Rochelle residents nearly filled City Hall council chambers Tuesday, Nov. 18, to learn more about a 50-megawatt, 300,000-square-foot data center potentially locating in Rochelle.

Community members heard presentations from city officials and the data center developer, LFF Industrial, which has been working on a potential project with the city. Public comments and a question-and-answer segment were part of the meeting.

The city has seen recent social media reaction to news of it talking with a developer about a new data center. A petition titled “Reject plans for a data center in Rochelle, Illinois” had 265 signatures as of Tuesday, Nov. 18. The City of Rochelle recently created a “Data Center Q&A” page on its website in an effort to address residents’ concerns.

During his presentation portion, Rochelle City Manager Jeff Fiegenschuh said the developer has owned the potential site near Steward Road since 2013, contacted the city in 2024 and has been working with it on the project since.

Fiegenschuh said the city is soliciting public feedback on the project this month and next steps would be taken in December, including the city council voting on a development agreement for the data center.

The city owns Rochelle Municipal Utilities, which would provide power, water and storm water services to a potential data center.

Fiegenschuh said a development agreement would stipulate and enforce limits on utility use by the data center, along with its obligations to pay for any improvements needed and other items such as noise pollution. The city would not provide any incentive funds to the developer. The data center would be eligible for the state’s 50% property tax abatement for six years, as other businesses located within the Lee-Ogle Enterprise Zone are.

Rochelle is already home to two data centers, owned by Allstate and Northern Trust. Those data centers have been in Rochelle for 15 years and use a combined seven megawatts of electricity. DeKalb is home to a Meta (Facebook) data center, which is about six times the size of the proposed project in Rochelle.

RMU Superintendent of Electric Operations Blake Toliver presented on the power use of the proposed data center. The data center would be RMU’s largest customer. After the development, the city would have 68 megawatts of power available for other development in the community.

“The reason we decided to cap this potential project at 50 megawatts is to not stifle the growth of any of our other businesses in the event they want to expand,” Toliver said. This data center would be significantly large as a new customer, but we do have the capacity to handle it."

The potential data center customer would pay an 11% power distribution surcharge and standard demand charges, and may elect to manage their own capacity and transmission costs. RMU’s power rates would not increase due to a potential data center due to long-term power purchase contracts and behind-the-meter generation it has in place.

A data center developer would be required to post a surety or bond to cover any purchased power or infrastructure obligations if it ceased operations or relocated. If the data center needed more power than expected in the future, it would have to pursue a ComEd reconfiguration of transmission lines.

RMU Superintendent of Water/Water Reclamation Adam Lanning said Nov. 18 that the data center would be capped at 100,000 gallons of water use per day, but its actual use would be around 10,000 gallons per day or less. The RMU water system sees 4-5 million gallons of water used per day, with its largest current customer using 1 million gallons per day.

“For wastewater, we establish a local discharge limit for all industries to prevent any upsets at the wastewater treatment plant,” Lanning said. “We would regularly inspect this industry as we do all others looking for any chemicals and they would provide a list of any chemicals on site and how they store them. If we didn’t approve of them, they would not be allowed to have them on site or discharge them into our system.”

Fiegenschuh said the data center would bring 25-35 permanent jobs with an average salary of $85,000. The project would also bring 500-800 temporary construction jobs. The developer would pay the city $125,000 in permit fees for its build, and would pay $450,000 per year in utility tax.

Based on most recent numbers, following the construction of the data center, if it was hypothetically valued at $250 million, Rochelle residents would see a decrease in their overall property tax rate from 8.55 percent to 7.52 percent and a home valued at $100,000 would see a bill decrease of $340.33.

“One of the reasons we want to see more commercial and industrial growth in this community is we want more value to tax from, so we’re not as reliant on property taxes of homes,” Fiegenschuh said.

Zach La Motta presented at the meeting representing the data center developer, LFF Industrial. The property under consideration is 124 acres and is currently farmland. The data center would use a footprint of 5-10 acres south of Interstate 88 up against train tracks and away from residential property.

Next steps would include a development agreement, a bond posted by the developer, securing of power, finding an end user for the data center, and construction. The final design of the data center would be subject to the end user, but would be subject to a development agreement with the city.

“We really do view the city as an active participant and partner in this project every step of the way,” La Motta said. “We feel we’ve eliminated the downside for the city and residents of this community and we look forward to bringing this development to Rochelle.”

During the question-and-answer portion of the meeting, Rochelle resident Megan Sneyd asked how power would be prioritized by RMU for the data center in the event of a large outage.

“RMU has an outage restoration plan that prioritizes all public services before any of our industrial customers,” Toliver said. “In the event of a large-scale outage here, the data center would be on its own. That’s how we operate here. We prioritize residents and our public services first.”

Rochelle resident Dawn Nance spoke during the public comment portion of the meeting.

“Even though we can support this, should we?” Nance said. “This industry is all new. Does our small community want to be a guinea pig? Are we sure we’re asking the right questions?”

To close the meeting, Fiegenschuh thanked community members for attending and making comments and encouraged residents to reach out to the city with questions regarding the potential data center.

“We appreciate everyone’s comments and concerns,” Fiegenschuh said. “Myself and the mayor and city council and much of our staff live here. We want to make sure we’re getting the best development for the community. I want to see us generate more revenue for the city so we can reduce taxes overall for our residents.”