Mount Prospect hires outside firm to handle data center permitting

Dealing with the departure of the village’s longtime building inspector, and sagging under the weight of reams of permit paperwork related to the CloudHQ data center campus, Mount Prospect is finding relief from an outside firm.

The village has hired HR Green, Inc., headquartered in Iowa with a regional office in McHenry, at a maximum of $22,500 for three CloudHQ permit reviews, with the cost passed on to the developer. Village Community Development Director Jason Shallcross said Cloud HQ has been submitting permits for the last five or six months.

Part of the need was caused when Bill Schroeder left his post as building and inspection services director after 20 years.

But officials also cited the volume of the data center’s permit submission, which includes roughly 3,700 sheets of construction drawings and more than 1,500 pages of structural calculations.

“The scope of these permits have more than 3,000 pages of individual plan sheets and almost 2,000 pages of technical documents that go along with them,” Shallcross told the village board last week. “To ensure that the village is fully protected, we need to have the right people reviewing those plan sets and inspecting those plans.”

The company, he said, has experience performing data center reviews in Wood Dale and Grayslake.

Village officials said in-house staff will continue handling routine residential and commercial permits.

Trustee Terri Gens praised the hire at last week’s meeting.

“With this data center, we don’t want to cut corners,” she said. “We want to make sure that they are doing everything correctly, so we don’t have any problems.”

Meanwhile, the $2.5 billion development on the former United Airlines site at the intersection of Algonquin Road, Linneman Road and Dempster Street remains under construction, with cranes jutting out of the sprawling fenced-in 50-acre site.

The original plan was first approved in 2021 and revised in 2025. It has been revised from three two-story buildings to two three-story structures, with the plan also calling for a second electrical substation.