Loaves and Fishes Community Services is set to expand its food distribution center in Aurora, despite a temporary pause on warehouses in the city, after the Aurora City Council recently approved an exception for the food pantry.
Included in the 180-day moratorium on warehouses and data centers, which was passed by the Aurora City Council in September, is a hardship appeal process for those who had already made substantial investments into a development but weren’t able to apply before the moratorium went into effect. Loaves and Fishes is so far the only organization to have gone through that appeals process.
Mike Havala, the nonprofit’s president and CEO, told the Aurora City Council on Nov. 25 that his organization was working to expand its food distribution hub at 580 Exchange Court when the moratorium came down. Loaves and Fishes is the state’s largest food pantry, he said, and about half of the 10,000 people it serves each week are from Aurora.
In the last four years since the hub opened, the nonprofit has tripled the number of people it serves and expanded the area it serves people in while reducing related costs by 40%, Havala said. Expanding the hub will help the organization’s work in collaborating with other nonprofits and will help it be agile in responding to things like when SNAP benefits weren’t being paid during the recent federal government shutdown, he said.
The expansion is expected to take the food distribution hub from 30,000 square feet to around 62,000 square feet with four times the amount of cold storage space and three times the amount of dry storage space, according to Havala. He said the roughly $8 million investment will double or triple the number of people currently being served.
Land was purchased for the expansion project in 2023, and much of this year has been spent engineering the project, Havala said. The organization was close to submitting an application for its permit, he said, when the moratorium in Aurora was put in place at the end of September.
Already, the nonprofit has invested $4.1 million plus two-and-a-half years into the project, according to Havala. He said delays due to the moratorium could cause further funding to fall through, among other impacts.
To go through the temporary moratorium’s hardship appeals process, an applicant has to prove that the moratorium has or will cause an economic hardship on them, that they can’t get a reasonable return on the property if the project isn’t allowed, that substantial investment was made before the moratorium without knowing it was going to happen, that the project would be allowed in this area if not for the moratorium and that the project follows all other city codes, according to Aurora Director of Zoning and Planning Tracey Vacek.
The Aurora City Council unanimously approved Loaves and Fishes’ exception to the moratorium at the meeting Nov. 25. Construction on the project is expected to start in 2026 and be done by 2027, according to Havala.
The moratorium was put in place to give staff time to research ways to mitigate the various impacts of data centers, which are currently classified as warehouses under the city’s code, then report recommendations for new guidelines back to City Council. At the time, staff cited an increased number of applications and residents’ concerns with existing facilities as reasons for needing the temporary pause on the approval of data center and warehouse proposals.
The temporary moratorium is in effect until late March 2026 but could be extended an additional 30 days. Aurora Mayor John Laesch previously said that the moratorium could be shorter if a code change is drafted before the end of the six-month pause, and city staff members said they will be presenting an update in 90 days.
During the moratorium, the city isn’t accepting or approving applications for new data center or warehouse developments or expansions of existing facilities, though there are several exceptions to this rule, such as the hardship appeals process Loaves and Fishes went through.
Also exempted are projects with completed applications filed before the moratorium went into effect, routine maintenance or repairs at existing data centers that do not increase capacity and public safety or emergency facilities operated by government bodies. There is also a conditional processing of new applications for developers with time-sensitive projects, but those applications will need to be modified to fit any new regulations that may eventually be passed by the Aurora City Council, staff previously said.
The ultimate goal of the temporary moratorium is to clarify the data center and warehouse development process while making sure that long-term community and environmental impacts are addressed before construction. Staff have said that any new rules eventually adopted would not apply to those developments with applications submitted before the moratorium was approved.
rsmith@chicagotribune.com
