Lebanon

No aid stations, no crew, no shade.

He's a mechanical design engineer, race director, woodworker, and podcaster from Lebanon, Indiana.

And seven years ago, he couldn't walk 100 yards without supplemental oxygen.

This is what happened between then and now.

We're going to talk about this drama with all the trucking companies in Greenwood.

We're going to talk about this... police station referendum in Lebanon.

We're going to talk about the mayor of Noblesville under fire for naming a street after his kid.

We're going to talk about Republicans trying to get rid of the death penalty in Indiana.

I'm not going to give you the campaign reports anymore.

You got to go to Boone County.

He's like, yes, you're here at 10 o'clock in the morning as the mayor of Lebanon, retweeting back and forth with Indy Reporter, getting paid by taxpayers.

And you don't have the time to just email your campaign reports.

And so this is gonna create a very durable, robust system for years to come in the fight against SCN.

So what does that look like in a field? This is a field just outside of, Lebanon, Indiana.

And as you can tell, it's a no-till environment.

Down here on the left, you can see a picture of what this looks like.

I drive by this meta data center.

They're building in Lebanon, Indiana, like once a week.

And this thing is literally four square mile.

It's four miles wide and four miles long.

And they normally host a sectional or sometime in the tournament.

But yeah, that's a neat one to Lebanon's got an old one.

That's really cool where Rick Mount played that.

I would highly recommend if you stop by Lebanon to go walk through there and it's called memory hall, but it's downtown Lebanon.

That's really neat in that area too.

Appropriately named.

Welcome to Least of These, where I cover the cases that need it most, because every life matters and everyone deserves justice.

I'm your host, Leah D., and today I'll be covering the case of Donald Bowers in Lebanon, Indiana.

Let's get right to it.

[rock music] Halfway between downtown Indianapolis and Purdue University, nestled in the countryside, is the city of Lebanon, Indiana.

Lebanon has that quintessential small-town feel, a place with a historic downtown, quiet residential neighborhoods, beautiful Boone County farmland, and more than 100 acres of public parks, all this according to Life In Indy.

For a city with a population of roughly 16,000, it's about as safe as any other city its size in the United States, and Lebanon was home to 64-year-old Donald Bowers.

Donnie, as he was known by most of his friends, lived in an old established residential neighborhood in the 500 block of Southwest Street on the southwest side of Lebanon with his dog, Peanut.

According to his friends and family, Donnie, who was disabled and required the use of a wheelchair, well, Donnie just never met a stranger.

Employment is high during construction, but generally dips for operation.

I live in Lebanon, and Meta is spending millions on roads, infrastructure, and community programs.

Are they paying for investments in the electric grid to operate? This is important so those one-time upgrades don't fall on existing customers.

Companies in the beginning of the data center boom weren't paying those costs.

What about the water? Some communities have plenty of water resources and some don't.

If water supply is ample, that is a big part of the equation.

But if, like Lebanon, water has to be brought in via an extended pipeline, it might not be the right fit.

And where will the wastewater go? These are all considerations you should research.

But you do have, you know, pockets, obviously, central Indiana that we have a ton of infrastructure projects in Indianapolis right now.

You know, Lily's building a huge project out in Lebanon, Indiana.

Yeah.

And then

Yeah.

We've had a lot

of workers working on the Lebanon project here in Indiana.

And then we've had a few that have done some really cool stuff out in New York City.

I was talking with Brock Timmons.

Timmons Feed, they're in Lebanon, Indiana, a great TTF dealer, but also is part of the committee that puts on Indiana Youth Expo.

He said they had, and I'm going to get the numbers wrong, I think it was a little over 800 exhibitors.

1,750 head of livestock across four barns, all at the Boone County Fairgrounds this weekend.

I think the first time we made that happen, we traded him some rye whiskey for a pickup truck full of peat.

And from there, we've been working with Sugar Creek Malt Company in Lebanon, Indiana, local family-owned maltster who runs their own – farm where they get a lot of their malted barley and also runs a consortium of different farms to get other varieties of malted barley.

And they've been smoking our peated malt ever since.

And it's been awesome.

They didn't replant that.

They started moving to different varieties.

And effectively, you know, had become almost extinct until our craft monster had brought back a five gram packet of seeds from a seed bank in in Europe, planted them in Lebanon, Indiana.

And then spent about six years growing that crop until we finally had enough to make available to, you know, in a very small amount to brewers.