Inside the Fierce Battle Over a $6 Billion Data Center | Lori Merriman

Our Take

Festus, Missouri is the latest small town to discover it was cast in a real estate deal it never got to audition for. Fourteen thousand residents, one city council, and apparently a year of closed-door meetings with CRG — Clayco's development arm — over 360 wooded acres and a $6 billion hyperscale project. Flashlights and creator Lori Merriman deserve credit for dragging this into daylight; that's exactly the kind of shoe-leather accountability work these buildout stories need, because the paper trail rarely shows up on its own.

This is the pattern we track every week at GridWatch: a mega-project gets sketched out behind closed doors, and the town finds out only after the terms are basically set — the tax abatements, the land, the utility asks, the whole package. By the time residents get a public hearing, they're negotiating with a stacked deck. Merriman calling it 'corruption' isn't a legal finding, it's a resident's read on what secrecy does to public trust — and that instinct is worth taking seriously even before any investigation confirms specifics.

Festus residents now have to ask the same questions we'd push in any town facing this: who signed the non-disclosure agreements, what did the council know and when, and what's the actual water and power draw once this thing is built. Check our facility map to see if a project like this is already headed for your county, and hit take-action for tools to get ahead of the closed-door phase instead of reacting after the fact.