Decatur City Council amends ordinance that will allow new slaughterhouse to be built

FORT WAYNE, Ind. (Fort Wayne’s NBC) - Decatur City Council unanimously voted amended a city ordinance at Tuesday night’s meeting that bans slaughterhouses within city limits.

Neighbors have spent months fighting that plan because they don’t want a new slaughterhouse to be built at the old Dean Plant.

Right after Tuesday’s meeting, Mayor Dan Rickord that he’s excited to move forward on this project. He says it will help expand the city’s economy, but he says he realizes not everyone is buying into the idea of building a slaughterhouse in Decatur.

While all five council members voted in favor of the amendment, members of the community have been outspoken against the plan for months. Many of them say they believe the site should be outside city limits and away from neighborhoods because they’re concerned about bad smells and noise. However, developers say people won’t have to worry about those concerns because they say they have ways of keeping that under control.

Mayor Rickord says owners of IO Property Group, the development company in charge of this project, did a good job explaining why they believe this would be good for Decatur.

“I think a lot of it was education and I think a lot was just that the people who were for it weren’t out at the meetings, and when I think they realized that if they want to see our city grew, then they realized they need to show up at the meetings,” Rickord said.

Tuesday’s vote came after of nearly five months of public debate. During a meeting in March, things were quite tense among members of the community and city council. That tense environment seemed to calm over time.

Rickord says that if everything goes according to plan, he expects the facility to open in about year.

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