On August 23, 2026, Mayor Ronald Morrell Jr. published this sheet on his public Facebook page, with a statement saying the deal had become real and that he had promised the details would be made public when it did. It describes $2 billion of private investment across two phases, an approximately 800-acre technology campus in Marion, and $176.5 million in what it calls "total modeled community benefit through incentive payment period" — $94 million of that in personal property community impact payments, $82.5 million in minimum real property payments. The sheet says its figures are modeled and remain subject to final agreements, permitting, project timing and approvals.

It never uses the words "data center." It never names a company. It never says where in Marion.

OurWeek obtained the same sheet in August, before it was public. The mayor's copy matches ours figure for figure. Tap it to read it full screen. The whole report is also a PDF to print or hand out, with every recording carried as a QR code that opens the video at the moment quoted.

For a year Grant County argued about a data center while county officials said, on the record, that they knew of no site anybody had proposed. The mayor's statement is the first we have found from anyone in government that a project is real — and it is about ground inside Marion, which the county's moratorium does not reach. There is still no application on file, and no company has been named in any government document as the one behind the Marion project.

And there is a study the commissioners paid for that told them to soft-pedal the subject in all public documents and secure land options before any public announcement.

The talk around town has a location: the old Dana plant on Marion's west side. A resident told the county plan commission in March 2026 that he had heard it rumored for two years. The county's feasibility study is about somewhere else — the I-69 and State Road 26 interchange at Exit 255, southeast of the city, which is where the study was focused, and inside the unincorporated county the moratorium covers. Nothing we have found puts a data center at Dana: no application, no land transfer, no county document. Mayor Morrell says the project is real. Dana is still not confirmed. That gap is the story.

What follows is the play by play of how Grant County got here, built from 20 recorded meetings, a full-text search of every set of Grant County minutes back to 1997, and the ownership and transfer records of 1,753 parcels. Everything below is tied to a document, a recording, or named outside reporting. Tap any moment to open it — the recording plays where the words were said, or the page opens with the relevant text highlighted. Where the evidence requires an inference, or where the talk around the county runs past the record, that is said plainly.

What we found

How to read this. Every claim on this page is filed in one of three states — confirmed by the record, contradicted by the public record, or unconfirmed and not ruled out. They are collected in one place further down, under "Common claims, and where each one stands." Where a conclusion is our reading of the documents rather than something a document says outright, the text says so.

Dana. The old plant on Marion's west side is what the talk names. A resident told the county plan commission in March 2026 that he had heard it rumored for two years. No application, land transfer or county document places a data center there.

Marion. A one-page summary describing $2 billion of investment and a roughly 800-acre technology campus reached OurWeek in August 2026. On August 23 Mayor Morrell published the same sheet himself and said the deal had become real. It still never says "data center," never names a company, and never says where in Marion.

The county. The commissioners paid for a feasibility study of the Exit 255 interchange. It has a section headed "The Data Center Dilemma," and it recommends soft-pedaling the idea in all public documents and securing land options before any public announcement.

The land. We checked 1,753 parcels and 1,255 owner names across the three areas in question. No completed assembly is visible in those records, and no county officeholder appears as an owner. Options — the exclusive right, but not the obligation, to buy later, which is what the study recommends — transfer no title, and so would not appear in them at all. On August 23 Mayor Morrell said owners have already agreed to sell.

The moratorium. The county's moratorium covers unincorporated Grant County. It does not reach inside Marion, which is where the talk points. And it is not a fixed two years: the ordinance ends it on March 16, 2028 or when the county adopts a zoning amendment governing data centers, whichever comes first. The plan commission's data center subcommittee has been drafting that amendment since March 2026. A moratorium is a pause while rules are written; when the rules exist, the pause ends and the rules govern.

Here is how it happened.

It starts with a closed factory

Before the study, before the moratorium, before the mayor's announcement, the commissioners pull two parcels out of the county tax sale so they can decide themselves what becomes of them.

That is the county doing the ordinary work of local government: taking on hard industrial ground and looking for a use for it. It happens in open session in December 2022, and nobody objects.

The next spring somebody asks for a place on the agenda, having heard about it.

Reese sits on Marion's redevelopment commission as well, which makes his appearance before the county commissioners notable. Nothing in any public record we can search connects him or his firm to a data center: not the county's minutes back to 1997, not any meeting recording since 2020, and not Marion's own redevelopment minutes — all fifty-nine documents in that archive, 2017 through this July.

