LEBANON, Ind. — Bright lights glare along the edge of the cornfields like something from a Steven Spielberg movie. Earth movers haul gravel across a sprawling construction site. Dust billows into the night.
Day by day and night by night on the outskirts of Lebanon, Meta is building a new outpost in its artificial intelligence empire – and the neighbors aren’t happy. They say the construction disrupts their sleep with relentless lights, emits noise that makes their homes vibrate and clogs the roads with truck traffic.
“I can’t sleep at night. Our house is constantly lit up from the lights,” said Kimberly Hobson-Moore, whose home is about a half mile west of the construction zone. “We can’t sleep with our windows open anymore because of the noise and the dust that comes from the site.”
Construction on the Meta campus – a complex of 13 buildings, including 10 data centers – began in October. Since then, crews have worked around the clock to hit Meta’s target of having the first buildings on the site operational by 2027.
The Meta campus sits in the Limitless Exploration/Advanced Pace (LEAP) Research and Innovation District, a 5,800-acreexpanse that the Indiana Economic Development Corporation bought for more than $427 million. Where corn, soybeans and a few clapboard farmhouses once stood, state officials promise to build a hub for advanced manufacturing in fields like aerospace, electric vehicles, semiconductors, and pharmaceuticals.
So far, the LEAP district has two tenants: pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly and Meta.
Some Lebanon officials see the arrangement as a windfall. Meta has committed to making grants to local schools and nonprofits, conducting park cleanups and ecological revitalization projects and investing $120 million in Lebanon’s water infrastructure, roads, and transmission lines. The data center will benefit from massive multiyear sales and property tax breaks, but Meta will provide Lebanon with payments in lieu of taxes.
Those payments, which will reach $7.5 million per year when the project is complete, could add up to 30% of the city’s annual budget, says Lebanon Mayor Matt Gentry. He plans to pass on the benefits to Lebanon homeowners as property tax rebates.
In an IndyStar op-ed this spring, Gentry wrote that he views the inconveniences of construction as a small price to pay for the economic boost.
“Certainly the city wants to mediate and try to minimize the impact to neighbors, but also understand that these are pretty massive investments that will benefit the residents of Lebanon,” Gentry said in an interview.
But the costs are high for the families living nearby. Tensions boiled over at the Lebanon city council’s June 8 meeting, where more than a dozen people spoke against annexing yet another plot of land for the LEAP district.
“We are living in a nightmare right now, and we’ll be living in a nightmare until Meta is done,” Leslie Hine, who lives one cornfield west of the Meta site, told the councilors.
“None of us wanted this. None of us like this,” her husband, Bret Hine, added. “We did not ask for Meta or industrial data centers in our backyards.”
The construction noise is “constant,” said Christy Neff, who lives next door to the Hines. “You just feel the vibration, day and night, all the time.”
Sometimes the machines on the Meta site sound like helicopter blades chopping, neighbors say. Construction on State Road 32 nearby and clangs from the concrete plant supplying the roadwork both add to the din.
City of Lebanon officials say there isn’t much they can do. When Lebanon annexed land for the LEAP district, the city passed a Planned Unit Development ordinance to regulate it, requiring landscaped buffers and setting limits on exterior lighting. However, the ordinance only governs finished buildings, not construction.
Lebanon does have a noise ordinance restricting construction between 10 p.m. and 5 a.m., but the measure applies only to sites within 500 feet of residential zones. The unincorporated county land where the Hines, the Neffs, the Moores and their neighbors live is zoned agricultural, leaving the residents with little recourse.
Meta says it’s minimizing overall construction time and keeping road traffic to a minimum during daylight hours by hiring crews to work 24/7. But the night work means that Meta keeps the site constantly illuminated to abide by Occupational Safety and Health Administration regulations.
Bret and Leslie Hine first emailed city officials to complain about the bright lights in December. So did Bret’s parents, Jackie and Dan Hine, who live in the home closest to the construction site, about 300 feet away.
The city took photographs to document lighting code violations and asked project representatives to “provide us with a plan to quickly bring the site into compliance,” Lebanon Planning Director Ben Bontrager told Jackie Hine in a Dec. 22 email.
