Missouri town fires half its city council over data center deal

Missouri town fires half its city council over data center deal

Residents of a St. Louis suburb turned out in droves to unseat four incumbents just days after the council approved a development agreement for a $6 billion data center.

The Festus, Missouri, City Council is getting a makeover after voters last week ousted every incumbent up for reelection. The new council will be sworn in Monday at Festus City Hall.

FESTUS, Missouri — Voters in a small Missouri town, unhappy with the city council’s approval of a $6 billion data center, struck back at the polls last week, ousting all four incumbent council members running for reelection.

Tuesday’s election in Festus, Missouri — a city of 12,000 people along the Mississippi River a half-hour south of St. Louis — is the latest example of growing public backlash against cities agreeing to host hyperscale data centers over the objections of residents concerned about their local impacts.

On the same day as the Festus election, voters in Port Washington, Wisconsin, a Milwaukee suburb, where tech giants Oracle and OpenAI are building a $15 billion data center campus, also registered their disapproval by overwhelmingly passing a first-of-a-kind referendum to restrict future projects. At least three other cities across the country will vote on similar measures this year.

The rout of half the Festus City Council was fueled by a surge in voter turnout and widespread frustration with the data center approval process.

“It’s really the way the deal was handled that led to this kind of uprising,” said Rick Belleville, who won the nonpartisan race for Ward 4 councilman by more than 40 percentage points over incumbent Jim Tinnin, who’d voted to approve the data center.

The other three losing incumbents were: Jim Collier, Brian Wehner and Bobby Venz.

Belleville, 70, has never run for public office before and walked neighborhoods and knocked on doors during the campaign. What he learned was that residents were frustrated by the city’s unwillingness to hear their constituents and a general lack of transparency around the project, he said.

“I ran because I thought the city was not listening to people,” he said.

And the data center fight is far from over in Festus.

Opponents are gathering signatures for a recall petition to oust the mayor and remaining four council members. They also filed a lawsuit Thursday against the city and developer CRG, part of Chicago-based Clayco, a national real estate development and construction company.

Mayor Sam Richards and CRG didn’t respond to calls and emails seeking comment on the outcome of Tuesday’s election or the lawsuit.

The City Council voted March 30 to approve a development agreement for the data center, planned for 360 wooded acres on the city’s southwest side. The operator of the data center hasn’t been identified — one of the many questions that the city and CRG have been unable or unwilling to answer, said Festus resident Sherman Boyle.

Boyle is among the plaintiffs in the lawsuit filed Thursday. His neighborhood backs up to the data center site and he’s among 11 property owners identified in the agreement as being eligible for a voluntary buyout by the developer. He and others said the city and developer have downplayed any concerns about the project’s effect on electric rates, water and the impact to surrounding neighborhoods.

“This was so avoidable,” Boyle said of Tuesday’s election outcome, urging future city officials to “listen to your residents.”

At the core of the lawsuit challenging the rezoning of the data center site and the development agreement with CRG are allegations of various secret meetings and a lack of timely public information meant to stifle opposition.

Lori Merriman also lives next to the data center site. She helped form a grassroots group, Wake Up JeffCo, organized in recent months to fight data center projects in Festus and surrounding Jefferson County.

“This is going in almost next door to our house,” said Merriman, who is not among those available for a buyout. “We just built it two years ago. It was supposed to be our forever home.”

Merriman initially got involved in city politics to get information about a new subdivision proposed near her neighborhood. Only in November, months after the city had begun discussions with CRG, did she and other residents learn about the data center.

Opponents said city officials’ disdain for data center critics is reflected in text messages and emails obtained by Festus residents though records requests. The messages are cited in the lawsuit filed in St. Louis County Circuit Court.

In one text exchange last fall — as pushback against the data center proposal began to intensify — unidentified Festus officials said the City Council must avoid “getting caught in the sideshow of uneducated people.”

In another exchange the next month, an unidentified city official discussed a “need to keep the flock herded,” in reference to data center opponents. Yet another suggests residents would forget about the data center controversy as soon as they find out the city is getting a new Olive Garden restaurant.

The cache of emails and texts also show that political support for the data center went to the highest levels of state government, including Missouri Gov. Mike Kehoe (R) who agreed to lobby members of the Planning and Zoning Commission ahead of a November rezoning vote.

“The governor reached out about Monday’s vote,” said a message from an unidentified sender. “He’s willing to call the one or two folks that need to be nudged.”

A spokesperson for Kehoe didn’t respond to a message seeking comment.

Missouri campaign finance records show a political action committee — made up of labor unions that support data centers because of the jobs they create — spent almost $40,000 in the final weeks of the race on newspaper and digital ads and yard signs in support of the four council members booted from office.

Wake Up JeffCo organizers, meanwhile, were collecting recall signatures outside the Festus Home Depot on Friday to oust the mayor and remaining council members. Their hope is to install leadership that will listen to residents and terminate the data center contract.

Merriman said last week’s election should serve as a warning to local officials in Missouri and beyond who try to ram through big data center projects over the will of residents.

“We’ve been called the minority but look at the polls,” she said. “We had record turnout, and the incumbents were ousted by landslide margins.”