Joliet's Data Center In Jeopardy? City Of Joliet, Powerhouse Hillwood Holding Face Lawsuit From 3 People

JOLIET, IL —Last October, Joliet Patch broke the news revealing that the city of Joliet was considering plans to build one of the largest data centers in the Midwest, not far from the NASCAR track. By March, the Joliet City Council, except for councilwoman Suzanna Ibarra, loved the project, and in an 8 to 1 vote, approved plans to bring Joliet its first data center.

This week, though, Joliet Patch has uncovered another development being spearheaded by a handful of people unhappy with the Joliet Technology Center project. They've hired Plainfield attorney Chloe Ann Russell to file a civil lawsuit at the Will County Courthouse in hopes of stopping the Joliet data center construction from ever happening.

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The plaintiffs, known as Joliet Residents for Responsible Growth, are Craig Doorneweerd, Rhonda Doorneweerd and Pedro Garcia.

They are suing the city of Joliet, Powerhouse Hillwood Holding, HW Technology Park Development LLC and American Real Estate Partners.

The lawsuit is around 550 pages.

According to the filing, the plaintiffs seek injunctive relief to void the related-use approvals enacted by the Joliet City Council on March 19. Two ordinances approved the annexation, rezoning and preliminary planned unit development of a 795-acre, 24-building 1.8 gigawatt data center campus to be constructed by PowerHouse Hillwood.

"The challenged approvals are the largest single land use action in the history of the city of Joliet and one of the largest such actions in the history of the state of Illinois. The project, if constructed, would consume electrical power on a scale roughly equal to the generating capacity of the Hoover Dam and would draw substantial volumes of water from sources that the city of Joliet has formally projected to be inadequate to meet existing municipal demand by 2030," the lawsuit asserts.

"Plaintiffs, do not, by this action, ask the court to weigh the policy merits of the project. Plaintiffs ask the court to enforce the procedural protections that the General Assembly and the Illinois Supreme Court have prescribed for actions of this magnitude. Those protections were not afford here," the lawsuit declares.

According to the lawsuit, lawsuit plaintiffs Craig and Rhonda Doorneweerd live at 23909 South Ridge Road in Elwood and both appeared on March 16 at the public hearing held by the Joliet City Council. As for Pedro Garcia, he lives on Schweitzer Road, and his mother appeared at the public hearing to offer her opposition to the data center.

Their lawsuit goes on to explain that the Joliet Residents For Responsible Growth "membership includes residents and property owners whose properties lie within one mile, within two miles, and within three miles of the project. The interests JRRG seeks to protect in this action are germane to the organization's purpose and neither the claims asserted nor the relief requested requires the participation of individual members beyond those named as plaintiffs."

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