Jana Wiersema | The Republic
City/County Assistant Planning Director Melissa Begley discusses the Project Whiteboard application Monday night at Columbus City Hall.
Plans from King’s Hawaiian to build a large-scale food and beverage production facility near Edinburgh are moving forward, with the company estimating an initial investment of more than $180 million and the creation of about 145 jobs.
The Bartholomew County Board of Zoning Appeals voted Monday to approve the applicant’s request for a conditional use variance to build the facility in the Wellfield Protection Overlay District and their request for a building height variance.
However, the board chose to continue the request for a variance regarding the size of wall signs.
The subject property is located at 11900 N. County Road 200W in German Township, just east of Indiana Premium Outlets in Edinburgh.
According to the planning department’s staff report, the applicant is proposing to build a 532,000-square-foot food and beverage production facility on the approximately 88-acre site. This includes a 368,000-square-foot manufacturing facility with an attached 78,000-square-foot cold storage building and a separate 86,000-square-foot beverage plant, according to planning department documents.
A letter of intent from Foresite Group LLC, an engineering, planning, design and consulting firm, said the facility will be named “Project Whiteboard.”
“The development is intended to be completed in stages with stage one as the main production facility, an approximate 368,000-square-foot plant, along with access, parking, landscaping, and utility infrastructure,” the firm wrote.
Joe Leonardo, SVP, Chief Operations Officer at King’s Hawaiian, said in a previous interview that the initial plant will be King’s Hawaiian. He added that they’ve acquired enough land to do other things with the site as well — such as expanding the footprint of King’s Hawaiian or bringing another brand to the area — but these are just possibilities rather than concrete plans.
He said at Monday’s meeting that the first phase of the project would be a “state of the art bakery.”
“The investment would be upwards of $180 million in our first phase with that,” Leonardo said. “That doesn’t include the freezer or the other things that we might develop this site with. … Given the state of the art nature, probably somewhere in 145, 147 jobs. We think those’ll be pretty well-paying jobs; with technology comes a whole host of skills and things for employees.”
A major topic of discussion at Monday’s Board of Zoning Appeals meeting was how applicant would work to avoid wellfield contamination.
Leonardo said that the company has been in discussion with the Eastern Bartholomew Water Corp. and added that they have good incentive to keep the water clean.
“We’re sitting over the wellhead protection area,” he said. “We will use that water. Our customers, our employees, so we have a very vested interest in ensuring that it is well-protected.”
Board members said they had received separate letters from the utility and SRS Real Estate partners, on behalf of the applicant, with each party outlining the conditions they felt were appropriate for conditional use approval.
Ted Darnall, president of the board of directors at Eastern Bartholomew Water, told the Board of Zoning Appeals that while the lists were similar, he felt theirs was more detailed.
“We are not against development, but anything that would compromise our aquifer is what we are trying to protect against,” he said.
The board ultimately voted to approve the conditional use variance subject to the eight conditions proposed by the applicant.
These cover subjects such as following development standards, complying with state and local standards for wellfield protection, providing a stormwater management system, coordinating with Eastern Bartholomew on retention or detention ponds, onsite pollutant management, creation of an inventory and spill prevention plan, discharging all sanitary and process wastewater to the local wastewater utility, and placing monitoring wells on the property to test water quality.
While the letter from Eastern Bartholomew had some of the same conditions, it also included others, such as limiting development of the subject property to areas outside of the one-year capture zone of the wellhead protection area.
Officials from Columbus and Bartholomew County expressed support for the project during the time for public comment.
This included Tony London, who said that he and the other Bartholomew County commissioners are completely supportive of the development.
“This company is bringing 140-some jobs that are good, high-paying jobs,” he said. “High 20’s, if what I read was correct, close to $30 an hour. This is an absolute wonderful thing, and they will be good stewards of our water.”
However, a couple of neighboring property owners said that they had questions or concerns about the project, such as potential impacts to their land and property values, why an industrial facility was being considered for this area, what would be done with wastewater, and how incentives for the project might affect taxes for other residents. Some also felt there had been a lack of communication about the project.