The machinery starts in earnest in March 2025. A consultant introduces himself.

Brad Bookout's firm, Augusta Consulting, goes under contract on a ninety-day trial with a thirty-day exit. That is the arrangement that will still be running the county's development work eleven months later.

A body is built, and it has no money

In May the commissioners create a county redevelopment commission.

In July it organizes. A sitting county commissioner takes the chair, and the first thing the new body does with its authority is hand the meeting back to the consultant.

Later in the same meeting the consultant proposes a title for himself, and gets it.

Asked what a director can actually do, he answers plainly.

Asked where the money for all this comes from, the answer is that there isn't any.

By August the commission is talking about drawing Tax Increment Financing (TIF) districts across every unincorporated industrial and commercial parcel in the county — before anyone asks for one.

A TIF district freezes the assessed value of the ground inside it at a base year. Tax on that frozen base keeps flowing where it always went — the schools, the library, the township, the county's general fund. Everything above it, the increment new development creates, is generally captured for the redevelopment commission instead, to spend on infrastructure inside the district or to retire the debt it issued to build that infrastructure. For allocation areas established after June 30, 2008, Indiana generally limits the allocation period to twenty-five years from the first TIF-backed obligation, with statutory exceptions.

Nothing about drawing one requires a company, a project or a name. A commission can put a district over empty farm ground and wait.

The reason its director gives is on the recording.

In August 2025, the county's redevelopment commission is being told to map the ground at Exit 255 so that they are not surprised by an entity showing up to build there — by its director, who is a paid consultant from Muncie and not a member of the body he directs. Nothing in the public record shows that anyone had told them a company was coming.

Moments earlier, the commission's president — Shane Middlesworth, who is also a sitting county commissioner — had said something else.

Then the director, seconds later: there is no specific project, and he is not raising a red flag that something is coming. Then: plan it, so nobody shows up and surprises everybody. Three statements inside a minute, in that order, from the two men running the meeting. What the interest was in, or whose it was, neither of them says, and no document we have found settles it.

A month later the maps arrive.

The commissioners had spent that same morning putting a financial adviser and a bond counsel under contract for a body with no money of its own. Then somebody at the table asks the question the whole exercise invites.

Later in the same meeting comes the plainest description anyone in this story gives of how a company actually arrives.

In October the discussion becomes a calendar. EDA is the county's shorthand for an economic development area — the boundary a redevelopment commission draws to make ground eligible for its powers, and which, unlike the older redevelopment areas, requires no finding that the ground is blighted. The TIF district is the tax capture inside that boundary. First on the timetable is the I-69 and State Road 26 interchange.

On December 1 the commission votes. Bond counsel walks them through a four-step process — this body, then the plan commission, then the county commissioners, then a public hearing — and explains why the calendar matters.

An earlier base year freezes the ground at a lower value. For as long as the district runs, the schools, the library, the township and the county's general fund go on taxing it at that base — which annual neutralization adjusts for reassessment, but which does not rise with what gets built. Tax on the value above it is generally captured for the redevelopment commission instead, though Indiana lets a commission release excess incremental value back to the other units, and some do. So the earlier the base date, the more of whatever gets built there can become increment.

Voting in December 2025 rather than early 2026 fixes the base at the January 1, 2025 value: a full year earlier.

The order also cannot be reversed. A district drawn after a building is already assessed cannot capture that value, because it is already in the base; only growth above the base becomes increment. Draw it first, and new assessed value there can become increment for the life of the district.

Then a second resolution, for a second area. We found no earlier public request for it in the records we searched.

That is the ground between Marion and Sweetser, on the city's western edge. Asked how those boundaries were arrived at, the room is told.

Eighteen days before the study lands, the county adopts its comprehensive plan. Page 94 records what people told it they wanted.

The study

The Exit 255 Economic Development Feasibility Study is dated September 20, 2025. BCS Management had been engaged by the commissioners that April, and its author would read the finished report to them in October. It has a section headed "The Data Center Dilemma." The recommendation it makes there is that the county soft-pedal the data center idea in all public documents and — "most critically," in the study's words — proactively secure options on land parcels before any public announcement.

A county-commissioned document, recommending that the county say less and move first, and giving its reason in the same sentence: to prevent local landowners from pricing the county out of the market.

