New projections from an agreement being finalized this week between West Lafayette and the Indiana Economic Development Corp. would put local the mix of local property tax revenue generated by SK hynix’s $3.87 billion semiconductor facility in the city at roughly $500 million over the next three decades, West Lafayette Mayor Erin Easter said Wednesday.
That number has been a question since spring 2024, when state officials said SK hynix’s 340,000-square-foot high-bandwidth memory manufacturing and research facility north of Kalberer Road would be part of an Innovation Development District, a mechanism built into hundreds of millions of dollars in state incentives used to land the South Korean chip maker.
Easter told the West Lafayette Redevelopment Commission that the city finished negotiations with the IEDC this week over the local take from the Innovation Development District, which puts the quasi-public agency in control of a host of taxes collected from the 100-acre-plus site under construction between Yeager Road and Salisbury Street/County Road 50 West.
State law for Innovation Development Districts guaranteed a 12% return for the city, Tippecanoe County and the Tippecanoe School Corp.
“We have successfully negotiated that up to 20%,” Easter told the redevelopment commission Wednesday. “This will more than cover our property tax loss over the course of the next five years, as we progressively lose more and more taxes because of Senate Bill 1. … We do have an agreement in hand. We have just about everything that we’ve asked for.”
The West Lafayette Redevelopment Commission on Wednesday put the final touches on redrawn maps – on hold for more than a year – that pulled the SK hynix property out of a local, city-controlled tax increment financing district to allow the state to establish the Innovation Development District at the site. The city had held off on the final step on that move until this week, pending final negotiations with the IEDC.
The full, 30-year agreement on SK hynix-generated revenues hadn’t been filed on the IEDC’s transparency portal, as of Thursday morning.
But Easter gave the broad strokes after Wednesday’s Redevelopment Commission meeting, including:
