What Four Experts Told Springfield About Data Centers

Matthew Stublefield is the founder and principal consultant at Fieldway and serves on Springfield Tech Council's advocacy committee. He can be reached at matthew@fieldway.org. Connect with him on LinkedIn.

I went to the Biz 417 B-School session held June 23 planning to take a few notes, and spent the first ten minutes realizing the panelists were referencing data-center fights I'd never heard of. Peculiar. St. Charles. I know the towns – I just didn't know that a project had been proposed in each one and gone down in flames. The panelists named them the way you name something everyone already knows, and probably some people in the room did, but I bet many were like me and just finding out about these projects.

The event was titled "The Data Center Conversation Our Region Can't Afford to Skip," and Biz 417 editor Dori Grinder framed it up front as "not a rally, not a debate – a briefing." Biz 417 owner and publisher Logan Aguirre moderated; JMARK's Tom Douglas sponsored it. Four panelists came at the topic from four different seats: Subash Alias, CEO of Missouri Partnership; Dwayne Fulk, president-CEO of City Utilities of Springfield; Jonas Arjes, senior vice president of economic development at the Springfield Area Chamber of Commerce; and Trent Overhue, the developer building a data center near Marshfield. Springfield Tech Council sent me as part of our advocacy work. Given the level of interest and discussion around this topic locally, this recap is intended to share what was presented and help our members and the community stay informed.

Why Missouri is suddenly on the list

Alias runs the public-private group whose job is marketing the state to investors, and he laid out the timeline plainly. Missouri Partnership's first data-center work was back in 2017, helping Meta and Google find sites for hyperscale facilities. For years, he said, the hard part was getting these companies to look at Missouri at all. Now the script has flipped. In just the last five weeks, Nebius announced a campus in Independence, and Google and Amazon each announced facilities of their own. The state isn't courting anymore, in his telling – it's paving the way and trying to keep up.

The stakes he cared about most weren't technical. They were reputational. And the clearest way to understand that is through the two projects that didn't happen.

The projects that fell through

Peculiar is a small city in Cass County, south of Kansas City. In 2024, a developer called Diode Ventures proposed Harper Road Technology Park, a roughly $1.5 billion data-center campus. Residents organized against it over noise, water rates, traffic, light pollution, and the loss of a small-town feel. In October 2024, the city's board removed "data center" from its zoning code, which effectively ended the project. The New York Times covered the fight, and in the aftermath, the city administrator and the mayor resigned, and an alderman decided not to run again.

That's the kind of headline Alias worries about. Missouri Partnership can't outspend a front-page story, he said, and a "do not enter" reputation is slow and expensive to undo.

St. Charles, in the St. Louis suburbs, went a similar way. A $1 billion project known as Project Cumulus – from developer CRG, the development arm of Clayco – was proposed on a 440-acre site. Residents packed meeting after meeting over water and power concerns, and the developer withdrew the application in August 2025. The city passed a one-year moratorium, then made it permanent this May, becoming one of the first cities in the country to ban data centers citywide. Alias's point wasn't that every project should be approved, it was that these failures are visible nationally and affect how Missouri is perceived.

What's actually true about water and power

The biggest misconception, the panel agreed, is that data centers drain aquifers and discharge toxins. Overhue, who's actually building one, explained modern closed-loop cooling by comparing it to a car radiator: coolant circulates through coils and fans, and once the system is charged, it rarely needs topping off. Newer designs use far less water than older ones. Alias passed along Amazon's own framing that its $10 billion Montgomery County campus would use water on the order of a golf course – he noted that while it’s still a lot of water, nobody is marching against golf courses.

Not everyone in the affected communities has accepted those reassurances. At the Marshfield meetings, residents pressed on exactly these points – if a closed-loop system barely uses water, where does the heat go, and what do the cooling units sound like running around the clock? Those are fair questions, and the honest answer the panel kept returning to is that it depends on the specific project.

Closer to home, Fulk described City Utilities' guardrails. CU stood up a "large load task force" – roughly a dozen people, working across departments, several hours a day – to review any project over five megawatts. Applicants pay fees, so the cost of studying speculative inquiries falls on them, not on existing customers. The guiding rule, Fulk said, is "do no harm" to current ratepayers: once a project clears state and federal regulation, local permitting, and CU's service standards, the utility is obligated to serve it, but a lot of inquiries never get that far. On water, he noted Springfield draws from multiple drinking-water sources and recently secured additional supply from Stockton Lake through the Southwest Missouri Water Coalition. CU has posted its process and FAQs at cityutilities.net/datacenters.

