Lisle board mulls zoning revision amid concerns over data centers

Lisle officials are poised to add another hurdle for data center developers to clear if they want to build one on an industrially zoned property.

Earlier this year, a developer pulled the plug on a controversial proposal to put a two-story data center on one such property: the site of the former Lockformer Co. plant along Ogden Avenue.

A proposed text amendment to village code would eliminate new data centers as a permitted use in Lisle’s industrial zoning district. The village board is scheduled to vote on it Monday night.

“I'm not against data centers, but right now, I agree that it's not something that we should be looking to attract at the moment, until we know more, and until we feel like we could do it in a way that would be safe for all residents as well,” Lisle Mayor Mary Jo Mullen said last month when the board discussed data center zoning regulations.

Data center proposals have been the source of public outcry across the suburbs.

In neighboring Naperville, city council members in January rejected a data center plan after opponents raised concerns over power consumption, noise, emissions from diesel generators and the proximity to homes.

Cloud Centers proposed redeveloping the Lisle property into a roughly 256,000-square-foot facility, but the plan met with major opposition. Across the street, north of Ogden, is a subdivision of homes.

“I walked into this five years ago now, thinking that data centers were going to be a viable option in Lisle, having seen success in some of the northwestern suburbs, where there's a lot in Elk Grove, Itasca area, and they continue to talk about what successes they feel like they've had in those areas,” Mullen said.

“One of the things that's very different from Lisle to Elk Grove is that Elk Grove has a very specific, large industrial park that is nowhere near anyone's house, so it's a very different setting.”

Based on resident feedback over the formerly proposed data center at 711 Ogden Ave., village staff recommended to the board that village code be amended to eliminate data centers as a permitted use in the I-1 zoning district.

“Limiting data centers in this district helps preserve valuable industrial land for uses that may better support local employment, infrastructure balance, and overall quality of life for residents,” one wrote in an email last week to Development Services Director Mike Smetana.

If approved, a developer could still seek a text amendment in an effort to revise village code for a specific development proposal, Smetana said at a board committee of the whole meeting in April.

There are “limited industrially zoned properties in the village of Lisle,” he said.

Those include the former Lockformer property, College West Business Park and the Western and Indiana Avenue industrial parks, which are north and south of Ogden.

Should Illinois adopt legislation regarding “data center siting” in the future, the village board retains the right to amend its code for consistency with state law, Smetana said.

Data centers are “not going to go away. So, I think it's OK to take a step back with the knowledge that we'll move forward at some point when it's appropriate,” Trustee Thomas Duffy said.

Lockformer Co. previously had a plant on the property. In the 1990s, it was determined that on-site TCE — short for trichloroethylene — contamination had occurred, according to a village memo. Illinois Environmental Protection Agency “well sampling determined that the TCE plume expanded beyond” the property's boundary and had contaminated private wells.

The IEPA issued a “No Further Remediation” letter about a decade ago.

— Daily Herald correspondent Alicia Fabbre contributed to this report