According to a Meta spokesperson, the company bought shorter light fixtures and aimed more of them downward and inward to reduce spillover onto surrounding properties. Bontrager said that Meta has also invested in remote-controlled lights that can be more easily turned off when work is not taking place.
Neff and Leslie Hine agreed the lighting became less intrusive after Meta made the changes and construction on the site moved east, away from their homes. In late May, workers installed 20-foot-tall panels to shield some nearby houses from the lights. Moore had shorter, eight-foot panels installed by Meta at the edge of her yard, and Hine requested a set of panels on June 11.
Still, these panels only create narrow gaps in the brightness, and the lights are strong enough to shine through trees and cast shadows inside Leslie Hine’s house at night. In December she bought new curtains and blinds to block out the glare.
Neighbors said their main point of contact has been a shift supervisorfrom Mortenson, the contractor leading the current phase of construction, who has helped document lighting issues on their property and reorient bothersome lights. In late March, several received handwritten postcards from Kenton Wooden, a community development regional manager and Meta’s liaison to people living near its data centers in Indiana.
“Our team is committed to being a good and responsive neighbor,” the postcards read.
But it can be difficult to coexist with construction next door. The week the postcard arrived, subcontractors for Mortenson began draining water from retention ponds on the Meta site, flooding a field where Dan and Jackie Hine grow soybeans. On March 29, the Hines filed a police report, and a Lebanon Police Department sergeant asked a worker on the site to turn off the pump.
This summer, Lebanon officials are examining how other cities regulate noise and lighting for major projects. That research is just starting, but it could lead to changes to city code, Bontrager said.
Busy roads cause inconvenience, anxiety
Traffic, particularly the near-constant flow of dump trucks, has been another frustration for western Boone County residents since construction began last year.
Safety concerns have led the Lebanon Police Department to spend overtime funds to increase police presence to catch drivers speeding on State Road 32, said Major Rich Mount, who oversees road operations. Lebanon police have received “numerous complaints” about reckless drivers and dump trucks with leaky loads, Mount wrote in an email.
James Richie Keith, who lives just southwest of the construction site, struggles to drive his daughter to cosmetology school in Lebanon because the exit onto S.R. 32 is often blocked by passing dump trucks, he said at the June 8 city council meeting.
Keith and his neighbors are haunted by the death of Jaheim Miller, a 22-year-old Mortenson subcontractor whose dump truck collided head-on with a semi on S.R. 32 in May. A preliminary investigation found that the crash was caused by a car turning onto S.R. 32.
Mortenson is installing a temporary traffic signal at the intersection where Miller was killed, a Meta spokesperson said in an email. The signal will be operational before the end of July.
Traffic plans posted to the project website indicate that construction vehicles should access the site from State Road 52 via a short stretch of county roads. But Leslie Hine said she frequently sees dump trucks traveling along the road in front of her house, which is not an approved access route.
Meta has agreed to spend $45 million on public roads around Lebanon — including preparing the roads for use by contractors’ vehicles, and refurbishing them after the heavy work is done.
Some of the impacts may ease within the next six months. A Meta spokesperson wrote that the company’s contractors expect to finish most of the earth-moving and utility installation work at the site by the end of the year. But construction won’t start on the buildings on the southern half of the Meta site until a section of S.R. 32 is rerouted farther south, a project that the Indiana Department of Transportation doesn’t plan to finish until next June.
For now, the project’s neighbors look for any relief they can get and have developed a new appreciation for storms, when work at the site ceases.
“A lot of us are God-fearing people, and we do pray for bad weather,” Bret Hine told the city council at the June 8 meeting. “Because bad weather is the only thing that will shut the lights off in that place.”
Tilly Robinson is a Pulliam fellow for the Indianapolis Star. She can be reached at tilly.robinson@indystar.com.
This article originally appeared on Indianapolis Star: Neighbors call construction on Meta Lebanon data center a ‘nightmare’
Reporting by Tilly Robinson, Indianapolis Star / Indianapolis Star
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By Tilly Robinson, Indianapolis Star | USA TODAY Network
