They tell me Missouri is the Show Me State. Well folks, if you’re a member of the Festus, Missouri city council who was running for re-election last week, voters are showing you something alright. The dang door.
According to the minutes of the meeting on March 30 when the council approved the project, the developer CRG Acquisition, LLC, “intends to invest a minimum of Six Billion and 00/100 Dollars.” CRG’s slogan, in case you’re wondering, is “Architects of Liquidity,” according to its website.
Those minutes include a section about a yet-to-be-created buyout program for eleven homes on Glenkee Court that look, from my amateur Google Maps sleuthing, like they just brush the northeast corner of the construction project. Nothing is apparently going to be built there, but they, and one other house, are “located within one thousand feet (1,000 feet) of the nearest planned active data center building.”
But those located just outside the buyout program will have less recourse than those within it, and social media posts have given the impression that living right next to a data center is pretty unpleasant.
“Developer shall adhere to Tier 4 generator standards of the Environmental Protection Agency, with a priority for natural gas or low-sulfur diesel,” the approved documents say.
A large data center in South Memphis, Tennessee operated by Elon Musk’s xAI, a division of SpaceX, is powered by natural gas, and has drawn heavy criticism for allegedly increasing nitrogen oxide air pollution. “I can’t breathe at home, it smells like gas outside,” one resident of the area said at a public hearing last year, according to Politico, adding, “How come I can’t breathe at home and y’all get to breathe at home?”
Festus, a suburb of St. Louis with a population of 12,000 a half-hour south of St. Louis, along with Port Washington, Wisconsin—site of an Oracle and OpenAI data center project—are the vanguard of what could be a widespread voter backlash against data centers, as they proliferate, with data center power demand expected to triple over approximately the next five years. In Port Washington, a referendum restricting construction of future data centers was passed on Tuesday—the first of its kind. That same day, voters in Festus, Missouri booted every incumbent city council member running for re-election at the time.
The defeat of the incumbent council members was covered by Politico, part of it’s recent spate of close-up stories about the local politics of data centers. Thanks to Politico, those of us outside of Missouri now know Jim Tinnin, Jim Collier, Brian Wehner, and Bobby Venz were ousted and replaced by members-elect like Rick Belleville, who told Politico, “It’s really the way the deal was handled that led to this kind of uprising,” and added, “I ran because I thought the city was not listening to people.”
Indeed, in an Instagram post from eight weeks ago, Belleville wrote that local government needed more transparency, and suggested an online platform that could “ensure that all residents’ voices are heard,” and “allow Festus residents to ask questions and be more engaged.”
Seems like they’re getting pretty engaged now.
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