ESSEX, Ill. – It’s been two days since we first told you about Constellation Energy buying several hundred acres of land in or near the Village of Essex and it’s still anyone’s guess what they are going to do with all of that land.

Fox Chicago’s Unit 32 brought you this story and our Bret Buganski is still on the hunt for some answers.

“My thought is, well, I think we lost our butts and our house because we bought it at the premium golf course price and now we are essentially could be having a data center in our backyard,” Essex resident Taylor Gunier said.

Gunier and her family moved into this house last summer.

She has spent the last year working with other concerned residents to figure out what Constellation is going to do with the 700 acres of land they have purchased in and around Essex from June 2025 to February 2026.

Data center in Essex?

The backstory:

Following a Freedom of Information request to the Kankakee County Recorder, a Unit 32 investigation found Constellation spent $47.5 million dollars in fourteen different land deals.  

Property records reviewed by Fox Chicago show the company purchased at least 505 acres in just nine months. The total is likely higher because some of the public records did not include the number of acres sold each time.
Unit 32 also found that two Essex Village Board members were sellers in five of those transactions.

“Essex does not have any industrial zoning ordinances, which I think is part of why Constellation chose us. We would have been an easy target with few regulations for them to abide by,” said Essex resident Kylee Raney.

Raney is part of the Essex Coalition, a group of concerned residents following every move between the Essex Village Board and Constellation Energy.

It has also been making some of its own moves.

“We’ve worked with a third party consultant and we have built out a draft of industrial zoning ordinances. They are based off of the Kankakee County industrial zoning ordinances along with some ordinances from Yorkville and the data center that is being built there. So we made sure to keep the language broad so it could cover a multitude of industrial uses, but we wanted to make sure the umbrella of that language included data centers. So we have a petition and we have doubled the numbers of our signatures there. The petition is to urge our village board members to pass industrial zoning ordinances. Even if you don’t know what they’re gonna build, even if Constellation doesn’t have their customer yet, you can put protections, legal protections, legally binding protections in place to ensure that we can mitigate noise pollution, sound pollution, we can monitor water usage. There are lots of avenues that we can take to build out the regulations to protect our future. No matter what happens,” Raney said.

While Raney says Constellation has not told them what they’re going to use the land for, the village board seems to be taking precautions for a data center.

On their website, the Essex Village Board wrote it “… has issued a formal notice establishing development standards and mitigation requirements for a proposed data center facility that may be located within the village.”

It also posted a letter. The subject line says it is a notice about “development standards and required mitigation response plan” for a data center.

What they’re saying:

“Now, as far as buying that big land in Illinois, there could be multiple reasons. I don’t know what they’re going do with it,” said Mohammad Shahidapur, a distinguished professor of electrical and computer engineering at the Illinois Institute of Technology.

Shahidapur has been teaching for 43 years.

Given his background, we asked him for his objective opinion as to what Constellation could be doing with all of this land. 

“They could be building a big solar farm because having a nuclear unit, we can sort of reduce the issues because sun doesn’t shine all the time. So then once the sun is shining, you know, basically, they can sell that and then when the sun is not shining they can replace it by nuclear. That could be one reason. They could be also going after data centers in a sense maybe they’re lining up with some of these tech companies to build more data centers and providing power through their nuclear units, so it’s sort of a joint venture,” Shahidapur said

The statement Constellation sent us when our story first aired says in part: “Constellation is seeking to annex land into Essex near the Braidwood Clean Energy Center to help the company strategically market the facility’s carbon-free generation to potential future developers.”

“So, obviously, I’m not an insider at the company, but if I’m a betting man, I would bet based on buying a bunch of land, looking to annex it, that they’re looking to build out one of these data centers,” said Andrew Rocco, a stock strategist with Zacks Investment Research based in Chicago.

Rocco’s focus is on the tech industry and where it overlaps with the energy sector.

So we also asked him for his unofficial analysis on what he thinks Constellation may do with the 700 acres of land they purchased in and around Essex:

“Braidwood is the largest nuclear plant in Illinois. And as I mentioned before, getting these nuclear facilities through the regulatory red tape, even though kind of the Trump administration has said they’re pro-nuclear, but still there’s a ton of regulatory red tape and really nothing has been approved in the last 10 or 20 years. So having this already built out, I think it does around 2,400 megawatts of carbon-free baseload electricity. So this is exactly what these large tech companies are looking for. They’re looking for an immense amount of energy, dependable and clean. Now you can look at natural gas as an alternative to something like this, because obviously the startup costs are going to be lower for natural gas. And natural gas is very, very cheap. And it makes up the most amount of energy produced in the U.S. currently. But once you have a nuclear reactor already running, this one’s been running since the late 80s, you don’t have to worry about that. So the upfront costs have already been paid for. Now they’re looking likely to secure this large plot of land nearby to put a data center in and just connect it right up to that massive nuclear plant.”

Again — that is Rocco’s unofficial opinion on what Constellation may be doing with all that land.

Unit 32 reached out to Constellation to see if they would tell us what was going to happen with all of the land they bought in and around Essex. They told us that since they do not have a customer, they do not have any plans.

CEDAR RAPIDS, Iowa (KCRG) – Syringes from injectable weight loss medications are turning up in drug drop-off boxes across eastern Iowa, creating a safety hazard for law enforcement officers who handle the containers.

Sgt. Erich Lear of the Linn County Sheriff’s Office said emptying the drug drop-off box is part of his daily routine — and the box fills fast.

“It’s probably a 30-gallon tote, and I’d say 3 out of the five days of the week it’s completely full,” Lear said.

Needles found mixed in with other medications

Lear said he has noticed over the past five years that people are placing medicine, nasal sprays and syringes in the bin. He said many of the syringes come from people discarding GLP-1 medications such as Ozempic and Wegovy.

“That tote that I pull out — there’s nothing that protects me from needles other than my observation and using gloves when I sort through things,” Lear said.

The Hiawatha Police Department said it is also seeing an increase in improperly discarded syringes.

Where syringes should go

The Cedar Rapids Linn County Solid Waste Agency is the proper disposal site for sharps. The agency said it has seen syringe intake increase by more than a ton in recent years.

“We’re talking about two thousand pounds of sharps and syringes coming in,” said Joe Horaney of the solid waste agency. “Before 2021 we were around 1.9, maybe 2 tons a year — now we are over 3 tons a year.”

Horaney said any Linn County resident can bring syringes to the facility, provided they are contained properly.

“We just ask that you have it in a heavy plastic container — so one of those medically certified red biohazard containers,” Horaney said. “If you don’t have that, it can be a heavy plastic container like an old laundry detergent [bottle].”

A third-party company picks up the sharps from the facility and incinerates them.

Some drop-off programs discontinued

Lear said another reason sharps are appearing at drop-off locations is that some agencies have ended their disposal programs. The Marion Police Department said it stopped offering the service after people continued to place broken glass, liquids and other garbage inside the box.