HANCOCK COUNTY – A summit open to the public is coming up next week to celebrate the growth in the western part of the county and discuss its future.
The first ever Mount Comfort Development Summit will highlight the corridor along Hancock County’s Mount Comfort Road, or CR 600W, as well as the surrounding region. Along with unincorporated parts of the county, the area also includes McCordsville, Cumberland, New Palestine and east Indianapolis.
The area has drawn a multitude of developments in recent years, but also resistance from existing residents reporting the changes are diminishing their quality of life.
At the upcoming event, leaders from the public and private sectors will present and discuss projects underway in the region and how the growth can be continued.
Updates will be provided on several projects, including Hancock Gateway Park, a business park Hancock Health is spearheading at Mount Comfort Road and I-70 that kicked off in 2019 with a medical facility. Since then, development has started on an aging-in-place campus and a Starbucks. Development on a pediatric oral surgery office is slated to start this fall.
The summit will also include an update on McCord Square, a 48-acre mixed-use project Fishers-based Rebar Development is leading in the southeast corner of Mount Comfort Road and Broadway in McCordsville.
Indianapolis Regional Airport and the town of Cumberland will also provide updates at the summit.
Panel discussions at the event will include Quality of Life: Increasing vibrancy, attractiveness, sustainability, and affordability; Innovation & Entrepreneurship: Attract and retain innovators, entrepreneurs, and businesses; Talent & Workforce: Attract, train, and retrain a talented and highly skilled workforce; and Diversity, Equity & Inclusion: Increasing diversity and promoting equitable and inclusive development.
Christine Owens, Cumberland assistant town manager, will be on the summit’s Quality of Life panel.
“For us, this is a continuation of the work we’ve been doing for years along the Mount Comfort Road Corridor, to collaborate together, have a shared vision and try to move forward,” Owens said. “There’s a lot of exciting things happening along the corridor, whether it’s north of (Interstate) 70 and south of 70, so we thought it was a great time to get everybody back.”
In 2019, the Urban Land Institute conducted a study on the corridor envisioning sustainable growth along it. The Coalition for Smart Growth, made up of the towns of Cumberland, McCordsville and New Palestine as well as Hancock Health, Greenfield Banking Company and utility provider NineStar Connect, formed to implement the study’s vision.
The coalition hired The Veridus Group, an Indianapolis consulting firm, to manage a planning effort for the corridor resulting in a land use plan, housing gap analysis, economic impact report and traffic analysis. Hancock County leaders adopted the land use plan last year to help guide zoning decisions on the project-heavy corridor until the forthcoming adoption of the county’s comprehensive plan update.
Jim Rawlinson, a project executive with The Veridus Group, noted how the vision for the corridor gained an advantage last year when the state’s Regional Economic Acceleration and Development Initiative, or READI program, awarded $5 million to the 70-40 Mt. Comfort Corridor Region. That group, made up of partners representing western Hancock County and eastern Marion County, will use those funds for regional economic development projects.
“I think this is really an opportunity to take the recommendations from the county comp(rehensive) plan, the READI submission and the Mount Comfort Corridor plan and really start celebrating the successes that we’ve had, and start looking at the future of what that can look like to try to drive a higher level of development along the corridor out here, to provide a better quality of life for the folks that live and work there,” Rawlinson said. “We’ve seen a lot of development happen so far and that investment has been good. Now we’re going on to the next stage of that development – looking at housing, and signage, and beautification and quality of life.”
The Mount Comfort Development Summit is 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. Sept. 15 at the Indianapolis Regional Airport, 3867 N. Aviation Way, Greenfield. Registration can be completed online at https://bit.ly/3Tv6t6b.
“If you’re interested in western Hancock County and eastern Marion County, there will be a lot of great people in the room to talk to,” Rawlinson said.
