MONTGOMERY COUNTY — Preserve Montgomery County hosted a town hall Monday night to update residents on the data centers coming to Montgomery County.
Over 100 people attended the meeting in the Montgomery County High School gymnasium.
Additionally, Preserve Montgomery County LLC is currently in a lawsuit against Montgomery County and the Missouri Department of Economic Development.
The lawsuit argues county officials repeatedly violated Missouri's Sunshine Law and failed to give legally required notices to taxpayers and local taxing districts.
According to court documents, Cole County Judge Cotton Walker took arguments under advisement after a hearing on Aug. 27. Walker heard arguments for a motion to dismiss from the defendants and a motion to compel from the plaintiffs.
Additionally, members who attended received an update from the attorney in a lawsuit between Preserve Montgomery County LLC and Montgomery County.
The lawyer representing Preserve Montgomery County, Steve Jeffery said the county and state have filed a motion to dismiss part of or all of Preserve Missouri's lawsuit.
Local and state politicians attended the event and spoke to community members about the proposed data centers.
The meeting allowed politicians to speak to voters on the data center issue in Montgomery County.
During the meeting, the biggest concerns included environmental, water and electric bill risks.
"This [infrastructure] will not stop with the data centers; we know more is coming," said Tom Westoff, one of the organizers of the town hall.
This comes as several CEOs of artificial intelligence companies called for an AI slowdown amid warnings of dire consequences if safeguards aren't put in place.
Two hyper-scale data center projects are confirmed in Montgomery County — a Google data center and Amazon Web Services data center.
According to past KOMU 8 reporting, Amazon announced it will invest $10 billion in Montgomery County to build the data center, and Google announced an investment of $15 billion for its data center.
Data center development sites in Montgomery County
Two data center developments are underway near New Florence in Montgomery County. An Amazon Web Services data center is in early stages of construction, and crews have broken ground on the Google data center.
"We just want to get out information, there's a lot of misinformation going around," Westoff said. "Unless they go to the county commissioners meeting, there's just a lot of misinformation and a lot of misunderstanding."
Tonight, people cited misinformation stemming from Facebook and other social media platforms either for or against the data centers.
Some people in the meeting also stated they didn't think the number of jobs would be as much as Amazon and Google have stated.
Amazon has cited that the data center campus in Montgomery County would bring over 400 full-time jobs, according to its website.
The Missouri Data Centers' independent, non-commercial tracker cites the data center risk at "very high" with a score of 77 out of 100.
For context, according to the same independent tracker, Boone County is at a moderate risk for data centers, scoring 50 out of 100.
In recent public feedback meetings about the data center proposal, residents have raised concerns about potential impacts on electric and water bills and the environment.
"Do we really want AI?" Westoff said. "There's a lot of controversy about it right now. There's a lot more behind just the money."
