Festus, Missouri Voters Fired Half Their City Council One Week After a $6 Billion Data Center Approval

What happened

On March 30, 2026, the Festus, Missouri city council voted 6-2 to approve a development agreement with CRG Acquisition LLC for a 6 billion dollar data center on 360 acres north of Highway 67. Festus is a city of roughly 12,000 people, half an hour south of St. Louis along the Mississippi River.

Seven days later, voters went to the polls and removed every incumbent council member on the ballot. Bobby Benz, Jim Collier, Brian Wehner, and Jim Tinnin -- all of whom voted for the data center -- were defeated by challengers Dan Moore, Karl Weekley, Allen Joseph McCarthy, and Rick Belleville.

At polling places, petitioners collected signatures to recall Mayor Sam Richards. Rick Belleville, one of the winning challengers, told reporters the central issue was transparency -- the way the deal was handled.

What officials said behind closed doors

A Sunshine Act records request -- Missouri's public records law -- revealed internal communications in which city officials referred to members of the opposition as uneducated. That disclosure, reported by KCUR, became a flashpoint in the election.

The pattern is familiar. In community after community, residents who raise concerns about data center projects are dismissed by officials who have already made up their minds. Festus is the first case where voters had an immediate opportunity to respond at the ballot box -- and they did, decisively.

Eleven homes on Glenkee Court, within 1,000 feet of the planned buildings, qualified for a buyout program. The project requires Tier 4 generator emissions standards, with a preference for natural gas or low-sulfur diesel. But critics point to the xAI facility in Memphis, where natural gas generators have drawn NAACP litigation over nitrogen oxide pollution in a predominantly Black neighborhood.

The developer

CRG Acquisition LLC uses the slogan Architects of Liquidity. The company name and the 6 billion dollar price tag suggest a hyperscale data center built on behalf of a major cloud or AI tenant whose identity has not been publicly disclosed.

The structure mirrors other data center deals in the pipeline: a special-purpose entity signs the development agreement, the actual end user is shielded behind non-disclosure agreements, and the community is asked to approve billions in infrastructure commitments without knowing who will occupy the facility.

The Festus project joins a growing list of data center proposals where the tenant remains secret at the time of the vote -- including STACK's Culpeper Technology Campus in Virginia and Mount Sunflower Properties' Project Pilot in De Soto, Kansas.

What this means

Festus is the second electoral rebuke of data center approvals in a single week. On April 7, Port Washington, Wisconsin voters passed the first anti-data center ballot measure in US history, with 66.4 percent voting to require public approval for any future tax increment financing district over 10 million dollars.

Taken together, Festus and Port Washington represent a new phase of the backlash. Communities are not just protesting. They are not just passing moratoriums. They are using elections to remove officials who approve data centers over public objection.

Pew Research Center data published April 13 confirms that most new data centers in development are being built in rural areas -- communities like Festus that have limited experience negotiating with billion-dollar developers and limited capacity to assess the long-term impacts of industrial-scale facilities.

The question for every city council considering a data center vote in 2026: are you willing to bet your seat on it?