The ILPA questionnaire roughly 89 percent of private equity funds use has no line for a zoning moratorium

Packed chambers, September 22, 2025. Before the Indianapolis City-County Council could take the vote, petition counsel stood up and announced that Deep Meadow Ventures LLC was withdrawing its rezoning request. Deep Meadow Ventures was Google. The company had assembled 467.66 acres of Franklin Township farmland, cleared the Metropolitan Development Commission 8-1 on August 20, and then watched the politics collapse: 17 of 25 councilors publicly opposed and more than 2,400 petition signatures against. District 20 Councilor Michael-Paul Hart had used the council call-down mechanism to force the petition out of the administrative track and into a full political vote. Reported project scale, roughly $1 billion. It ended without a roll call.

Now run the tape backward. Past the hearings and the land assembly, all the way to the capital.

The most standardized diligence document in private markets

Somewhere upstream of every vehicle that buys farmland for hyperscale development sits an allocator, and that allocator almost certainly ran the Institutional Limited Partners Association's Due Diligence Questionnaire. Roughly 89 percent of private equity funds use it, and a 2026 update added real estate modules. It is the closest thing private markets have to a universal instrument, and it is genuinely good at what it does: track-record attribution, fee and carry mechanics, valuation policy, GP alignment, compliance history, key-person terms.

What it does is manager diligence. Every question aims at the firm.

There is no line for a moratorium.

Nothing in the standard instrument asks whether the jurisdictions where the manager intends to deploy have organized against the product the manager intends to build. Not a soft prompt about regulatory frameworks. A real line, with proper nouns in it: which counties in your pipeline states have enacted or advanced moratoriums against your use type in the last 24 months?

What that line would have said about Indiana

It would have said plenty, because the record was loud. Four rural Indiana counties moved against data centers in a ten-month window, and each one left paper.

Marshall County passed the first Indiana county data-center moratorium in February 2025. Commissioner Stan Klotz explained the reasoning on the record: "Basically, we didn't like what we saw going on around us in other areas, and we just weren't quite totally sure how to respond." That is a defensive moratorium, triggered by activity elsewhere rather than a local filing, and it became the template. White County followed on October 20, 2025, on a 2-1 vote. Putnam County passed a one-year moratorium in November covering wind, solar, data centers, and small modular reactors under a single hold. Starke County's Planning Commission voted unanimously on December 4, 2025, to block any data-center proposal over 5,000 square feet, at a meeting relocated to the Knox High School auditorium because the planning office could not hold the crowd.

A venue change is a data point. When a planning commission needs a high-school auditorium, the political math is already settled.

Franklin Township itself was readable before Google filed in March 2025. D-A agricultural zoning meant a full discretionary rezoning. Flood Fringe and Floodway overlays sat on the petitioned parcels, visible in Marion County GIS. The council call-down mechanism made commission approval a checkpoint rather than a finish line. An active $192.9 million AES Indiana rate case handed opponents a household-electric-bill argument for free. A cited pre-filing read scored the site 25/100 at filing, on structural risk alone. By August, with the opposition organized, 2/100.

Two instruments, one blind spot

Here is the uncomfortable part for anyone who has ever chaired an investment committee. Every DDQ answer on a capital chain behind a deal like Franklin Township could have been immaculate. Honest GP. Clean references. Top-quartile attribution and sensible, aligned economics. The instrument would have returned a pass, because the instrument tests the manager, and the manager was not the problem.

The problem was county-level policy contagion moving at a measurable cadence, four counties in ten months, accelerating, connected by a single statewide advocacy organization. Citizens Action Coalition's program organizer Bryce Gustafson described the doctrine plainly: "Once the barn door gets open on that stuff, it makes it easier for the horses to get through." None of that lives in a manager's data room. All of it lives in county minutes and commissioner quotes on the record.

Manager diligence and jurisdiction diligence are different instruments. Allocators run the first with industrial rigor and mostly do not run the second at all, and the gap is not small. Indiana still has no state backstop: HB 1333, the bill that could preempt local moratoriums, was still pending in the 2026 session, which means every rural Indiana data-center thesis is gated on a statehouse outcome the questionnaire will never surface.

My bet is that ILPA adds a jurisdiction-level entitlement question to the real estate module within two update cycles, and that the first draft will be written so generally, something like "describe your approach to land-use risk," that a manager can answer it without naming a single county. The version that matters has names and dates in it.

Ask the question the form does not

If you allocate to real assets, you do not have to wait for the standards body. Next time a manager pitches a strategy with a heavy entitlement component, set the DDQ aside for five minutes and ask three things. Which jurisdictions in your pipeline have active or advancing moratoriums against this use type? What did the last hostile hearing in your target market look like, and did anyone on your team read the minutes? What is your kill rate before the LOI?

A manager who answers with names and dates has a process. A manager who answers with a slide about secular tailwinds is asking you to fund the next 467 acres of withdrawn farmland, and this time the warning will have been sitting in the public record the whole way down, distributed to everyone except the questionnaire.