During this meeting, city officials explained that Highland was working to construct a proposed housing development behind Walmart in Urbana, called Dugan Place. Highland representatives also expressed interest in buying property for a separate project on South State Route 68 to develop an industrial park. They said they wanted to buy land from private owners and buy the adjoining land from the county.
Overview
In a public notice published on the city of Urbana’s website, the administration detailed their involvement in the development of the potential data center. According to the notice, Urbana City Council passed ordinances related to annexation, data center definitions and a Community Reinvestment Area (CRA) for the project after open meetings and hearings.
After the annexation and uses for a data center were approved by council, developer Thor Equities entered into agreements with participating property owners — Organ Farms, LLC and the Board of Champaign County Commissioners — for $5 million. None of the land was owned or sold by the city.
The public notice states that there are no other contracts between the developer and the city, including other “deals,” non-disclosure agreements or CRAs.
As of Friday, the city has not received a site plan or other documents that show the developer’s plan for a data center.
Timeline
The timeline of events included in the public notice provides links to all relevant meeting packets and approved minutes on the city’s website; these documents detail ordinances presented and passed from November 2024 through November 2025, each of which received three readings and public hearings.
The first ordinances passed from November 2024 through January 2025 include a pre-annexation agreement with Urbana0624, LLC (Highland) to annex the property to the city, and one related to the land use and zoning buffers for the annexed land.
“The are no comments, questions or concerns by citizens in approved minutes pertaining to Highland, farmland owned by Organ Farms, a data center, or any other accusation of misrepresentation from the City or Council throughout this or leading up to April (2025),” the public notice reads.
In April 2025, several ordinances were passed, including to accept the annexation; update zoning definitions to include “computing infrastructure providers, data processing, web hosting and related services”; and to include those as permitted uses in the manufacturing district.
The notice said this language was added because in early conversations about an industrial park, a data center was mentioned as a possibility, and the definitions involving a data center were not present in the city’s ordinances.
In August 2025 after annexation and zoning was petitioned and introduced, council passed all previous related ordinances, “meaning at this point council was given clear information within their packets for (those) meetings.”
The notice said developer Thor Equities then proceeded with purchasing 47 acres of land and another 80 acres of land in the zoned and annexed territory for just over $2 million and just over $3 million, respectively.
“These purchases were from the property owners, not the city or the county,” the public notice stated.
The full public notice can be found on the city’s website at http://urbanaohio.com.
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