Residents of Independence, Missouri, voted overwhelmingly on Tuesday to remove a local official after he aggressively attempted to gift billions of dollars in local tax revenue to developers building a data center.
Voters in Independence, Missouri, overwhelmingly recalled a city councilman on Tuesday after he aggressively tried to donate billions in municipal tax revenue to the developers of a proposed data center.
The ousted official had championed a sweeping tax abatement package designed to lure a sprawling server farm to the Kansas City suburb, arguing the massive public subsidy was a necessary sacrifice to ensure tech executives did not have to finance their own infrastructure. He had spent months assuring constituents that absorbing the multibillion-dollar development cost would put the town on the map as a premier destination for windowless, hum-generating concrete boxes.
This sudden hostility to corporate welfare sends a chilling signal to the market that municipal taxpayers are no longer willing to unconditionally surrender their civic budgets to the cloud.
Industry analysts noted the recall marks a rare setback for the tech sector's ongoing strategy of locating high-margin, water-intensive server farms in midwestern municipalities and asking local residents to cover the operating costs. The proposed Independence site would have required the city to extensively upgrade its power grid and municipal water mains, an investment developers promised would eventually yield up to six permanent security and janitorial jobs.
Following the election results, development groups confirmed they are already scouting alternative sites in neighboring Kansas, where several towns have expressed a willingness to dismantle their public school systems in exchange for the prestige of hosting an Amazon Web Services cooling tower.