Voters Aren’t Waiting for November to Try Ousting Officials Over Data Centers

At a City Council meeting in Independence, Mo., in June, a councilman, John Perkins, stared down a crowd intent on throwing him out of office.

The room was packed with dozens of people, some forced to stand in the back. Many had helped gather more than 1,200 signatures to recall Mr. Perkins over an issue that had roiled the city for months: a data center under construction on the outskirts of town.

They were spitting mad that Mr. Perkins, along with four other Council members, had voted in March to award billions of dollars in tax breaks to the $150 billion data center project. Some became emotional as they accused the Council of making a bad deal for a project they did not want.

“The people haven’t been listened to,” said Joanie Flanagan, 62, a retired real estate agent and m***age therapist.

Data centers, the giant computing sites powering the artificial intelligence boom, have caused a national backlash that is set to affect voters’ decisions in November’s midterm elections. But some residents in more than a dozen cities and towns across the country are so angry about local elected officials’ approving the energy-guzzling warehouses, they are not waiting.

In Festus, Mo., critics of a local data center project gathered enough signatures in May to force a vote to remove the mayor and City Council members who had approved a $6 billion data center, though the effort is tied up in legal wrangling. In Mason, Mich., residents will vote in November over whether to recall a City Council member over a vote to create zoning rules for data centers.

Voters in Yukon, Okla., will also decide in November whether to recall their mayor after the town moved to sell land to a data center developer. And residents of Independence, a city of 121,000 that is 10 miles from Kansas City, will vote on whether to remove Mr. Perkins on Sept. 1.

Some local officials have already lost their jobs in the face of data center concerns in regularly scheduled elections. Last year, two members of the Georgia Public Service Commission lost their seats amid concern about data centers’ driving up electricity prices. A Virginia state delegate, Geary Higgins, also lost his job last year after his opponent branded him “Data Center Geary.”

“People are standing up and saying, ‘Sorry, we don’t want these data centers in our communities for a number of reasons,’” Senator Bernie Sanders, the Vermont independent, said in an interview. “‘If you can’t have the guts to stand up to some large corporation, you should not continue serving in office.’”

Voters have little patience for politicians supporting data centers, said Amy Kremer, the chairwoman of Humans First, a conservative-leaning group promoting greater A.I. regulation. They will “step up and recall them and hold them accountable.”

Independence would be one of the first municipalities to hold a data-center-motivated recall election. A judge this month rejected a legal challenge by Mr. Perkins and others, who argued the recall violated Missouri’s Constitution.

Mr. Perkins, 54, said in an interview that the argument for the recall had “no merit” and that a “single vote” should not outweigh years of work for his constituents.

John Sutter, the vice president of U.S. public affairs at Nebius, the Dutch firm building the data center, said the company did not “get involved in political races.”

“Our job here is to show the public, and show the community, that the vote that Council member Perkins made along with his other fellow Council members, this was a vote for the future of Independence,” Mr. Sutter said.

Independence is an expansive, low-slung satellite community with a red brick Colonial Revival courthouse towering over a town square, and with sites marking the start of the Oregon Trail and home of Harry Truman. It is ringed by residential neighborhoods mixed with shopping centers anchored by Walmart, Costco and B*** Pro Shop.

The city has faced economic challenges in recent years. Almost 16 percent of its residents live in poverty, more than the statewide average. Major employers include Olin Winchester, which operates the Lake City Army Ammunition Plant on the edge of the city, and health care facilities.

Starting in 2008, the city built a road called the Little Blue Parkway to help develop unused land near the ammunition plant. It sat empty for years. In 2022, Independence rezoned the area for industrial use.

When Nebius bought a site there in December with plans to build a 2.25-million-square-foot data center complex, some thought the project was a boon. The site had access to power from Independence Power & Light, the city’s utility, augmented by a plan to bring a retired power plant back online. Nebius said the complex would employ at least 150 people full time and create more than 1,000 construction jobs.

Shortly after the purchase, Nebius applied for tax breaks under a statewide economic development program. The company also reached out to residents, including an open house in January at a local library building.

McKenna Cobb, 31, who works in medical billing, took her three children to the event. She worried the project could worsen water quality and raise electricity prices. She spoke with Mr. Perkins there and said she came away unsatisfied with his support of the project.

“I left with a lot to worry about,” Ms. Cobb said.

Nebius continued to lobby for the tax breaks. It was “unlikely the project would proceed at the same level of investment, if at all,” a lawyer for the company warned in a city meeting in February.

City Council members were “very convinced that this was the best thing for Independence,” Jared Fears, a member at the time, said of the project.

Once the center was built, it would contribute $35 million to $55 million a year in revenues to the city’s general fund, which totaled roughly $85 million last year, he said. The city also estimates that the project would contribute tens of millions of dollars to the local utility, schools and public institutions like libraries.

At a regular meeting in March, the Council voted 5 to 2 to give Nebius a 90 percent break on personal property taxes and a 98 percent break on real property taxes. The property tax incentives totaled $6.26 billion over 20 years. (Under state law, Independence can determine the total level of tax breaks to give an economic development project.)

Mr. Perkins told attendees — many of whom had shown up to protest the vote — that Nebius would use limited water and that the city had ensured residents were protected from rising electricity prices. If the company didn’t hold up its end of the bargain, Independence could yank the incentives, he said.

“The protections are there,” he added. “I feel very comfortable with this.”

But many residents remained incensed. Their frustrations soon boiled over.

In April, two Council members who had voted for the tax breaks were on the ballot.

Mr. Fears knocked on doors a day before his re-election bid for one of the Council’s two at-large seats. One voter said she did not believe the project would financially benefit the city and thought it would raise electricity costs. “There was nothing I could do to change her mind,” he recalled.

Mr. Fears lost to candidates who criticized or called for more accountability around the project. Bridget McCandless, another Council member who voted for the tax deal, lost her bid to be mayor.

Ms. Cobb and others wanted to fire Mr. Perkins, who was not up for re-election. She teamed up with other residents to collect signatures for a recall vote, motivated by what they said was Mr. Perkins’s lack of engagement with skeptics of the data center.

In June, the county’s election board verified that the organizers had obtained enough signatures.

The Council was notified at the June meeting. Recall supporters, including children, held signs with messages like “Represent Us or Resign.” Others held signs that said, “We support John Perkins.”

Kevin King, the mayor, warned that the microphone would be cut for anyone who made “personal, impertinent or slanderous remarks.” He said comments should be directed to the Council as a whole instead of individual members.

Lynne Baker, a former high school counselor in her early 80s, said Independence was struggling to retain residents when nearby cities had more money to spend on their communities. “I’m just going to say it once, but I’m here to support Councilman Perkins,” she said, as the crowd shouted objections.

“Ma’am, you cannot,” Mr. King replied sharply.

Mr. Perkins stayed quiet. Near the end of the meeting, he thanked the crowd for its thoughts.

He has spent recent days knocking on doors and putting up signs to keep his job.

“I’m in the campaign mode now, to get my message out,” he said. “It’s a new experience, but we’re plowing through it just fine.”