LEAP is not a side story in Indiana.
It is the state’s marquee economic-development project.
The Indiana Economic Development Corporation — the state’s taxpayer-funded economic-development arm — describes LEAP Lebanon as a 9,000+ acre innovation district along Indiana’s I-65 Hard Tech Corridor, with land ready for manufacturing, research and development facilities, and corporate campuses.
Lilly has announced that it is building a $9 billion, 800-acre research and manufacturing campus within LEAP.
Meta has broken ground on a $10 billion, 1,500-acre data center designed for one gigawatt of capacity — roughly enough power for 800,000 homes.
The Indiana Capital Chronicle reported that LEAP spending was nearing $1 billion, with the projected budget shielded.
And LEAP is now at the center of public fights over water, wastewater, Eagle Creek Reservoir, utility infrastructure, and who pays for Indiana’s next generation of mega-development. WFYI reported that 21 of 25 Indianapolis City-County councilors warned about a proposed deal that could send up to 25 million gallons of water per day from Indianapolis sources, including Eagle Creek Reservoir, to Lebanon Utilities by 2031, with treated industrial wastewater then piped back toward Eagle Creek Reservoir.
Billions of dollars.
Thousands of acres.
Pharmaceutical manufacturing.
Data centers.
Water.
Power.
Public money.
Private development.
And continuing questions about transparency: how publicly funded economic development works in Indiana, who benefits, and what the public can actually see.
LEAP sits inside a larger IEDC transparency problem
In 2025, Governor Mike Braun ordered an independent forensic audit of the IEDC after reporting raised questions about related entities, possible misuse of public money, missing financial reports, and potential conflicts of interest.
When FTI Consulting’s review was released, it said the review was intended to provide transparency into past practices, assess governance and conflicts of interest, and strengthen public trust. FTI reported 45 unique findings and observations related to conflicts of interest, compliance, and financial oversight, including gaps in governance and inadequate policies and procedures.
Axios summarized the findings as involving lack of oversight, conflicts of interest, inadequate management, and concerns about favoritism and misuse of public funds. Axios also reported that FTI identified 30 entities and 52 agreements in which an IEDC board member or employee had a potential conflict of interest and the entity received IEDC funding.
That matters here because LEAP is not just a land-development story.
It is also a story about opacity.
Public money moving through development structures.
Private businesses working near state power.
Public-private relationships ordinary taxpayers cannot easily or fully see.
And, soon, private investment structures that can be largely invisible to the public.
Pure was not a minor vendor
The IEDC audit brings Pure Development into the center of LEAP.
FTI wrote that its LEAP review included the selection and approval process involving LEAP’s primary third-party vendor, Pure Development, Inc.
FTI also reported that Pure’s initial agreement described Pure as acting on behalf of the IEDC to fully develop the property and prepare it for sale as a state-owned, commercially viable, shovel-ready innovation district for research and development, advanced manufacturing, technology, and life-sciences uses.
According to IEDC personnel interviewed by FTI, the original Pure contract was sole sourced, not competitively bid.
And in FTI’s table of non-land LEAP disbursements by vendor as of June 10, 2025, Pure was listed at $77,047,033 — 40% of the non-land total reviewed.
So Pure was not a side character.
Pure was the key private development name attached to IEDC’s biggest project.
Then Pure split open
The two equal partners behind the developer of IEDC’s marquee project started a bitter business divorce in July 2024 just as LEAP was ramping up.
That kind of fight is not small.
It is not a dispute over a few stray invoices.
It is a fight over control.
Projects.
Employees.
Relationships.
Fees.
Opportunities.
And money, including some of the taxpayer funds already distributed to Pure through the IEDC.
The trial court ordered Pure to dissolve. The IEDC mailed a letter to Chris Seger at Pure Development demanding that all IEDC agreements with Pure be assigned to Canopy 5, LLC, a new company that the same Chris Seger had formed months earlier. This effectively shut out his Pure partner.
A fight like that requires serious commercial litigation counsel.
Andrew Hull and his firm appeared for Drew Sanders, the Pure partner fighting the Canopy 5 transition.
For new readers, the name Andrew Hull matters.
Hull is the same Hoover Hull Turner lawyer who has been the lead attorney representing Valeo against me in the case I have been writing about — the case that began with Valeo pursuing a claim of $37,476.96 and has now lasted eleven years.
See Part 6: The Billion Dollar Litigator to catch up.
In full disclosure, as of May 2026, Hull withdrew from my case.
That has been one of the questions running through this series:
Why has a lawyer like Hull been involved in a case like mine?
A big commercial litigator in a major business divorce over control of IEDC’s main LEAP developer makes sense.
A big commercial litigator spending years helping a nearly $13 billion advisory firm pursue me over a disputed $37,476.96 claim has always looked different.
That contrast is part of why I kept looking.
And what I was missing.
Then Valeo appeared
In Pure’s litigation, Valeo appeared.
Not as a party.
Not as a plaintiff.
Not as a defendant.
But in a public filing.
One small sentence buried in an appellant brief:
“Valeo clients have a combined investment of $100 million in projects associated with Pure Development, Inc.”
