What Does Progress Look Like?

The wave of organized opposition spreading across the Kansas City metro—from Peculiar’s preemptive ban in 2024 to this year’s dust-ups with Independence’s tax-abatement fight, Gardner’s withdrawn proposal, Edgerton’s hold, Jackson County’s moratorium, the gathering pushback in Leavenworth County—has produced some legitimate scrutiny and some lazy symbolism. The work of distinguishing the two is overdue.

Start with what the opposition has gotten right. Hyperscale data centers do not behave like the office parks they sometimes resemble on a site plan. A campus drawing 75 megawatts or more operates closer to the load profile of a small city than a corporate headquarters. Banks of backup diesel generators, industrial cooling systems and 24-hour operation create noise and emissions footprints that bear little family resemblance to “light industrial.” 

Critics calling these projects “heavy industry” have a defensible point, and zoning codes—written in an era when industrial use meant smokestacks and conveyor belts—were not designed for what a modern hyperscale campus actually is. Local governments arriving at the table without updated land-use categories, performance standards or buffering requirements have been outflanked by developers moving faster than ordinances can adapt. That is a real problem, and it deserves the procedural fixes opponents are demanding.

The legitimacy of the zoning critique, however, has been doing a lot of heavy lifting it should not be asked to carry. Two separate arguments are being braided together. One is technical: the existing land-use framework underweights the operational impact of these facilities. The remedy is updated zoning, transparent siting criteria, enforceable noise and emissions standards, and disclosure of energy and water demand at the application stage. None of that requires opposing the underlying investment.

The second argument is symbolic. The leader of the Kansas City Data Center Watchdog group summarized it cleanly in a recent interview: communities uniting “to fight against corporate interests and big companies.” In this register, data centers are not problematic because of decibel readings or aquifer draw. They are problematic because they are large, because they are owned by large corporations, and because they represent a future being built by parties insufficiently accountable to the communities they enter. 

This, folks, is not a critique of data centers. It is a critique of how industrial economies are financed, and it bridges a populist left suspicious of Big Tech with a populist right suspicious of Big Tech for largely opposite reasons.

Treating that symbolic argument as if it were a zoning argument leads to bad public policy. The scale of Independence’s incentives—hundreds of millions in foregone revenue across the abatement window—deserves serious scrutiny. Whether clawback provisions are tight, whether the city captured enough of the upside through PILOTs and infrastructure cost-sharing, whether comparable jurisdictions have negotiated better terms: those are questions a business-minded community can answer with information. They are not the same question as whether AI infrastructure should be allowed in the metro at all.

The opposition has paid almost no attention to displacement risk, which the critique deserves, whether one approves of data centers or not. When affluent, well-organized communities prevail in stopping a project, the developer does not abandon the build. Instead, it relocates to a community with fewer lawyers, smaller turnouts at council meetings and more pressing reasons to accept the tax base. 

Beale Infrastructure’s withdrawal from Gardner did not end Beale’s plans; the company is still developing a campus elsewhere. None of the opposition subtracts data centers from the region. It redistributes them, and the redistribution flows toward the less politically powerful, often into rural counties whose grids and water resources are no longer able to absorb the load. Critics on the left have begun to notice this. Critics here have not.

Finally, the regional stakes are worth naming plainly. AI compute is becoming what rail in the 1880s and fiber in the 1990s once were: the platform on which the next generation of economic activity will be transacted. Metros that decline a seat at that build-out do not stop the build—they pay a long tail of opportunity cost for a generation, watching the tenant base, the construction work and the supply-chain ripple migrate to whichever jurisdictions said yes. Kansas City’s “platform for thinking bigger” is not optional infrastructure. It is the infrastructure.

The way forward? Better deals, better zoning, better disclosure. Not a smaller future.

PUBLISHED JULY 2026