{"id":1883115,"date":"2026-04-14T10:00:01","date_gmt":"2026-04-14T07:00:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/?p=1883115"},"modified":"2026-04-14T10:00:01","modified_gmt":"2026-04-14T07:00:01","slug":"missouri-town-council-approves-data-center-a-week-later-voters-fire-half-of-council","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/?p=1883115","title":{"rendered":"Missouri Town Council Approves Data Center. A Week Later, Voters Fire Half of Council"},"content":{"rendered":"

[analyse_image type=”featured” src=”https:\/\/gizmodo.com\/app\/uploads\/2026\/03\/data-center-1200×675.jpg”]<\/p>\n

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They tell me Missouri is the Show Me State. Well folks, if you\u2019re 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.<\/p>\n

According to the minutes of the meeting on March 30 when the council approved the project, the developer CRG Acquisition, LLC, \u201cintends to invest a minimum of Six Billion and 00\/100 Dollars.\u201d CRG\u2019s slogan, in case you\u2019re wondering, is \u201cArchitects of Liquidity,\u201d according to its website.<\/p>\n

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 \u201clocated within one thousand feet (1,000 feet) of the nearest planned active data center building.\u201d<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

\u201cDeveloper shall adhere to Tier 4 generator standards of the Environmental Protection Agency, with a priority for natural gas or low-sulfur diesel,\u201d the approved documents say.<\/p>\n

A large data center in South Memphis, Tennessee operated by Elon Musk\u2019s xAI, a division of SpaceX, is powered by natural gas, and has drawn heavy criticism for allegedly increasing nitrogen oxide air pollution. \u201cI can\u2019t breathe at home, it smells like gas outside,\u201d one resident of the area said at a public hearing last year, according to Politico, adding, \u201cHow come I can\u2019t breathe at home and y\u2019all get to breathe at home?\u201d<\/p>\n

Festus, a suburb of St. Louis with a population of 12,000 a half-hour south of St. Louis, along with Port Washington, Wisconsin\u2014site of an Oracle and OpenAI data center project\u2014are 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\u2014the first of its kind. That same day, voters in Festus, Missouri booted every incumbent city council member running for re-election at the time.<\/p>\n

The defeat of the incumbent council members was covered by Politico, part of it\u2019s 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, \u201cIt\u2019s really the way the deal was handled that led to this kind of uprising,\u201d and added, \u201cI ran because I thought the city was not listening to people.\u201d<\/p>\n

Indeed, in an Instagram post from eight weeks ago, Belleville wrote that local government needed more transparency, and suggested an online platform that could \u201censure that all residents\u2019 voices are heard,\u201d and \u201callow Festus residents to ask questions and be more engaged.\u201d<\/p>\n

Seems like they\u2019re getting pretty engaged now.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/article>\n

\n

They tell me Missouri is the Show Me State. Well folks, if you\u2019re 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.<\/p>\n

According to the minutes of the meeting on March 30 when the council approved the project, the developer CRG Acquisition, LLC, \u201cintends to invest a minimum of Six Billion and 00\/100 Dollars.\u201d CRG\u2019s slogan, in case you\u2019re wondering, is \u201cArchitects of Liquidity,\u201d according to its website.<\/p>\n

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 \u201clocated within one thousand feet (1,000 feet) of the nearest planned active data center building.\u201d<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

\u201cDeveloper shall adhere to Tier 4 generator standards of the Environmental Protection Agency, with a priority for natural gas or low-sulfur diesel,\u201d the approved documents say.<\/p>\n

A large data center in South Memphis, Tennessee operated by Elon Musk\u2019s xAI, a division of SpaceX, is powered by natural gas, and has drawn heavy criticism for allegedly increasing nitrogen oxide air pollution. \u201cI can\u2019t breathe at home, it smells like gas outside,\u201d one resident of the area said at a public hearing last year, according to Politico, adding, \u201cHow come I can\u2019t breathe at home and y\u2019all get to breathe at home?\u201d<\/p>\n

Festus, a suburb of St. Louis with a population of 12,000 a half-hour south of St. Louis, along with Port Washington, Wisconsin\u2014site of an Oracle and OpenAI data center project\u2014are 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\u2014the first of its kind. That same day, voters in Festus, Missouri booted every incumbent city council member running for re-election at the time.<\/p>\n

The defeat of the incumbent council members was covered by Politico, part of it\u2019s 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, \u201cIt\u2019s really the way the deal was handled that led to this kind of uprising,\u201d and added, \u201cI ran because I thought the city was not listening to people.\u201d<\/p>\n

Indeed, in an Instagram post from eight weeks ago, Belleville wrote that local government needed more transparency, and suggested an online platform that could \u201censure that all residents\u2019 voices are heard,\u201d and \u201callow Festus residents to ask questions and be more engaged.\u201d<\/p>\n

Seems like they\u2019re getting pretty engaged now.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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[analyse_image type=”featured” src=”https:\/\/gizmodo.com\/app\/uploads\/2026\/03\/data-center-1200×675.jpg”] They tell me Missouri is the Show Me State. Well folks, if you\u2019re 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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[226,53],"class_list":["post-1883115","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","tag-crawlmanager","tag-gizmodo-com"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1883115","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1883115"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1883115\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1883115"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1883115"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1883115"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}