The brief cites Trial Transcript Volume 6, page 57, identified as Schilling testimony, in a transcript range excluded from public access.
Mac Schilling is the CEO & President of TwoPointO Capital, LLC, Valeo’s in-house private real-estate manager. We'll see him again in a later post.
The brief also states that the public findings did not explain the relationship between Pure Development and Valeo.
That is the sentence.
That is the number.
$100 million.
Valeo-client money in projects associated with Pure Development.
Where it appeared
The placement of that sentence matters.
The $100 million Valeo-client statement appears in the section of the brief discussing Canopy 5 — the new company connected to one side of the Pure dispute.
That section says Seger laid the groundwork for taking Pure Development’s business to Canopy 5.
The public version then contains redactions.
Immediately after those redactions, the brief states that Valeo clients had $100 million invested in projects associated with Pure Development.
The surrounding redacted material points to PX1492 and Exhibit Volume 17, pages 232–236.
That is not speculation.
That is where the public filing puts the sentence.
Another court exhibit filed by Sanders’s side — Hull’s firm — includes an AI transcript excerpt from argument that reads:
We've seen work behind Drew's [Sanders] back with [Vallejo / Valeo] to create this plan that we're going to talk more about.
I am including that because it shows how thin the public window usually is.
A name in a transcript.
A bracketed uncertainty.
A redacted section.
An exhibit number.
A footnote.
A sentence.
That is often all the public gets to see.
Another excerpt should cause us all to pause:
If a Pure partner is demanding an accounting of $10 to $12 million of cash, how concerned should Hoosiers be about our $77 million, even more given the FTI conclusions of IEDC lack of oversight?
And in private investments, even this is far more than the public ever gets to see.
The legal filing showed the pull
This section of the series is about gravity.
Not in the sense of proving hidden conclusions.
In the sense of watching what moves around the same center.
Usually, hidden gravity is hard to prove directly.
You see bodies move.
You see names repeat.
You see projects overlap.
You see lawyers reappear.
You see public money and private money move near each other.
Then you ask why.
But here, we have something unusual.
A legal filing stated the pull directly.
Valeo clients had $100 million invested in projects associated with Pure Development.
Without that litigation, the public trail would have been much thinner.
One obscure Nevada business article described Pure Development’s capital partner as Valeo Real Estate 2.0 of Carmel, Indiana, connected to multiple Tahoe Reno Industrial Center sites.
But the Pure litigation put a number on the relationship.
$100 million.
The relationship was important enough to appear in the appellate brief.
The cited testimony appears in material excluded from public access.
And nearby references appear around redacted portions of the public filing.
What the record does not show
What the public record shows is narrower.
Pure Development was IEDC’s key LEAP development vendor.
Pure was paid tens of millions of dollars in connection with LEAP.
Pure’s business divorce pulled major commercial litigation lawyers into the dispute.
And in that dispute, a public filing stated that Valeo clients had $100 million invested in projects associated with Pure Development.
At this stage of LEAP, most of the visible activity involves large-scale, billion-dollar anchor developments. If Valeo or its clients were to be involved, it would more likely appear later as smaller parcels and secondary development begin to take shape.
So far, I have not found a clear public record tying Valeo client funds directly to LEAP itself.
But the overlap through Pure is enough to show why Pure and related parties belong on the map.
And enough to show why the scale of the Valeo story changed.
The scale problem
If Valeo had spent ten years in litigation over $100 million of private real-estate investments tied to Pure Development, that would make business sense.
If Valeo had been involved in a LEAP-related project where someone breached a signed contract that actually existed, that would make business sense too.
High stakes.
Real documents.
Major investments.
Major counsel.
That is the world where Andrew Hull’s involvement makes intuitive sense.
But that is not what Valeo did to me.
Valeo has spent eleven years pursuing me over a disputed claim that began at $37,476.96.
A claim tied to clients who were never worth even a fraction of $100 million.
A claim tied to an agreement structure where the signed Compensation Agreement was never produced.
A claim that continues now, even after years of litigation, judgment enforcement, family-bank-account issues, and settlement demands that include speech restrictions.
So when I saw Hull in the Pure dispute, I noticed.
When I saw LEAP in the background, I noticed.
When I saw Pure identified as IEDC’s key LEAP development vendor, I noticed.
And when the Pure appellate brief stated that Valeo clients had $100 million invested in Pure-associated projects, I noticed that too.
Because that is not a small body moving.
That is a very large one.
The public record
Here is the public-record shape:
LEAP is Indiana’s marquee development project.
Pure was one of IEDC’s key private development vendors.
Pure became locked in a high-stakes business divorce.
Andrew Hull appeared for Drew Sanders in that fight.
The same Andrew Hull represented Valeo against me.
The Pure appeal stated that Valeo clients had $100 million invested in Pure-associated projects.
The public findings did not explain the Pure/Valeo relationship.
And without that business divorce, the public may have had only an obscure Reno article to see that Valeo was anywhere near Pure at all.
That is Part 24.
That is the first observation of bodies being pulled in motion by gravity.
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