Public hearing for Yorkville’s largest proposed data center is this week

The first public hearing for the more than 1,000-acre Project Cardinal will be at the June 10 Yorkville City Council meeting at City Hall. The second and final public hearing, for the project’s rezoning, has been changed to July 9 at City Hall.

The developers, Pioneer Development, LLC, will be at both hearings.

With the first public hearing for the Project Cardinal data center right around the corner, just how massive is Yorkville’s largest ever manufacturing undertaking?

At 1,037 acres, Project Cardinal is the largest proposed data center. The city officials have slated 3,000 acres for its data center alley.

Past public hearings for data center campuses located near residential areas turned heated when residents said they would rather move away from Yorkville than live next to a manufacturing wasteland.

The first public hearing is specifically for the annexation requests for seven properties, totaling 305 acres, for Project Cardinal. The unincorporated areas are west of the remaining parcels which are already within city limits.

The site, which must be rezoned to manufacturing before construction, is located northwest of Route 47 and Galena Road, south of Baseline Road, and east of Ashe Road.

The project is part of the larger “Eldamain Road data center corridor” envisioned by the city.

The proposed campus contains 14 two-story data center warehouses, totaling more than 17 million square feet. It also includes two electrical substations and 3,750 total parking spaces. The phased construction will take up to a decade to fully complete.

With the site’s close proximity to residential areas, the city requested the developers meet with local homeowners. Residents of the Bristol Bay Subdivision, Equestrian Estates at Legacy Farms, and homeowners along Baseline Road, Eldamain Road, and Galena Road were contacted by the developers, according to city documents.

During the end of May, the developers met with the unincorporated property owners to the project’s west and their attorney.

In early June, the developers also held a Zoom meeting with the Bristol Bay Homeowners Association.

The developers are discussing the feedback from the residents during the June 10 public hearing.

The city is requesting that none of the campus’ buildings be within 500-feet of the nearest residential or commercial structure. The developers must also install an eight-foot-tall berm along the perimeters, capping off the 100-foot landscape buffer to the site’s four neighboring roadways.

As part of the developer’s agreement with the city, the developers are paying for a sound pollution mitigation study to measure the potential impact on the surrounding area. The developers are required to create a mitigation plan to ensure that “operational noise does not exceed the city’s current noise ordinance regulations,” according to city documents.

The city projects more than 100 data center warehouses will be built over the next few decades.