It is also the method the county's own development director had described to the redevelopment commission eighteen days before the study is dated: the quiet approach, the zoning map, the landowners. He was not describing what the county would do. He was describing what a company does, and saying it is what they had all arrived at.

There is a case for that advice, and the study makes it in the same breath: an owner who learns a public body needs his ground can price accordingly, and an assembly that needs forty parcels can be stopped by the fortieth. Confidential land assembly is common in large economic development projects for that reason. Site selectors commonly require confidentiality as a condition of looking at a place at all, and a county that announces first and buys second generally pays more. On that reading the recommendation is not secrecy; it is the ordinary practice of the trade, written down.

What the record does not settle is the other half of it — where that practice ends. At what point does a public body mapping ground, drawing tax districts, weighing infrastructure spending and considering tax abatements owe the people who live there an account of what it is doing?

What happened when it was presented

On October 20 the study's author presents the final report to the commissioners in open session. He tells them he will read his comments to keep it brief, and then take questions. The prepared remarks run about nine minutes; the whole item is over in thirteen.

The words "data center" are never said.

That is not an accusation. It is a count. We reviewed the entire recording — the full seventy-five minute meeting, not only his item: "data center" does not occur, and neither does "hyperscale." The study contains both — its utilities section cites the local utility's forecast that hyperscale data centers need "over 500 MW of capacity," and that by 2030 they will be about sixty percent of that utility's peak load across Indiana.

Electricity did come up. The substations near the interchange have seven to eight megawatts to spare, the author said, which is "a lot for homes or for typical commercial developments" and short only for "a very high capacity large user, say a typical one over 10 megawatts." That is the threshold for needing a new substation at this interchange. Ten megawatts is data center scale — but it is far below the hyperscale developments discussed elsewhere in the same study, whose figure for the projects driving that utility's projected load growth is over five hundred megawatts.

The community reads it for itself

Three weeks after the commission drew that second area, a joke about it appeared. On December 21, 2025 a Wabash County satire page published a mock news story announcing a data center "constructed west of Marion along Highway 18," built to store footage from the license plate cameras that had been going up around the county. The target of the joke is surveillance. The location is scenery.

Highway 18 west of Marion runs through the boundary proposed for the west side economic development area. Three quarters of the parcels in that ground lie within half a mile of that road, and ninety-nine percent within a mile; the nearest other state route, State Road 13, is about three miles off. Nothing suggests the writer knew what the commission had done three weeks earlier, and this page does not suggest it. What can be said is the order of events: the county proposed a development boundary over the corridor, and then a joke put a data center in it.

Several of the things the piece played for laughs — the cooling, the water, the noise, what happens to the building when it is abandoned — are what the county's own subcommittee would spend 2026 writing rules about.

The study was public too. Over that winter people read it, and by March 2, 2026 they were saying so from the podium.

One of them asks the plainest question available, and gets a plain answer.

He keeps going, into what the study was for.

That description is in the study. Printed page 26 is headed "Insight from Augusta Consulting": it records that interest in a Buc-ee's has been expressed and weighs which corners of the interchange would suit one, and it describes demand for divisible warehouse, light manufacturing and small business space of 15,000 to 30,000 square feet.

The other description is in the same document, on the two pages before it. "The Data Center Dilemma" runs across printed pages 24 and 25, and it ends in the recommendation to soft-pedal the idea and secure land options first.

Both accounts of the study are accurate. They are consecutive pages of it.

The buildings on page 26 are specced at under one megawatt. Elsewhere in the same study, the hyperscale developments driving that utility's projected load growth are put at over five hundred.

Then, that same morning, a commissioner moved to shut the door.

Two weeks later it is an ordinance.

Ordinance 4-2026 runs for twenty-four months — to March 16, 2028 — or until the county adopts an ordinance amending its zoning code, whichever comes first. The plan commission's data center subcommittee had held its first meeting five days earlier.

And the county says out loud what the room had become.

In April, the county sends the notice.

On the city side of the line

The moratorium governs unincorporated Grant County only, because it is a moratorium on improvement location permits and those are issued under a zoning chapter that says where it applies.

Marion, Gas City and the towns write their own rules — and the location residents name most often in the meetings on this page is inside Marion. So the same argument shows up in the Marion council chamber, at a hearing about water rates.

The site nobody names

The project is public now. The site is not.

