They tell me Missouri is the Show Me State. Well folks, if you’re a member of the Festus, Missouri city council who was running for re-election last week, voters are showing you something alright. The dang door.
According to the minutes of the meeting on March 30 when the council approved the project, the developer CRG Acquisition, LLC, “intends to invest a minimum of Six Billion and 00/100 Dollars.” CRG’s slogan, in case you’re wondering, is “Architects of Liquidity,” according to its website.
Those minutes include a section about a yet-to-be-created buyout program for eleven homes on Glenkee Court that look, from my amateur Google Maps sleuthing, like they just brush the northeast corner of the construction project. Nothing is apparently going to be built there, but they, and one other house, are “located within one thousand feet (1,000 feet) of the nearest planned active data center building.”
But those located just outside the buyout program will have less recourse than those within it, and social media posts have given the impression that living right next to a data center is pretty unpleasant.
“Developer shall adhere to Tier 4 generator standards of the Environmental Protection Agency, with a priority for natural gas or low-sulfur diesel,” the approved documents say.
A large data center in South Memphis, Tennessee operated by Elon Musk’s xAI, a division of SpaceX, is powered by natural gas, and has drawn heavy criticism for allegedly increasing nitrogen oxide air pollution. “I can’t breathe at home, it smells like gas outside,” one resident of the area said at a public hearing last year, according to Politico, adding, “How come I can’t breathe at home and y’all get to breathe at home?”
