Independence voters recalled a councilman over data center tax breaks

In Independence, Missouri, voting yes on a data center now costs politicians their seats.

The recall

Nearly 70% of voters in Independence recalled councilman John Perkins over his vote for $6 billion in tax breaks for Nebius’s planned $150 billion AI data center. Perkins is the third council member who backed the project to lose his seat this year.

A pattern, not an incident

One recall is local politics; three unseated council members over the same project is an electorate delivering a verdict. The AI buildout runs on exactly these municipal votes, tax abatements, land, power and water agreed at city council scale, and Independence shows the political cost of those votes becoming visible to the people who cast them. For the companies planning hundred-billion-dollar campuses, the lesson is that the hard approval is no longer the state incentive package. It is the town next door.