Until the mayor's August 23 statement, every official answer about location we found in the public record said the same thing: no specific site had been publicly identified. The county's data center subcommittee said so from the chair in June, drafting an ordinance it describes as being for the whole county and not for anywhere in particular.

Three months earlier, someone who lives and runs a business on Marion's west side stood at the same microphone and named one.

They were not the first to say it out loud. Nine days earlier, at the commissioners' meeting where the moratorium was moved, another resident had put a second location on the same corridor.

Earlier still, and in a body nobody thinks to check. On October 28, 2025 — four months before either of them — the county drainage board finished its business and moved to adjourn, and a member spoke up.

Seven months later the plan commission drew the same boundary in plainer terms.

So the county moratorium covers the ground the county studied, and does not reach the corridor people keep naming.

The ground they describe is across the road from the closed Dana factory this report opened on. Rumored for two years, they say — which would put the talk in early 2024: before the study, before the moratorium, before the commissioners engaged the consultant who wrote about Exit 255.

No application has been filed. No company has been named. No county document proposes a data center at that address. What the record does hold is that the county's own redevelopment commission had that ground on a map seven months before that public comment, working west across the city.

Three months after that map discussion, the same ground stopped being a discussion. On December 1, 2025 the redevelopment commission passed a declaratory resolution for a west side economic development area, with its map attached and a base year of January 1, 2025 for capturing the increase in property tax. That resolution opens the statutory process rather than completing it: the map goes to the plan commission, and the commission takes final action afterward. Three months later it had not. "I did present the maps that this body had worked on for a while to the APC as one of the required steps of approval," the county's economic development consultant told the redevelopment commission on March 2, 2026. "They did not approve the westside map that was presented."

So the claim sits here: unconfirmed, and not ruled out. The ground has been on a county map, and then inside the boundary the county proposed for a west side economic development area — a boundary the plan commission did not approve as drawn. And the people who live across from it have been hearing about it since before the Exit 255 study existed.

Eight hundred acres

The sheet at the top of this page reached OurWeek in August 2026, when Marion officials were giving it to community leaders for input. On August 23 Mayor Morrell published it himself. The copy he released is the one shown above, and it matches the copy we had — the same figures, line for line. It still carries no date, no author and no letterhead, and it is still not on file with any public body.

In the statement he posted with it, Mayor Morrell wrote that he had not signed a non-disclosure agreement, that Marion has about 12 million gallons a day of water capacity against about 3.5 million in use, and that he had been told the city has the electrical capacity for the project — pointing readers to Marion Utilities and to Indiana Michigan Power to check both for themselves. He also wrote that people with questions about the land should "talk to the property owners and farmers who have chosen to sell their land to the company." That is the first public statement we have found from anyone in government that owners have agreed to sell. He did not say who they are, where the ground is, or who the company is.

Past the headline figures, it puts approximately 200 permanent positions on the site — 50 full-time employees and 150 contractors — against 1,000 to 1,500 construction jobs per phase. It says the developer would fund all of the power, water and sewer infrastructure the project needs, and that approximately half the investment would be personal property rather than real property. Throughout, it says "the developer" and "the company."

It says the company "has voluntarily committed to work with the City of Marion to study potential noise and lighting impacts from the site."

Its vocabulary is not unusual. "Community impact payment" has been used in other Indiana data center agreements for money a company pays a local government alongside a tax abatement. At the LEAP district in Lebanon, the state's own economic development corporation says Meta committed to "an annual community impact payment of $1.5 million to the city of Lebanon for each completed phase" of a campus it puts at more than $10 billion. We looked for a published one-page summary elsewhere that matched this one in form or phrasing and did not find one. What is worth noting about Lebanon is the part this sheet does not have: the company was named.

It does not say where in Marion. The city is as specific as it gets — and the city is outside the county moratorium's reach.

The question nobody had asked out loud

In May 2026, at the plan commission, a resident used his public comment to say why he thought the subject was so hard to discuss — and then asked the board directly.

In the same comment he said that officials at the city of Marion have been heard to say they signed such agreements. That part is his account. We have not located the record he refers to, and this page does not carry it as fact. What the record carries is the question, asked in public, and the answer given that night.

Written minutes summarize a meeting; they do not transcribe it. That is why forty-two of the fifty-six sources on this page are recordings.

The one company that wrote the plan commission

In June 2026 the area plan office received an email. Its director called it "the first communication the APC office has received concerning building or establishing a data center in Grant County," and read it into the minutes.

