Festus, Missouri – Voters in a small Missouri town, unhappy with the City Council’s approval of a $6 billion data center, turned the tables on last week’s election and ousted all four outgoing council members running for re-election.
Tuesday’s election in Festus, Missouri — a town of 12,000 along the Mississippi River about a half-hour from St. Louis — is the latest example of a 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 complex, also overwhelmingly registered their disapproval. passing the first referendum of its kind To restrict future projects. At least three other cities across the country will vote on similar measures this year.
The defeat of half of the Festus City Council led to an increase in voter turnout and widespread frustration with the data center approval process.
“There was really such an uproar because of the way the deal was handled,” said Rick Belleville, who won the non-partisan race for Ward 4 Councilman by more than 40 percentage points over incumbent Jim Tinnin, who had voted to approve the data center.
The other three incumbents defeated were: Jim Collier, Brian Weiner and Bobby Wenz.
Belleville, 70, has never run for public office before and during the campaign he walked around the neighborhood knocking on doors. What he learned was that residents were frustrated with the city’s unwillingness to listen to their constituents and a general lack of transparency around the project, he said.
“I ran because I felt the city wasn’t listening to the people,” he said.
And the data center battle in Festus is far from over.
Opponents are collecting signatures on a recall petition to oust the mayor and the four remaining council members. They filed a lawsuit Thursday against the city and developer CRG, which is part of Chicago-based Clayco, a national real estate development and construction company.
Mayor Sam Richards and CRG did not respond to calls and emails seeking comment on the outcome of Tuesday’s election or the lawsuit.
City Council voted on March 30 approve a development agreement The data center is planned on 360 wooded acres of land on the southwest side of the city. The operator of the data center has not been identified — one of many questions the city and CRG are unable or unwilling to answer, said Festus resident Sherman Boyle.
Boyle is a plaintiff in the lawsuit filed Thursday. His neighborhood supports the data center site and he is one of 11 property owners identified as eligible for voluntary purchase by the developer in the agreement. He and others said the city and the developer have downplayed any concerns about the project’s impact on electric rates, water and neighborhoods.
“This was very avoidable,” Boyle said of Tuesday’s election result, 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 to suppress opposition.
Lori Merriman also lives next to the data center site. He helped create Wake Up Jeffco, a grassroots group organized in recent months to fight data center projects in Festus and surrounding Jefferson County.
“It’s going to be almost next door to our house,” said Merriman, who is not among those available to purchase. “We just built it two years ago. It was supposed to be our forever home.”
Merriman initially became involved in city politics to obtain information about a new subdivision proposed near her neighborhood. Only in November, months after the city began discussions with CRG, did she and other residents learn about the data center.
Opponents said city officials’ disdain toward critics of the data center was reflected in text messages and emails obtained by Festus residents through records requests. The messages are cited in the lawsuit filed in St. Louis County Circuit Court.
In a text exchange last fall — as opposition against the data center proposal began to grow — unnamed Festus officials said the City Council should avoid “falling into the trap of the uneducated.”
In another conversation the following month, an unnamed city official discussed the “need to keep the herd out” in the context of data center opponents. Another suggests that as soon as residents find out the city is getting a new Olive Garden restaurant, they will forget about the data center controversy.
The trove of emails and texts also show that political support for the data center extended to the highest levels of state government, including Missouri Governor Mike Kehoe (R), who agreed to lobby Planning and Zoning Commission members ahead of a rezoning vote in November.
“The Governor reached out about Monday’s vote,” the message from an unknown sender said. “He’s willing to call on one or two people who need help.”
A spokesperson for Kehoe did not return a message seeking comment.
Missouri campaign finance records show that a political action committee — made up of labor unions that support data centers because they create jobs — spent about $40,000 in the final weeks of the race on newspaper and digital ads and yard signs in support of the four council members removed from office.
Meanwhile, Wake Up Jeffco organizers 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 end 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 thwart large data center projects over the wishes of residents.
“We have been called a minority but look at the elections,” he said. “We had record turnout and the incumbents were ousted from power by a huge margin.”
