The prospect of a new large-scale data center development in the City of St. Charles drew widespread public criticism during a packed Planning and Zoning Commission meeting on Monday night, potentially foreshadowing a long and rocky road ahead for the backers of the project.
On the agenda were two items pertaining to a proposed 1.5 million-square-foot data center on about 440 acres in the northwest portion of the city: a site plan and conditional use permit, because the site would store and utilize hazardous substances, such as diesel fuel, within the wellhead protection district. The district is in place to safeguard areas that recharge the groundwater that St. Charles relies on for public drinking water.
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After an increasingly tense hour-and-40-minute consideration, the Planning and Zoning Commission split on the two items, approving the site plan but defeating a favorable recommendation on the conditional use permit by one vote. The room erupted into applause on the defeat.
It now heads back to the city council but has a tougher path to pass, said St. Charles Mayor Dan Borgmeyer, who voted for both of the measures.
“They’ll evaluate it, and they’ll either decide to support the nay vote or they’ll override it,” he said. “Since it was defeated here, they’ll need a super majority to pass it.”
Borgmeyer said many of the concerns expressed by residents were about issues beyond the scope of what the commission was considering. He said he expects they’ll continue to come up as the development proposal works its way through the city government.
“This will come up again and again,” he said. “Every stage of this has to get approved through the Planning and Zoning Commission, so they’ll have plenty of opportunity.”
Hear more about this story from Schmid on The 314 Podcast.
Data centers are a hot commodity this year, with the explosion of artificial intelligence. So far, construction isn’t keeping up with demand. But the project in St. Charles comes with the added wrinkle of being placed in the floodplain and over part of the wellhead protection district.
Residents at the meeting largely took issue with the size and placement of the proposed development site, 440 acres situated between Missouri Highway 370 and Elm Point Road and east of Harry S. Truman Boulevard that is currently farmland and regularly floods.
“I’m sure everybody in this room drives down 370 one time or another. After a rain, it could be a two-inch rain. It doesn’t have to be a six-inch rain, a 12-inch rain, a 15-inch, or a 30-inch rain, like they got in Texas. There’s water laying on these fields, both sides of the highway,” said Tim Klein, who described his farm on Huster Road as “downstream from the development.”
In order to accommodate the new use and stay dry, the developer plans to add about 15 feet of infill to elevate the area before constructing five separate warehouse-style buildings of 285,000 square feet to house the servers, adjoining machinery yards with cooling equipment, water treatment, backup generators and fuel tanks, three office buildings, and landscaping. The whole development will take about 10 years to complete.
“There will be increased stormwater runoff, but there should not be an increase in the peak stormwater runoff,” the request for conditional use states.
But that prospect didn’t sit well with Klein. “I don’t understand why they’re coming to the bottoms with this,” he said. “With that being said, I’m sure it’s probably going to happen anyway, but where is the water going to go?”
Others speaking publicly raised concerns about a key subject of the conditional use permit: allowing the use, handling, and storage of hazardous substances, including some 1 million gallons of diesel fuel (spread among 150 tanks).
“Hazardous materials like petroleum pose a permanent contamination risk,” said Bob Burns. “I recommend that we not put this over the top of our water system. [I’m] totally OK with systems like this, but not in that location.” He suggested allowing development at the site to move forward would break the trust of the public.
Some people’s trust appeared already fraying, though. David Fine questioned why details on the proposed site have been so sparse, with no indication what entity wants to occupy the building. “I think they’re farther along in the process by now, so it’s about time somebody told us who was going to be in there,” he said. “It would give us a chance to take a look and see if they’ve been good neighbors at other sites around the country.”
During the meeting, Andrew Gribble, a civil engineer with consulting firm Kimley Horn, repeatedly said they didn’t have an end user identified.
Many residents in attendance scoffed at the relative dearth of information about the development.
When asked after the meeting, Mayor Borgmeyer wouldn’t name the potential tenant or the identity of the developer. (The listed address for the applicant, CRG Cumulus, LLC, has the same address as construction firm Clayco, which has been pushing into data center developments this year.)
“The developer, they just don’t want to say,” he said, adding that he hopes to have more to share within 60 days.
