As Missouri's Aug. 4 primary nears, a 2015 state tax law is turning county level data center deals into a statewide fight over who subsidizes Big Tech.
Bill Cope farms 1,200 acres of corn and soybeans in Truxton, Missouri. He used to farm 1,500. Earlier this year, the owner of roughly 300 acres Cope was renting sold the ground to Amazon, which is building a $10 billion data center just north of the highway in New Florence. Losing that ground, Cope said, will push fixed costs higher across the rest of his operation. On a recent evening, he stood before the Montgomery County Commission and made a different ask: reject the 25-year, 70% personal-property tax abatement the county is weighing for a neighboring $15 billion, 934-acre Google data center already under construction outside town.
"If [data center developers] are that good, they should come in, and we would welcome them. But pay your fair share," Cope said, according to reporting from The Dexter Statesman. His objection captures the fight now heading into Missouri's Aug. 4 primary: local officials are approving multibillion-dollar server farms, while state lawmakers are being asked to write the rules before the next deal lands.
The instrument under contest is a 2015 Missouri statute, Senate Bill 149, that lets data center developers avoid most state and local sales and use taxes. Combined with the county-level power to grant long personal-property tax abatements, the law gave Missouri a way to land Big Tech infrastructure without a statewide vote on the tradeoffs. Counties used it. At least five data centers are now proposed along a 30-mile stretch of the I-70 corridor west of St. Louis, and Cope's neighborhood sits inside the planned 5,000-acre "Heart of America" industrial mega-site, the developer's name for the cluster. The Google and Amazon projects anchor it. Additional projects are in discussion in Liberty, Maryville, Independence, and Joplin.
On Aug. 4, that mechanism goes to a public test.
Amendment 5, a ballot measure on the Aug. 4 ticket, is being advertised as reversing the 2015 sales-and-use-tax exemption that underwrites those deals. A television ad cited by The Dexter Statesman tells viewers the amendment would undo the 2015 law. The ballot language and operative text, however, do not necessarily reach SB 149. Even if the amendment passes, the Legislature would still have to act separately to lift the data center exemptions, because the underlying deal-enabling rule is a statute, not a constitutional provision. The political promise and the legal mechanism are not the same thing, and the gap is now the live issue in the race.
The fight has reached the GOP primary ballot. State Rep. Tricia Byrnes, a Wentzville Republican running in a competitive state Senate primary, previewed legislation for the next session that would target data center transparency, utility costs, water use, and public input. She has not yet filed the bill, and the Missouri General Assembly has not yet assigned it a number. The 2026 regular session ended without passing any data center rules, according to KCUR, and follow-up reporting from the regional public radio station confirms residents and local officials are now demanding legislative action. Sen. Mayhew has launched a separate push for a special session on data center growth, KXCV reported on June 24. Rep. Byrnes told KY3 she wants public hearings before more projects are approved.
Two pending 2026 House bills, HB3362 and HB3364, would rewrite electricity and water rate schedules for large-load data center consumers and extend those frameworks to municipal utilities and electric cooperatives. As filed, the two bills target utility costs, not the underlying 2015 sales-and-use-tax exemption. Whether either reaches SB 149 would have to be confirmed against the full bill text.
For Cope, the immediate question is the Montgomery County vote. The county commission is weighing the 25-year, 70% abatement on Google's project. The terms come from advocacy testimony and have not yet been confirmed against a finalized county resolution. The Warrenton Data Center Project, documented in the city's conditional use permit file CUP-103-SP-185, sets a transparency floor for what project footprint and abatement scope a locality can be asked to disclose. Whether counties in the Heart of America corridor choose to follow that floor is now a question for the Aug. 4 primary voters, and for the commission chambers where Cope plans to keep showing up.