Toni Ball has lived in the Martindale Brightwood area for nearly 60 years. She was one of nearly 100 community members gathered at the intersection of 25th Street and Sherman Drive on Oct. 13.
Chanting and stopping traffic, they were there to protest a proposed data center an out-of-state developer wants to build in the neighborhood.
“We don’t need a corporation coming in here telling us what we need to have,” Ball told Mirror Indy. “The data center is not going to benefit our community, it is going to be really against us, raising our bills and causing us to have more inconveniences than we already endure. We do not want the data center here.”
Los Angeles-based developer Metrobloks wants to build a 13-acre data center on a piece of the site of the former Sherman Drive-In Theater, 2505 N. Sherman Dr. The land has been vacant for decades and is a brownfield — meaning the land may have been contaminated or polluted. At a Sept. 23 meeting between the developer and residents, Metrobloks CEO Ernest Popescu said further environmental studies on the site need to be completed…