He then said what it was not.

Nine months earlier the same subject carried a different instruction, in a study the commissioners paid for: soft-pedal the data center idea in all public documents, and secure land options before any announcement. The area plan commission is a separate body, with its own director, its own staff and its own meetings. The commissioners also assign one of their own three to sit on it each year, and its zoning ordinances come back to them to be adopted.

Here is the email itself.

It is not a farmland proposal. It is a proposal to buy what the letter describes as an existing crypto-mining site already operating in the county — "our project recycles an existing operational site, no agricultural land" — and convert it to what the letter calls a quiet, permanent AI Data Center. It offers to serve as the county's official proof of concept for the ordinance being drafted, and closes by asking for a ten-minute Zoom call that week.

The county's entire reply, sent the next afternoon, was five words.

A website under that name, recoredigital.ai, runs on a domain registered on May 15, 2026 — a month before the email.

Headquarters is given as "North America." The site names no street address, no person, and no county. Indiana is the most specific location on it.

A year later, in the budget

August 2026. The county council spends two nights on the 2027 budget, and on the second night it works through the commissioners' contractual services line — $300,000, and nobody at the table is certain what is inside it. The list is read out. Two of the names on it are the two firms this story has been following.

BCS Management was paid from the same line. Asked whether the county is still under contract with the consultant, the table gets a flat answer.

The council cut the line to $150,000. Members work the annual amounts out loud as they go, arriving at six different figures in about ninety seconds; none of them is printed here, because arithmetic done from memory at a budget table is not a contract. What the record carries is that both firms were paid from that line, that the consultant's arrangement ended, and that the line for 2027 is half what it was. It does not say why. Nobody at the table could say either — the budget had been assembled by a commissioner who has since left the board.

The mayor says it is real

On August 23, 2026, Marion's mayor put the sheet at the top of this page on his own Facebook page, under a statement that opens: "As promised, if and when this deal became real, I said the details would be made available to the public. That time has come."

It is the first statement we have found from anyone in government that a project is real. His post is at facebook.com/share/p/1BSgvQeLeC; because a post can be edited or taken down, the whole of it is also saved as it stood — five screens, with the sheet attached below the text on the last one.

He answers a list of things directly. He has not signed a non-disclosure agreement. He is not running for another office, has not been paid by anyone and is not moving. He says Marion has about 12 million gallons a day of water capacity against about 3.5 million a day in use, and that he has been told the city has "sufficient power capacity" — and in both cases tells people not to take his word for it, but to ask Marion Utilities and Indiana Michigan Power themselves. The two are not equally checkable. The water claim carries figures, and those figures have a public source. The electrical claim carries no figure, and he does not say who told him.

The water figure has a public source, and it is older than the statement. It comes from the city's own witness, under oath, in Marion's 2023 water rate case before the Indiana Utility Regulatory Commission.

The utility says the same thing on its own website, and puts the wells at the same twelve.

Both figures predate this project, and neither is a statement about what the plant can spare in 2026 — which is the question, and the one he says to put to the utility.

On the land, he wrote:

"If you have questions about the land involved, talk to the property owners and farmers who have chosen to sell their land to the company. Without willing landowners, this project cannot happen."

That is the first public statement we have found from anyone in government that owners have agreed to sell. It does not say who they are, how much ground, or at what price.

He gives a reason for pursuing it, and it is a budget. Marion, he says, expects to lose about $8 million from a roughly $34 million budget beginning in 2029 under Senate Enrolled Act 1, the property tax law the General Assembly passed in 2025 — a law whose fiscal analysis projected local units across Indiana losing about $1.5 billion over three years. He lists three ways out: cut services and staffing, ask taxpayers for more, or grow the tax base. He does not claim to know that this is the right one. "Is this the best deal for Marion? I truly don't know."

And after two thousand words releasing the details, three things are still not in them. He does not say "data center." He does not name the company. He does not say where in Marion the eight hundred acres are.

What the land records show

The claim that farmers have already been quietly paid — roughly $200,000 apiece, held in escrow — is checkable in one direction, and it was checked.

We pulled the owner of record, assessed use and transfer history for every parcel in the three areas the county studied or mapped — the I-69 and SR 26 interchange at Exit 255, the SR 18 corridor west of Marion, and the Miller Avenue quadrant. That is 1,753 parcels, 14,067 acres, 11,879 of it farm ground.

