Residents of Festus, Missouri, were not feeling the city council’s approval of a $6 billion data center, so they decided to fire more than half of the officials in a fight to save their community, Politico reports.
The small town, just 30 minutes south of St. Louis and home to roughly 12,000 people, showed up to an election to express disdain over the approval of the massive data center and relieve four elected officials who voted for the center of their duties: Jim Tinnin, Jim Collier, Brian Wehner and Bobby Venz.
“I ran because I thought the city was not listening to people,” said Rick Belleville, 70, who beat out Tinnin by more than 40 percentage points. “It’s really the way the deal was handled that led to this kind of uprising.”
Festus residents don’t plan on stopping at the city council. They are targeting Mayor Sam Richards by gathering signatures for a recall petition to oust the mayor and the remaining four council members. A lawsuit was also filed against the city and developer CRG, as residents have repeatedly called on council members to answer a few unanswered questions before the March 30 vote.
One such question: Who is operator for the center scheduled to be built on 360 wooded acres on the city’s southwest side?
Resident Sherman Boyle said, “This was so avoidable,” and pressured future city leaders to “listen to your residents.”
Fellow Festus resident Lori Merriman started a grassroots group, Wake Up JeffCo, to fight data center projects in her city and the surrounding areas. “This is going in almost next door to our house,” she said. “We just built it two years ago. It was supposed to be our forever home.”
The pushback is the latest in the growing public backlash against rural areas that host hyperscale data centers despite residents’ objections.
A large data center in South Memphis, Tennessee, operated by Elon Musk’s xAI, has drawn widespread criticism for being powered by natural gas. Residents accuse the data center of increasing nitrogen oxide air pollution, causing breathing problems for the people who call South Memphis home.
Data from the Pew Research Center revealed more than 1,500 new data centers are in development nationwide—and more are on the way— with most planned construction taking place in the South and Midwest. Seventy-five percent of all planned data centers will be built in these two regions, with the South accounting for almost half. Southern states are set to become home to 754 data centers in addition to 1,209 already in existence.
Just like Merriman, 38% of Americans live within a five-mile radius of at least one data center and since many are built in bulk, nine out of 10 data centers are within five miles of each other.
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