The County Line
For better or worse, it just could be Hamilton County that attracts the much publicized Amazon’s second national headquarters. We stress could be, but still far from a certainty.
The retail giant last week narrowed its search for a location to 20 sites including central Indiana. Folks in the Indianapolis media say that if the area is selected there are five most promising places for the billion dollar complex, two of which are in this county.
One possible site is east of Noblesville between State Road 38 and Interstate 69 where an as yet unidentified buyer is in the process of securing options on several thousand acres of farmland. With offers to pay as much as $40,000 per acre, you can assume the mysterious person or group is not planning to grow soybeans.
The other county site is Metropolitan Airport property north of 96th Street, south and east of the airport. It is ground that is not needed for airport operations and has long been seen as a prime location for business or commercial development.
Both these locations are close to I-69. Amazon is known to want easy access to interstate highways and an airport.
Last fall in this column we speculated on the possibility that someone saw at least the possibility of landing a giant distribution center, hence the optioning of big acreage in Wayne and Fall Creek Townships. The purchase of large tracts of land by anonymous buyers for a big development is not unheard of. In the 1950s the Indianapolis Water Company quietly bought 3,000 acres north of Noblesville. We know the site today as Morse Reservoir and the subdivisions surrounding it. The Noblesville Ledger eventually figured out what the land was to be used for.
It’s hard to visualize what an Amazon headquarters would look like with 50,000 employees, hundreds of thousands of square feet under roof and constant truck traffic coming and going at such a gigantic complex.
Many political leaders would see it as the greatest thing that could be imagined. Jobs, jobs, jobs and presumably reasonably high paying jobs. Of course, Hamilton County has very low unemployment so the employees would likely come mostly from surrounding counties. Nearby Madison County has been hurting for years since the closing of major manufacturing plants there. Jobs within a few miles would no doubt be welcome.
Then, we must think of what would be needed to service Amazon. Major road improvements, sewer and water utilities, public safety personnel and schools. Most major industries expect a community to provide incentives such as property tax abatement.
We’d be getting ahead of ourselves to consider all this, but local government might have to do some calculations to see that some of the costs would not fall on current residents. It may well not happen, but it’s never a bad idea to think about all the ramifications, good and not so good of any possibility.