The Grayslake Lawsuit: Nine Neighbors Sue to Void a 472 Acre, 1.55 Gigawatt Data Center Campus

Cornerstone is a 641 acre, $750 million mixed-use development that Alter Asset Management, an affiliate of The Alter Group, has been assembling at the edge of Grayslake for years. According to the complaint, between September 2024 and May 2025 the Grayslake Village Board took a series of actions that converted most of it into a single hyperscale data center campus for T5 Data Centers: 472 acres, more than 10 million square feet, and a power draw of about 1.55 gigawatts supplied by ComEd with diesel backup generation on site.

The plaintiffs allege four distinct violations. First, that the approvals departed from the village's comprehensive planning framework so sharply that they violated substantive due process. Second, that public participation was inadequate: notices described the project only as T5@Chicago IV, a code name that told neighbors nothing, and the September 9, 2024 hearing that eliminated the remaining residential uses on the site lasted 61 seconds with zero public comment. Third, that village officials violated the Illinois Open Meetings Act by conducting public business over personal email and devices. Fourth, that the village approved a data center under a zoning ordinance that contains no data center category at all.

The complaint adds texture that a court will notice. Six village officials, it says, publicly described the development as set in line and 20 years advanced before the public process concluded. A consultant told the Army Corps of Engineers, in a wetland assessment, that the project enjoyed broad community acceptance. And the campus's utility infrastructure, the plaintiffs say, extends into residential neighborhoods, which is how a 1.55 gigawatt campus becomes a next-door problem.

The lead plaintiff is the Preservation of Community Well-being Collective LLC, joined by nine individual residents. Five of them live in Saddlebrook Farms, an age-restricted community in Round Lake Park with Grayslake mailing addresses, directly across Alleghany Road from the site. They are represented by Chloe A. Russell of the Law Office of Ronald D. Cummings in Plainfield, the same firm behind the Joliet Technology Center lawsuit filed two months earlier, which makes Grayslake the second front in a coordinated Illinois challenge to fast-tracked hyperscale approvals.

The relief requested is total: declare the 2024 and 2025 approvals invalid, void the development agreement, and permanently enjoin the village from issuing further permits based on those approvals. That is the same shape of remedy that killed the Prince William Digital Gateway in Virginia, where a public notice defect voided a rezoning for the largest proposed campus in the world.

T5's chief executive, Pete Marin, has framed the project in fiscal terms: $1.5 billion in new taxes and fees over its life, including more than half a billion dollars in new revenue for local school districts, and more than 1,600 jobs. In response to the suit, he said the company had volunteered to suspend its wetland remediation permit application indefinitely, a step that pauses one federal approval while the state court case proceeds.

The village's defense has not yet been filed as of this writing. Expect the arguments Joliet has already made in its case: that industrial zoning and a project name adequately describe a project's nature, that state law does not require notices to specify an end use, and that voiding action taken at an open public meeting is too extreme a remedy for a notice defect. Whether Illinois courts accept that framing is the question both cases now put in front of them.

Meanwhile the county is moving on its own. The Lake County Board scheduled a public hearing for August 18, 2026 on a potential data center moratorium for unincorporated areas, part of a wave that has now reached 40 states, tracked in our moratorium tracker.

If a large project near you was approved before you understood what it was, the Grayslake complaint is a checklist for what to pull from the public record:

• The notices. What did they actually say? A code name or a bare zoning classification, with no description of the use, is the fact that voided the Digital Gateway and anchors this case.
• The minutes and the video. How long was the hearing? Who spoke? A 61 second approval of a 472 acre change is evidence on its face.
• The zoning code itself. Does it contain the use that was approved? If a data center is not a listed use, the approval may be outside the board's authority.
• Officials' communications. Open meetings and public records requests for emails and texts about the project are how the personal-device allegation here was built.

Then move fast. Challenges to land use approvals run on short clocks, sometimes 30 days from the decision, and our deadlines guide explains why waiting is the most common way these cases die. Our guide to fighting a proposed data center covers the substance. And our free case review connects you with an independent attorney in our network who handles data center cases in your state, at no cost and with no obligation.