The economic case, beyond the job count

Arjes said the economics get flattened into a number of jobs, and for this industry, that's the wrong number. Data centers run heavy on capital investment and light on headcount, though the jobs they do create tend to pay well above the county-average wage. The bigger lever, especially in rural areas, is real-property taxes and especially business personal property tax revenue.

Douglas opened the morning with the example the panel kept circling back to: Pryor, Oklahoma. After Google built there, the Pryor school district's assessed value grew from about $80 million to roughly $1 billion. The district now runs smaller classes, pays teachers better, and offers a free after-school program – and collects enough locally that it's "off the formula" for state aid. Douglas also pointed to Loudoun County, Virginia, often called the data center capital of the world, where the board of supervisors has lowered the real-property tax rate every year for a decade, from $1.145 to about $0.805 per $100 of assessed value, crediting data-center revenue for the room to do it.

Arjes added a local perspective. A single 10-megawatt customer inside a rural co-op like White River Valley Electric would be its largest load by a wide margin, which he said would tend to push member rates down rather than up. And he pointed out that Springfield-area manufacturers are already building cooling systems and server racks for the industry – business that lands here whether or not a single data center ever does.

The Marshfield project, up close

The only panelist actually building one was Overhue, whose project sits near Marshfield in Webster County. It's small by industry standards: about 10 megawatts on roughly five acres, single-tenant, doing high-performance computing. (Public reporting identifies the developer as Lumon Solutions and puts the facility at a few thousand square feet, with up to 15 jobs.) Overhue said he went looking for stranded power and found it – a local substation using a fraction of its capacity. He checked with the county on zoning, found none was required, signed a power agreement, and bought the land.

Then the story got out before he did. Hundreds of residents packed Marshfield High School in May to oppose the project, and Overhue believes the narrative took shape early, before more detailed information was available.  His takeaway was to get factual information out early, even when standard nondisclosure agreements make that hard. On those NDAs and code names, Alias explained that the secrecy is normal across economic development, not unique to data centers: competitors can reverse-engineer each other's plans from power and equipment figures, so companies guard them closely.

Two of the panel's claims were more speculative in nature. Overhue offered his personal view that some of the misinformation is being amplified by candidates ahead of primaries to drive turnout. Fulk raised a national-security angle, his own framing, that some of the disinformation may originate with foreign interests who would rather data centers stay offshore, and that spreading many smaller centers across the country is harder to attack than concentrating a few large ones. Both were presented as the speaker's perspective, and neither is something I can independently confirm.

How the region coordinates, and what comes next

Locally, the work is a standing meeting. Fulk and Arjes described the City of Springfield, City Utilities, and Greene County sitting down every Wednesday to walk through projects – a "no wrong door" approach, where an inquiry gets routed properly no matter who hears it first. Arjes named a real tension, too: the current rush means speculative data-center plays are tying up sites that might be better suited to manufacturing, and some utilities are now charging six-figure review fees to weed out the ones just trying to lock down land.

Asked where they hoped the region would be in five years, the panel pointed at outcomes rather than announcements. Alias wanted communities to feel the benefits before the doors open – the way Nebius paid off school-meal debt in the Independence and Fort Osage districts during construction, or Amazon pledged more than $7 million in community money in Montgomery County, including a new gathering space at the county fairgrounds. It's worth noting these benefits ride alongside large tax-incentive packages that draw their own scrutiny – the Independence deal, for one, has been publicly questioned by watchdog groups over the size of its abatements. As with incentives and community contributions, impacts vary widely by project and are often a point of local debate. Panelists drew a distinction between a temporary pause to gather more information and permanent bans, describing a pause as a way to allow time for education, while suggesting bans may influence a region’s reputation for investment.

For STC members

If you want to go deeper, two starting points came up more than once: City Utilities' own page at cityutilities.net/datacenters, which spells out its review process, and Missouri Partnership, which tracks statewide activity. And whatever you make of any of this, the panel modeled the questions worth asking about any specific project. How big is it, in megawatts? What kind of cooling, and how much water? Who pays for the infrastructure? And what does the community get before the doors open? The answers change from one project to the next – which was, in the end, the whole point of the morning.