I'm not a mechanical engineer, so I don't have the knowledge to lay out all the facts. I know from my experience that once buildings get large enough that more than two standard residential-style compressors are necessary, HVAC designers will begin comparing whether a small chiller would be more cost effective.
I'm working on a project on a small college campus (~1,000 students) that has a chiller plant that is 2,500 tons (1 ton = 12,000 BTU). (A typical household AC is somewhere between 1 to 5 tons.) This campus is much smaller than IOA or USF. I asked out of curiosity how much it would cost if they were running individual AC units for each building. The plant operator said that the energy costs would be around 3 to 4 times as much. It would also mean having a few hundred or thousand AC compressors sitting around the campus, so it wouldn't be practical regardless.
Let me pull this back around to the original topic. The building in question is a necessary building that cannot be located off-site. It is possible that it could be relocated somewhere else onsite, but we're talking 7 or 8 figures (in dollars).