plan is just distraction to get us arguing about details instead of pointing out the fundamental problem with the IEC plan.
If we keep our focus on the real issue here and state our concerns plainly and strongly, they won’t be able to hide from our comments, and the real consequences of the IEC will be visible for everyone to see! Let’s seize the opportunity to speak out and get our county leaders to change course by rejecting the IEC!
Thank you for all you do!
Chris Cobb
P.S. More Details about What’s in the Plan
If you’d like to know more about the plan without reading through all of it yourself, here’s a more detailed summary of the problems with it.
1) The proposed plan for the IEC would promote damaging development.
• The IEC plan would put development in the wrong place. St. Joseph County does need development, but the County should be working to bring development where it would be beneficial. The west side of South Bend, where there are brown fields that could be reclaimed productively for industry and commerce and where more and better employment opportunities are needed, should be the focus for redevelopment planning, not Olive Township, where there is already a large amount of industry in proportion to the population.
• Because the proposed development is being directed to the wrong place, it threatens thousands of acres of farmland and established rural and small-town communities. Although they claim to be limiting the area to be developed only to the “core development area,” that is still a huge area. The plan itself states: “At 7,200-acres, the IEC is the ninth largest industrial megasite in the US” (p. 7). A site that size would overwhelm New Carlisle and the rural neighborhoods of Olive Township, no matter what kind of industry or other businesses occupy it. This is sprawl of the most damaging kind.
• The excessive size the proposed development is obvious. It clearly violates the County’s approved 2002 Comprehensive Land Use Plan, which calls for a maximum of 2000 acres of industrial development in this part of St. Joseph County. There are already about 2000 acres of industrial development. Decisions about the location and size of development projects should be made through a formal, transparent, and inclusive process to update the Comprehensive Land Use Plan. The “IEC Area Management Plan” has not been developed in accordance with best practices for community land use planning, so it cannot substitute for a comprehensive plan.
• The plans for large-scale logistics development would greatly increase in truck and train traffic, including an eventual toll road interchange (p. 84), but no assessments of traffic impacts are included in the plan. It talks about road “improvements” but not about traffic levels.
2) The plan gives no attention to the needs or interests of the residents of the core development area, who are mentioned in the plan only in passing, when it is noted that 5% of the land in the core development area is currently dedicated to residential use. If the needs of residents had been seriously considered, the plan would look very different.
3) The plan significantly overstates the public’s engagement with the planning process.
4) The plan includes very little factual information of any kind. Frequently, readers interested in facts are referred to the appendices of the document, but these appendices have not been provided with the document.
5) The plan makes absolutely no commitments that set limits on the scope or nature of the development to be pursued. With no commitments in the plan, the plan has nothing in it that the public should trust.