This Tuesday, the Ferguson City Council will revisit a plan to put a data center on the old Emerson campus, a development spearheaded by lawyer-turned-real estate mogul Jim Onder. The council narrowly rejected the $1.5 billion tax incentive plan in May 2026 before members Nick Kasoff and LaMika Covington announced they wanted to try again. This time, they said, Onder would be paying millions to help the community.
The money—$7.5 million over 10 years—would go to the nonprofit Ferguson Neighborhood Improvement Program. The organization works to bolster property values in Ferguson by helping young people with down payments for homes and providing grants for neighborhood improvements, among other projects. Kasoff, who represents ward 2, has explicitly linked Onder’s willingness to donate to the organization to Kasoff’s willingness to reintroduce the tax break legislation.
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That’s raised hackles because the nonprofit’s president Larry Robinette has been the campaign treasurer for Kasoff as well as councilmembers LaMika Covington and David Williams.
“Those are blatant conflicts of interest,” says Ward 2 Councilman Jamil Franklin (each of Ferguson’s three council districts has two representatives). “It doesn’t look good.”
Franklin adds that he doesn’t know the details of the $7.5 million arrangement and that it’s his understanding that the nonprofit rents its office space from Councilman Michael Palmer. That gives Ferguson Neighborhood Improvement Program a connection to four of the seven council members.
Kasoff adamantly denies that any funny business is afoot, saying that when the nonprofit gives out a grant or completes a project, a politician’s name is never attached to it. He also says that the notion that the city is giving more than a billion dollars in tax breaks in exchange for $7.5 million to a not-for-profit is a total straw man. If the data center comes to fruition, he says, it could wind up paying taxes equal to about one-third of the city’s general fund tax revenue—even with the tax breaks he’s now reopened for consideration.
Ferguson is an enterprise zone under state law, which means that development is exempted from utility taxes. But one of the provisions of the agreement with Onder is a waiver of the utility tax exemption. “The utility taxes are going to be enormous,” says Kasoff. And those go to municipalities.
He argues that the proposed development makes sense at the site, which has been an industrial zone since 1940 and already has a (comparatively small) data center on it. He adds that the tax break on personal property tax he’s proposing reflects the amount of equipment a data center will have, which would otherwise be subject to a 7 percent rate. “Nobody’s going to put in $500 million, or a billion dollars, or whatever, in stuff that’s subject to personal property tax and pay that,” he says. Kasoff adds that he doesn’t stand to benefit in any way different from any other resident of Ferguson.
Onder, the developer, says there are two factions on the City Council and they “vehemently, vehemently hate each other.” He believes council’s disagreement on the abatement plan isn’t about the fact that a non-governmental organization will get $7.5 million—but which organization will get the money.
He said that after the first vote on the data center proposal failed, he had conversations with members, including Franklin and Mayor Adrian Shropshire. What he heard, he says, was that he should provide funds to support home ownership and infrastructure repairs in the city and that he should keep that money outside of the council so it wouldn’t get caught up in their infighting. When he learned about the Ferguson Neighborhood Improvement Program, it seemed to fit the bill.
“Now all of a sudden, the very people who asked that it be independent of [the] council, so that it wasn’t subject to the divisiveness of council, are the ones complaining it should be going to council,” says Onder. He says that Shropshire, for one, wanted the money to go to the Ferguson Youth Initiative. “It was almost like he was asking us to bribe him with money to his pet cause.”
Kasoff accuses Franklin of trying to strike his own deal with Onder to give money to a new organization, set up either by Franklin or his “cronies,” in lieu of the millions that would go to Ferguson Neighborhood Improvement District. Kasoff says Franklin wanted to use this new entity to expand his “political outreach” to other wards. “He’s a Ward 2 councilman,” says Kasoff. “He has mayoral aspirations. Ward 1 is not very good territory for him. So what he wants to do is have ‘walking around money’ in Ward 3, so that he can get his name out there.”
Kasoff put much of this in a Facebook post on Thursday.
“As it relates to his post, it was full of lies,” says Franklin.
Franklin says that he talked to Onder about establishing a board or commission that—unlike the Ferguson Neighborhood Improvement District—is under the umbrella of the city government and would disperse money to the communities nearest to the data center project.
“It was just a conversation,” he says. “Like I’m talking to you now.”
Asked what he thinks will happen at the City Council meeting Tuesday, when the abatement comes up for a vote, Franklin says he thinks it will pass, 4–3.
“I think that the meeting will probably be packed with residents speaking out against the deal in itself,” he predicts. “There’ll probably be a debate between myself and my fellow council members, and then they will vote for the project to move forward.”
