St. Joseph County Council gives final approval for $11B Amazon data center

ST. JOSEPH COUNTY, Ind. (WNDU) - Imagine that. This time, Amazon was waiting for a package.

Documents that spell out the financial details and corporate commitments of a deal to put an $11 billion Amazon Web Services data center in St. Joseph County were given final approval on Tuesday evening.

The package was unanimously approved in the morning by the St. Joseph County Board of Commissioners and by members of the St. Joseph County Redevelopment Commission. Hours later, the package got the final stamp of approval from the St. Joseph County Council, voting on four separate bills approving a 10-year tax break for one of the world’s richest corporations.

Each bill passed the county council by a 7-2 vote. The only opposing votes came from Amy Drake and Mark Root.

Drake said she was troubled by giving Amazon, a remarkably prosperous company, a colossal tax break while homeowners in St. Joseph County will get nothing like that on their property tax bill.

But Drake and Root aren’t the only ones who don’t like this deal. Retired economics professor and St. Joseph County resident Steve Francis has been sounding alarms throughout this process.

“I think there’s an imbalance between what Amazon is getting, they’re getting $4.2 billion dollars in a tax break,” Francis said. “The county over those same years will get $2.2 billion, so there’s a real mismatch.”

While the commissioners were accused of “giving away the store,” County Commissioner Carl Baxmeyer pointed out that tax abatement on real property was being granted at 50% for 10 years, at a time when 100% is quite common.

“But let’s remember they’re going to be paying, they’re going to be our biggest taxpayer, reason to assume, and in addition, they’re tax payment each year is going to be in excess of $20 million, and that is roughly a quarter of what our annual, little less, a quarter of our annual budget,” Baxmeyer said.

Meanwhile, St. Joseph County Economic Development Director Bill Schalliol says the tax breaks result in a great big net gain for the county.

“I think the math is very good for the county,” he said. “We did this deal, really tried to look big picture, what’s the best for the taxpayers, what’s the best for the community? We think the numbers really work. To have a company like Amazon Web Service come into the community building a number of buildings, so it’s going to put people to work, building, but also in those buildings themselves. We think this is a great opportunity for the county.”

“We’re really excited about where we are, and again, we just think it’s such a great project it would be hard to say no to,” Baxmeyer said.

While the agreement was needed, it’s not something Amazon Web Services had been sitting around waiting for. The latest pictures from the site show progress being made on the first of some 22 buildings planned for the campus.

“So, four of the buildings should be completed by the end of this year, operational first quarter next year,” Schalliol told WNDU 16 News Now. “And then you’ll just continue to see buildings built over the next 10 to 15 years.”

And while Amazon is promising to hire 400 full time employees here, St. Joseph County may get more job creation than it bargained for.

“Locally, it’s going to be 400 jobs,” Schalliol said. “Commitments in the documents are for 400 jobs, and then, but the state has an agreement with AWS for 1,000 jobs, so we anticipate 400 jobs. 600 additional jobs will be added to that mix over a period of time, so, we’re really looking at a thousand jobs on the site, but likely much more as they continue to build additional buildings.”

Professor Francis, though, maintains that each one of those jobs will cost St. Joseph County $5 million in lost tax revenue.

The data center, which is the largest planned capital investment in Indiana state history, will have servers, data storage drives, and networking equipment. There will also be an artificial intelligence component.