Gary Common Council members are back at the table with a familiar question: As AI data centers multiply across northern Indiana, who ends up paying for the power they need?
Kerwin Olson, executive director of the Citizens Action Coalition, argued at a public forum Wednesday that residents already squeezed by rising NIPSCO bills could be next in line.
For Gary residents, the discussion comes as utility bills have already climbed sharply. According to figures presented at the forum, NIPSCO residential electric bills for 1,000 kilowatt-hours of usage increased by about $83 a month between 2023 and 2025. Natural gas bills rose roughly $36 a month over the same period, among the steepest increases for Indiana’s five investor-owned utilities.
Layered on top of that is the fallout from NIPSCO’s gas meter errors, which left more than 3,500 customers billed for roughly twice their actual usage after mechanical meter indexes were installed incorrectly. The company did not report the error to state regulators for nearly a year after discovering it. The Citizens Action Coalition, which led Wednesday’s forum at Gary police headquarters, said it plans to file testimony pushing for full refunds for those customers, calling the utility’s handling of the issue “egregious.”
The coalition argues that data centers, which the group says can consume more electricity than Indiana’s largest steel mills or refineries, are not paying their fair share of the infrastructure built to support them.
The group pointed to NIPSCO’s deal with Amazon’s New Carlisle data center campus, which is planned to include more than 30 buildings and has already involved pumping billions of gallons of water from the site during construction.
NIPSCO has said the arrangement will return $1 billion in credits to ratepayers. The coalition contends that if Amazon paid the same transmission rates as existing industrial customers, that figure should be closer to $3.5 billion, a gap the group frames as a shortfall Gary and other NIPSCO ratepayers are absorbing.
Central to that dispute is GenCo, the NIPSCO subsidiary created to build power plants dedicated to data centers. NIPSCO says separating those projects from its traditional rate base protects existing customers. The citizens coalition counters that the structure also means data centers won’t help shoulder “legacy” costs, such as coal ash cleanup, leaving residential ratepayers to cover those bills alone.
Advocates also raised Senate Enrolled Act 424, which allows utilities to charge ratepayers for “project development costs” tied to future nuclear projects, even if those projects are never built. Council Vice President Darren Washington was direct about who could be hit hardest.
“Are we really going to force low-income households, working-class Hoosiers, single moms, retirees, disabled veterans to pay project development costs for a company like Google that has a balance sheet in excess of $4 trillion?” he asked.
Community organizer Carolyn McCrady also highlighted what she described as the health risks posed by data centers and the financial “trap” created by state tax policies.
“It’s amazing how Senate Bill 1 fits into the plans of exploiters of working-class people,” McCrady said. “They put cities and towns in a situation where they’re going to go under, and then they have to accept these data centers.”
Wednesday’s forum, the council’s second this year on the issue, fell on the same day the Indiana Utility Regulatory Commission announced a formal investigation into “trackers,” the bill riders utilities use to pass infrastructure and other costs on to customers outside of standard rate cases.
The inquiry, one of two opened as part of the commission’s energy affordability report released Wednesday, will examine how those mechanisms operate under the state’s new multiyear rate plan created by House Enrolled Act 1002.
For the citizens council and the local officials pushing back on data center costs, the tracker investigation is effectively a parallel front in the same fight. Both are arguments over who absorbs the cost of the state’s utility buildout: ordinary ratepayers, or the industries driving the new demand.
Amid those unresolved questions, some officials and advocates urged the city to consider pausing future data center development.
Michaela Spangenberg with the Gary Education Coalition urged the council to take immediate protective measures by way of a moratorium.
“What a moratorium does among other things is buy you time,” Spangenberg said. “We need something to protect us now.”
Washington was the most explicit in his support for the idea, stating, “I am definitely not against a moratorium but not without consultation and working with our executive branch first”. He emphasized that such a move should be done in unison with the mayor’s office to allow for more research to be completed.
