The fight over new data centers in Missouri may have started last year in St. Charles and St. Louis, but the battle has spread from urban and suburban areas to more rural parts of the state.
CRG, the developer behind the failed proposal in St. Charles, shifted its attention south to a site in Festus. And further west, parcels in Montgomery, Warren and St. Charles counties are being eyed for projects currently under planning or potential consideration in the future.
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“It’s obvious that they’re coming after the rural land—that’s all that’s left,” says Änna Farrar, who lives in Warrenton, the seat of Warren County and about an hour’s drive west of St. Louis. “They’ve planned out everything elsewhere, and they’re not leaving us alone to be rural anymore.”
Farrar began paying much closer attention to potential data center developments early last year and grew concerned at what may come as a result of infrastructure improvements, such as upgraded electrical transmission, rural broadband, and highway access, which she documents in a Substack, along with the multiple sites near where she lives that could become home to data centers.
“I see everything off of the spine of I-70 becoming less and less rural and more and more not just suburban, but city and industrialized,” she says. “It’s very scary for me, because it’s everywhere all at once. I don’t know that we’re prepared for it.”
The rural counties immediately west of St. Louis are home to four areas where developers already intend to build new data centers or may soon do so: a roughly 1,000-acre “mega-site” for up to 17 buildings that Amazon Web Services is eyeing near New Florence, the nearly 1,000 acres in Montgomery County for a development dubbed Project Spade, about 335 acres contained in the Warrenton Industrial Park North, and sites in Foristell, which straddles St. Charles and Warren counties.
Many of those areas are not often covered by major news outlets, Farrar says, and generally don’t experience a lot of pushback in the halls of government.
“People just aren’t used to watching these developments,” she says. “I think that’s part of it is we do have to take responsibility for the complacency that we’ve bred in the development of these projects.”
That part is changing, however, with residents increasingly pushing back. An informational town hall last month in Montgomery County to discuss data center projects drew several hundred people—and significant anger towards the data center concept.
“It was intense, it was passionate,” Farrar recalls. “I’d never seen so many people show up to a civic event in my life. I was astounded and floored.”
The scene Farrar describes mirrors others across the greater St. Louis area, with locals turning out in numbers to both learn more, and voice their views. As in St. Charles County last year, locals in Montgomery County pushed for greater transparency on who’s behind these projects.
“People care and they want to have a say,” Farrar says. “When I was at that event, it became very clear how little they were involved and how passionate they are to be involved moving forward. We were infuriated by the lack of answers, and the lack of answers was fueled by purposeful secrecy.”
As with other potential projects around the St. Louis region residents expressed anger that they learned of a development, such as Project Spade or AWS’ plans, so late in the process. The sites in Warrenton and Foristell are seeing scrutiny much earlier in the process.
Last month the Warrenton Board of Aldermen chose to table amendments to their city’s municipal code pertaining to data centers, citing a need to dig into specifics around sound concerns, fuel storage requirements for generators, and air pollution monitoring. Foristell is considering annexing land to facilitate potential developments, even though the city hasn’t yet received a formal application for a data center, and Mayor Bradley Miller has repeated commitments to transparency in any development process.
Other public officials have pledged transparency around data center proposals, only to fall short. That includes Festus, where city officials had private discussions with CRG months before the public widely knew of the project, KSDK reported.
To Farrar, this is the opposite of how public officials should treat these kinds of developments, which she acknowledges are more likely than not coming, whether residents are ready or not.
“If we could put it on our leaders, our government, our municipalities, to act as that third space, as like a liaison, to communicate what’s going on, and allow us that third space to be a part of what’s going on, I think it would negate a lot of the fear that I have and the fear that I’m seeing,” she says. “Because it wouldn’t be, like, them against us. It would be a cooperative development.”
