Okay, I’ll admit it: I can’t help myself. Show me any story about modern life and my brain immediately cross-references it with the Seinfeld episode it most closely resembles. It’s a reflex, a curse, and apparently the unavoidable fate of anyone who came of age in the 1990s. My wife rolls her eyes. My colleagues have learned to live with it.
So when “The Journal.” podcast featured a small Missouri town called Festus erupting in fury over a proposed data center – complete with shouting matches at city council meetings, viral Facebook memes, and a recall campaign against the mayor – my brain went exactly where you’d expect it to go.
Festivus. For the rest of us.
If you need a refresher: Festivus is the fictional holiday invented by Frank Costanza on “Seinfeld” – an aluminum pole, a “Feats of Strength,” and, most crucially, the “Airing of Grievances,” in which you gather your loved ones together and tell them exactly how they’ve disappointed you over the past year. It was born, in the show’s mythology, out of a feeling of being left out of the traditional holiday season, of being forced to watch others celebrate something irrelevant to you.
The residents of Festus, Missouri, are airing some grievances right now. And honestly? They have a point.
“I hope your kids hate you for life.” — a Festus resident, to a City Council member, during a vote on a $6 billion data center proposal
North Carolinians are pushing back on data centers too. Apex has banned new data center construction for a year. Chatham and Orange counties have followed suit. This kind of local conflict and growth fatigue fascinates me. Helping companies navigate this environment has become a big part of what we do at E&V Strategic Communications. Naturally, my ears perked up when this podcast came on.
A $6 billion project. A breadstick solution.
Here’s what happened. A development firm named CRG identified a 300-acre plot near an interstate outside of Festus – a town of about 14,000 people, 35 miles south of St. Louis – and proposed a $6 billion AI data center. City officials were enthusiastic. The economic math was hard to argue with: the project could generate more than $30 million a year in local tax revenue, roughly equal to the city’s entire current budget. Better roads. Better schools. A rec center, maybe.
The problem wasn’t the vision. The problem was the rollout.
When residents filed public records requests to learn more, they discovered internal messages suggesting city officials had tried to keep them in the dark. One message dismissed opponents as “a sideshow of uneducated people.” Another floated what became known, delightfully, as the “breadstick solution”: the implication that if residents were given an Olive Garden, they’d shut up and stop asking questions.
The breadstick solution, shockingly, did not work. It became a meme. It became a rallying cry. It became the kind of thing that gets stitched on a banner and draped over a vehicle at a city council meeting.
In April, all four Festus City Council incumbents who supported the data center were voted out in a landslide. A recall campaign targeting the mayor and three more Council members has since gathered more than 4,000 signatures.
This is not a Festus problem. A recent Elon University poll found that 44% of North Carolinians oppose data centers in their communities. Moratoriums on new data center construction are being passed in communities across North Carolina, Michigan, Indiana, Ohio, and beyond. A bipartisan backlash is growing, not abating.
Who’s actually selling these things?
Here’s where the real structural problem lives. The way the data center industry currently works, a developer like CRG builds the facility and then leases it to a major tech company – Amazon, Meta, Google, etc. The tech companies with the most to gain from the AI infrastructure boom are, by design, one step removed from the communities being asked to host it.
They get the benefit. They absorb far less of the reputational risk. They are, to borrow a phrase, trying to have it both ways.
And that’s clearly not working. Not enough energy is being invested in making the affirmative case for data center projects. The developer is focused on zoning approvals. The tech company doesn’t have its name on the permit. City officials are left holding the bag, armed with tax revenue projections and no good answers about water usage, power prices, or what happens if the AI bubble bursts.
The result is a vacuum. And in a vacuum, fear wins.
Money for nothing – and that might actually be the pitch.
Here’s the thing Dire Straits understood back in 1985, and that data center developers somehow haven’t figured out by 2026: sometimes, “money for nothing” is the whole value proposition. (Yes, I just Seinfeld’d and Dire Straits’d in the same blog post. I contain multitudes.)
Data centers have long been criticized for not creating many permanent jobs after construction. The build phase is labor-intensive and union-friendly – but once the facility is running, it employs relatively few people. Critics have historically framed this as a weakness.
In the current environment, it might be the strongest argument available.
Think about what’s happened to suburban communities across the country since COVID. Urban sprawl has accelerated dramatically. Communities that were once quiet are now gridlocked. Schools are overcrowded. Water and sewer systems are strained. Roads need expanding. Parks are full. And the tax revenue from all that residential and commercial growth? It barely keeps pace with the cost of servicing it, because people are expensive. They need things.
A large-scale data center doesn’t bring people. It brings decades of substantial tax revenue – and then it leaves you alone. It won’t crowd your schools. It won’t sit in traffic on Route 30. It won’t move in and pull up the ladder behind it. It won’t change the character of your town in the same way large-scale residential or commercial growth can.
In a country suffering from serious growth fatigue, that’s not a bug. That’s the feature. And nobody is saying it out loud.
The Festivus lesson: Stop leaving people out of the value proposition.
Remember why Festivus existed in the first place. Frank Costanza felt excluded. The data center opposition movement is, at its core, the same story: People who use AI every day, who benefit from the cloud, who stream and swipe and search are being asked to host the infrastructure that makes all of it possible without anyone bothering to include them in the process or tell them why that’s a good deal for them specifically.
The tech companies need to show up. Not through a developer’s lawyer at a zoning hearing. Not through a city council member who got a nice economic development presentation. Directly, locally, personally. They need to answer the water questions. They need to get ahead of the power price concerns. They need to engage with the neighbors who live 300 yards from the proposed site and don’t know if they should sell their house.
And they need to make the affirmative case: This project will fund your schools and fix your roads for 30 years, and it won’t bring a single new stoplight with it.
That’s a genuinely compelling pitch. Someone just has to be willing to make it.