The study named the three largest landowners near the interchange, in a section listing stakeholders. It did not say those were the parcels to option — it says precise parcel identification is impracticable and that it deals generally with the area around the interchange. None of the three has sold anything. Central Indiana Grain Farm IV LLC holds 466 acres and last took title in 2011. Lasater Family Land LLC, 210 acres, 2020. Chalk Hill Farms Inc, 166 acres, 2016. Fifteen months after the same document recommended securing land options before any public announcement, all three are still on their ground.

Across all three areas, 282 parcels changed hands since January 2024, and the large ones are almost entirely families conveying to themselves — Wright to the Wright trust, Seward to the Seward family trust, Patricia Smith's 145 acres re-deeded to herself. Among the 1,718 parcels whose ownership records resolved: no new entity, no out-of-state newcomer, no adjoining parcels moving together in a window.

We also checked every owner name — 1,255 of them — against the county clerk's roster of elected officials, all 185 entries, which run from the federal ballot down through the county offices to township boards, town councils and school boards. That is more than the 178 offices our NDA canvass puts a question to, which leaves out the presidential ticket and the six elected judges. No county officeholder appears among the 1,255 owner names we checked. Not the Campbells, who sold into the grain farm entity in 2002; not the Lasaters; not Kelsay Farms, which sold Chalk Hill its two parcels in 2016.

Town and school officials do appear, which is what farm country looks like. The mapped areas take in Fowlerton, Jonesboro, Fairmount and Sweetser, and people who serve on those councils and boards own property in them — house lots for the most part, and in one case a few hundred acres of farm ground near the interchange. None of those offices has a vote on county zoning, on the redevelopment commission, or on the study. And the check matches names only: an official holding ground through a company would not appear in it, and the principals behind the three interchange entities were never obtained.

And here is the limit. Indiana law does not require an option to be recorded, so one can exist for years without creating a county record. These records can rule out a completed assembly. They cannot rule out one still in the option stage — which is precisely the stage the study recommended. So that claim stands where it stands: unconfirmed, not ruled out. Two records would ordinarily surface a completed transaction, and both are public. A sales disclosure form, ordinarily filed when property is conveyed for valuable consideration, and searchable by buyer name. And a lease longer than three years, which must be recorded within forty-five days — and ground leases for developments of this size can run for decades.

Common claims, and where each one stands

Confirmed by the record.

• The county paid for a study that recommended soft-pedaling a data center and securing land options before any public announcement.
• A sitting commissioner presided over the redevelopment commission that mapped Exit 255.
• That commission discussed TIF boundaries at the interchange from August 2025, before any company appeared in its public record.
• One company has written to the county. It wants an existing crypto site, not new ground.
• A one-page summary describing a $2 billion, roughly 800-acre technology campus in Marion was given by Marion officials to community leaders for input in August 2026, and published by Mayor Morrell himself on August 23.
• Marion's mayor says the deal is real, that landowners have agreed to sell to a company, and that he has not signed a non-disclosure agreement.

Contradicted by the public record.

• That the study was never about data centers — it has a section headed "The Data Center Dilemma."
• That county officials never discussed Exit 255 in public — the redevelopment commission discussed it in open session from August 2025.
• That county officeholders own the land at Exit 255 — none appears as an owner of record among the 1,255 names checked. A name check cannot see an interest held through a company, so what this settles is the ownership record and not every possible interest.

Unconfirmed, not ruled out.

• A data center at the old Dana plant on Marion's west side. No filing exists, Mayor Morrell did not say where the ground is, and the sheet does not either. The ground people name sits inside the boundary proposed for a west side economic development area in December 2025 — which the plan commission did not approve as presented — on a corridor three people have named aloud in public meetings.
• Escrow payments to farmers. The mayor says owners have agreed to sell; he did not describe the terms, and an agreement to sell is not the same instrument as an escrow payment.
• A specific price per acre for any official's land.
• A named technology company behind any of it.
• Money promised to the schools and then withdrawn.

Several of these would leave a public document if they reached a sale, a lease, a filing or a formal county action, and none has surfaced. At the option or exploratory stage, some would leave no public record at all. Absence of a record is not proof of absence when the instrument in question need not be recorded before it closes — and securing options before any public announcement is exactly what the county's own study recommended.

