Anger over AI data center drives Missouri city’s voters to recall council member

Voters in Independence, Missouri, on Tuesday night voted to recall a City Council member who has served for more than a decade, rebuking his decision in March to back billions of dollars in tax breaks for a proposed AI data center.

The recall effort comes amid escalating backlash nationwide against the rapid proliferation of data centers that is influencing federal and local races ahead of November’s midterm elections.

Independence City Councilmember John Perkins was recalled Tuesday, with nearly 70% of his district voting to remove him, according to unofficial election results from Jackson County.

The anger in Independence, a Kansas City suburb with 121,000 residents, over the construction of the artificial intelligence data center on the city’s eastern flank has been mounting for months.

In March, Perkins was one of five council members who voted to issue tax breaks totaling more than $6 billion to Dutch company Nebius for the construction of the planned $150 billion data center.

More than 50 community members attended and spoke at the City Council meeting in which the tax breaks were approved. A local chapter of the progressive Sunrise Movement organized a letter-writing campaign ahead of the meeting for community members to oppose the tax breaks in an attempt to sink the data center project.

A Facebook group for Independence residents who oppose the data center called Stop the AI Data Center in Independence has 115,000 members, many who celebrated Tuesday night when the unofficial election results showed Perkins had been recalled.

“Politicians aren’t entitled to elected positions. They’re elected by the people to serve those people. When they stop serving the people they were elected to represent, they’re voted out of office,” one member of the group wrote Tuesday. “This is democracy in action.”

Another member of the group described speaking with Perkins outside their polling place Tuesday, writing that they’d told him, “Enjoy the consequences of selling us out to the data center.”

Perkins has not yet responded to a request for comment on the recall election. But in a recent Kansas City Star op-ed , he urged voters to judge him by his full record, adding that he stood by the data center vote.

“You can disagree with that call, and I respect that,” Perkins wrote. “However, disagreement isn’t a crime, and I don’t believe it is grounds to attempt to overturn an election that happened two years ago.”

Two other City Council members who’d voted in favor of the data center tax breaks — Bridget McCandless and Jared Fears — lost their subsequent election bids in April. Fears was running for re-election to the council and McCandless was running for mayor.

Opposition to AI data centers has surfaced in communities around the country, looming over the coming midterms and prompting candidates to choose sides .

For some Republicans, that has meant opposing President Donald Trump, who recently signaled strong support for data centers — writing on Truth Socia l that communities that oppose them “want to end up being backwards and poor.”