Development blending Lafayette to Lebanon … and other predictions
Some takeaways and predictions when two mayors and a county commission give a state of a growing community to business leaders Tuesday. Plus, Buddy Guy booked at Loeb Stadium. And that T-Mobile outage
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DEVELOPMENT BLENDING LAFAYETTE TO LEBANON … AND OTHER PREDICTIONS
Amid the regular round of touting and celebrating bipartisan cooperation between Greater Lafayette’s governmental units and Purdue, there were some interesting takeaways about where and how Lafayette and West Lafayette are growing from an annual state of the community session at the Tippecanoe County Fairgrounds.
“It is a big jigsaw puzzle with a lot of pieces and a lot of moving parts that have to fit together right to be able to get these things done,” Lafayette Mayor Tony Roswarski told a lunch crowd hosted by Greater Lafayette Commerce.
Here are a few of the moments and predictions, along with some news, supplied by Roswarski, West Lafayette Mayor Erin Easter and Tippecanoe County Commissioner David Byers during a Q&A session with Chad Pittman, the recently appointed CEO of Purdue Research Foundation.
A CORRIDOR THAT BLENDS LAFAYETTE AND LEBANON?: Much of the hourlong session was devoted to assorted infrastructure projects – streets and roads, wastewater plant expansion, utilities work and the sort – that Easter chalked up to the cities and counties working together and “doing a lot of behind-the-scene things” to anticipate growth. That includes prepping for construction and all that follows when South Korean chip manufacturer SK hynix arrives with its $3.87 billion facility in the Purdue Research Park in West Lafayette. Production of high-bandwidth memory used to feed the artificial intelligence market is expected to start by the second half of 2028 and eventually create an estimated 1,000 jobs in a facility along Yeager Road.
“We want to continue to be able to grow,” Roswarski said. “We know that’s important, because there is no standing still in the global economy. You are either going forward or you're going backwards. There's no just maintaining, so we always have to be continuing to plan and (asking) how do we look forward and then balance that with how do we pay for those projects and how do we recoup that investment.”
Roswarski outlined more than $100 million being spent now on the city’s wastewater capacity, as well as sewer and water lines aimed to the south and southwest of Lafayette, into what the city calls areas 11A and 11B. The idea is to initially feed 1,000 acres for residential and commercial lots in the next 22 months and eventually open up 5,200 acres that cover much of the land south of Lafayette.
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“We've seen a lot of growth there,” Roswarski said. “We'll continue to see growth there.”
Roswarski’s prediction for Greater Lafayette’s section of what Purdue calls the Hard Tech Corridor, running down Interstate 65, past the 9,000-acre LEAP district 30 miles south in Lebanon and on to Indianapolis?
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