How it has gone elsewhere

Grant County is not the first Indiana county to take up the question of data centers, and five earlier ones left a public record of how it went. None of them says what will happen here. What they show is the order the documents arrived in, and how long it ran between the first public step and the day anyone learned whose project it was.

Allen County. In October 2023 an "unnamed Fortune 100 company" proposed a data center campus around Adams Center and Paulding roads outside Fort Wayne, requiring the annexation of more than 700 acres into the city. Through the annexation and the rezoning it was known only as Project Zodiac. WFYI reported that "in January 2024, after everything was finalized, the anonymous company's name was released" — Google, with up to twelve buildings. The developer of record was Hatchworks LLC, a Google subsidiary; a separate entity, DMI FW LLC, bought the property for it.

St. Joseph County. In November 2023 the county redevelopment commission approved a contract with Razor5 LLC to survey up to 800 acres near New Carlisle — $1 million in escrow for the survey rights alone, before any price had been discussed. WVPE reported that "County officials have not said what company Razor5 represents and the contract requires confidentiality until discussions for a sale move further along." Two days later the county council voted 8-1 to add about 1,500 acres to the New Carlisle Economic Development Area, over residents' objections, which put 309 properties on a property acquisition list. The company was named five months later: Amazon, $11 billion.

Morgan County. The Indiana Daily Student reconstructed that sequence from filings, minutes and litigation and published it as a dated timeline. A developer approached the county's economic development director in the first quarter of 2024. A company called Woodland Caribou LLC was formed in Delaware that June. By the end of August, two landowners had signed agreements restricting sale to it. The plan director signed a non-disclosure agreement in October; the county commissioners signed theirs in December. A rezoning petition for 390 acres was filed in January 2025 and approved 3-0 the following month, the developer still anonymous. In May the county granted a ten-year, fifty percent property tax deduction — to the LLC. Google was not confirmed as the company behind it until October 2025, eight months after the rezoning and five after the tax break.

The code name is part of the convention. Morgan County's was Project Louie, held through Woodland Caribou LLC. In that case and in Fort Wayne's, the company turned out to be Google. Nothing in the record connects Project Riverjump to Google or to any other company. What those two code-named projects establish is the sequence: the code name comes first and the company comes last.

Two more Indiana projects sit either side of that pattern. Michigan City's council approved a taxpayer agreement for "Project Maize," a data center campus at 402 Royal Road — an $800 million commitment and 30 full-time jobs, taken under the state's data center exemption, with the applicant given as Lavendar Fields Holdings LLC. Michigan City's own project page is headed "Phoenix Investors / Project Maize" and says "Phoenix Investors and its end-user are proposing" it — so the developer is named and the data center end-user is not. Shelbyville went the other way entirely: its 2026 agreement for a multi-phase campus of up to eleven buildings, at about $2 billion, names Prologis in the document itself — a California real estate investment trust, appearing with an annexation and a rezoning and no code name at all. So the sequence is a practice, not a rule. Some Indiana projects arrive with the company's name on the first page.

The three completed sequences are not unique. A Wisconsin Watch investigation found at least four Wisconsin projects developed after local officials signed non-disclosure agreements; Microsoft has since said it will stop signing them with local governments, while continuing to use them for land acquisition. In Oklahoma, The Frontier documented Sand Springs annexing 827 acres in June 2025 without telling residents Google was looking at the ground.

What the three completed sequences have in common is the order. An annexation, an economic development area, or a survey contract first. Then an option or a purchase agreement with an entity nobody can identify. Then a filing, a published notice, a hearing. The name last — three months after the annexation in Allen County, five months after the development area in St. Joseph, nine months after the rezoning petition in Morgan. Every governmental step in that sequence is a posted meeting with a recorded vote. The private land agreements are not. None of them requires anyone to say the name.

Where the visible record puts Grant County. A contracted economic development office, since April 2025. A study the county paid for, dated September 20, 2025, recommending that land options be secured before any announcement. An economic development area adopted at the interchange that study covers, and a second proposed on Marion's west side that the plan commission did not approve as drawn. And then, nowhere we can find it: a rezoning petition, a published notice, a hearing, an annexation, a shell entity that has bought anything, or any company named in a government record — except the one that wrote asking about a crypto site that already exists. If Grant County is following a similar pattern, the visible record would place it before the filing — the stretch in which those counties' steps had not yet produced a county record. The county has said consistently that it has no project before it. The mayor's August 23 statement establishes that a project exists in Marion; what it does not establish is whether, or when, that project would require a county filing at all. A project inside the city may never need one — which would account for the apparent contradiction in the public record without anyone in county government having said anything untrue.

