A lawsuit claims the rezoning of agricultural land for a Joliet data center is unconstitutional and the city violated state laws during the approval process.

The lawsuit against the $20 billion, 795-acre Joliet Technology Center project was filed May 18 at the Will County Courthouse by attorneys for Joliet Residents For Responsible Growth.

The members of the group who are plaintiffs in the lawsuit include Craig Doorneweerd; his wife, Rhonda Doorneweerd; and Pedro Garcia.

The lawsuit listed addresses that showed all three live in unincorporated Elwood in Jackson Township and would reside close to the data center campus.

The group, which is awaiting state approval to become a nonprofit corporation, includes residents from Joliet and other areas affected by the data center, according to the lawsuit.

On March 19, the Joliet City Council approved an annexation agreement for the data center in a 8-1 vote.

The data center is designed for four sub-campuses containing six buildings. The completion of the first sub-campus is slated for 2028.

The defendants in the lawsuit include the city and three companies connected to the project: Powerhouse Hillwood Holding, HW Technology Park Development and American Real Estate Partners.

Shaw Local contacted the city, Hillwood and PowerHouse Data Centers on Sunday for comment on the lawsuit.

Lawsuit’s key claims

The lawsuit alleges the following violations:

• The Feb. 18 public notice of the Joliet Plan Commission special meeting on the project failed to comply with state law by not publicly revealing the proposal involved a “24-building, 6,936,000-square-foot, 1.8-gigawatt data center campus, or any data center development at all.”

• The March 19 City Council meeting failed to comply with the Open Meetings Act because it should have taken place within 24 hours of the March 16 council meeting with no change to the agenda.

• The March 16 council meeting failed to comply with due process by denying “affected residents” the right to cross-examine developers’ witnesses, and the city failed to “maintain a meaningful opportunity for those residents to be heard.”

• The city rezoning the property for the data center from agricultural to light industrial is unconstitutional because it “bears no substantial relation” to public health, safety, morals or welfare.

Because of those alleged violations, the lawsuit is asking a Will County judge to declare the City Council’s approval of the data center project “void and of no legal effect.”

While the Feb. 18 notice in The Herald-News does not mention a data center, it does mention a preliminary planned unit development of a Joliet Technology Center subdivision.

But the lawsuit contends the notice must include the “substance of the proposal” sufficient to “apprise the public of the nature of the agreement to be considered.”

The lawsuit alleges the “procedural integrity” of the city’s consideration of the data center was “impaired” by Joliet Planning Director Jayne Bernhard being the “daughter of a person with a financial stake” in the project.

The lawsuit claims the public has not been provided with a “reliable account” of the extent to which the planning review process was “insulated from the influence of a senior administrative officer with a familial financial interest in the outcome.”

The data center

On Feb. 20, the city launched a web page on the data center that included 12 documents relevant to the application for city approval for the data center along with a statement on the review process.

The website was launched several days after Joliet City Council member Suzanna Ibarra called for more transparency on the project. She was the only council member to vote against the project on March 19.

The Joliet Technology Center would generate $2.1 billion for all taxing bodies, including schools and other units of local government, over 30 years, according to Hillwood.

The project also promises between 7,000 and 10,000 jobs through construction and 700 permanent high-paying jobs when fully operational.

Joliet city staff have said the data center campus would use a “closed-loop system that recycles water and significantly reduces overall water usage.”

Noise from the data center would be “mitigated by the structures themselves, as well as by the landscape berms,” according to city staff.

City staff and the developers said the electricity demand for the data center will be self-contained and should not affect energy customers around the Joliet Technology Center.

Lawsuit on project’s impact

The lawsuit alleges the data center would consume between 100,000 to 150,000 gallons of water per day, drawn from an aquifer that is projected to no longer meet peak demand in 2030.

The city plans to switch to the Lake Michigan water system in 2030.

“[The] costs of constructing the Lake Michigan replacement-supply pipeline have been publicly reported to exceed $1.44 billion and were borne by taxpayers for the purpose of providing residential and commercial water services to existing Joliet residents, not for the purpose of cooling industrial data center equipment,” according to the lawsuit.

According to the lawsuit, the data center’s projected electrical demand of about 1.8 gigawatts is about the equivalent to the “generating capacity of the Hoover Dam” and sufficient to supply residential electrical demand for Chicago.

The lawsuit alleges the data center will impose “noise, traffic, vibration, light and air quality burdens” disproportionately on residents of the city’s District 5.

District 5 covers the south and east sides of the city. Ibarra, the council member for the district, said the district is a “dumping ground for what other districts don’t want.”

The lawsuit also alleges that a traffic study did not analyze the traffic impact of the five-to-seven-year construction window for the project.