One thing here has no counterpart in either case. In Morgan County and St. Joseph County the confidentiality sits in contracts and non-disclosure agreements between the parties, and the public read about it afterward. In Grant County, the recommendation to soft-pedal the subject in all public documents is printed in a study the commissioners paid for and released.

What happens next

Monday, September 14, 6 p.m. — a town hall at REAL Community Covenant Church, 1240 South Adams Street in Marion, convened by a group calling itself Concerned Citizens of Marion & Grant County. It is open to the public. The speakers listed so far are Rev. Andrew Morrell, Molly Earley and Rev. Tanya Smith, with others to be announced, and the church has added a note that it does not endorse any political figure or party.

The flyer puts the two halves of this story on one page: the code name from the mayor's sheet, and the Dana site. A citizens' group is doing that, not a document. No application, no company and no county record places a data center at that address, and the claim stands where it has stood since March — unconfirmed, not ruled out.

Tuesday, October 6 — the Marion Common Council's first regular meeting of the month. The council meets the first and third Tuesdays. Rev. Morrell wrote publicly that he had been told the proposal is expected to come before the council around that date. Nothing about it is on a posted agenda; agendas go up a few days ahead, so that is expected rather than meaningful.

The same talk puts a price on it, and has since before the mayor's post: about $150,000 an acre, across about 800 acres, from a few farmers. Nobody in government has said it. No document we have seen carries it. We have not verified it. That price would be about ten times what Purdue's June 2026 survey puts top-quality Indiana farmland at — $14,909 an acre — and five and a half times its $27,260 figure for land moving out of agriculture into residential, commercial or industrial use. Purdue cautions that these are statewide averages across differing soils and locations, not appraisals of any particular tract. It is also the kind of number that appears on a sales disclosure form the day a sale closes.

And the step that cannot happen in private. Indiana requires a fiscal body to adopt a declaratory resolution, publish notice and hold a public hearing before it can confirm a tax abatement. The sheet at the top of this page describes abatement periods and minimum payments during them; a real property abatement cannot be granted in Indiana without that process. So an abatement would require public notice, a public hearing and formal action by the designating body.

What that meeting would not necessarily produce is a name. Morgan County held its rezoning hearing in February 2025 and granted its abatement in May, both to a Delaware LLC, and the company behind them was not confirmed for another five months. A public hearing is where the public gets a formal chance to comment before final action. On the record from the counties above, it is not reliably where the public finds out who it is for.

Check it yourself

Two public databases will settle most of what is still open here, and neither costs anything.

The county's own property viewer carries recorded sales back to 2008 and is updated weekly. Search an address or a parcel number and it returns the owner of record, the transfer history and the assessed value — the same records this page was built from. It is at grantin.elevatemaps.io.

The state's sales disclosure search is where a buyer's name would appear. Indiana generally requires a sales disclosure form when property is conveyed for valuable consideration, and the Department of Local Government Finance publishes them searchable by buyer name — along with seller, parcel, price, property class and date. Anyone assembling ground at Exit 255, along Highway 18 in the corridor proposed for the west side economic development area, or around the old Dana plant would ordinarily produce one at closing, under the name of whatever entity is buying. Watch the buyer field for a name nobody here recognizes. That search covers 2021 forward; older years are on STATS Indiana.

There is a third, for a deal structured so it never shows up as a sale at all. A lease longer than three years is recorded with the county recorder, in the Miscellaneous Record; one not recorded within forty-five days of signing is void against a later good-faith buyer. A ground lease for a development of this size can run for decades.

That is the whole of it — everything we have been able to find in the public record about data centers in Grant County. Everything above opens onto the source it came from.

If you have a fact check on something we covered, or a tip about something we did not, email us at hello@ourweek.in.

The NDA Question

One question the record cannot answer is whether anyone holding office here has signed a non-disclosure agreement about data center development. Mayor Morrell addressed it without being asked: in the statement he posted on August 23, he wrote that he has not signed one.

We are putting the same question to all 178 — every state and local official on the Grant County ballot, and our three members of Congress — and publishing every answer as it arrives.

See the list, and the answers so far