Residents upset as major concerns linger around planned Independence data center
For the past five years, a bald eagle has returned nightly to its nest at the end of Bly Road in Independence.
Other migratory birds come around too, feasting on dropped kernels of corn and soy.
But when construction crews arrived in November with little warning, starting the first wave of preparations for a planned 400-acre AI data center, the birds began to vanish. First the seasonal flocks, a vision of grey and white. Then the eagle, whose nightly roosts have become sporadic.
When Dawn Hahnfeld left her home Tuesday night to attend a community meeting in protest of the planned data center, the bald eagle was sitting on a light pole, watching crews dig.
Along with outgoing Independence Mayor Rory Rowland and Assistant City Manager Charlie Dissell, councilmembers Bridget McCandless, John Perkins and Jared Fears took the stage at St. Mark’s United Methodist Church Tuesday night to address concerns about the incoming Independence data center, which will be the U.S. hub for European AI cloud management software company Nebius.
Kevin King, who is currently running against McCandless for mayor, was in the audience.
Rachel Gonzalez, who moderated the conversation along with other members of the Stop The AI Data Center in Independence action group, said the goal of the conversation was to get further clarity on the progress of the data center project and the projected impact on residents’ daily lives.
“We’re not anti technology, and we want Independence to grow and thrive economically,” said Misty Vaughn, another Stop The AI Data Center organizer. “What we’re asking for is responsible growth with clear guardrails in place, and right now there are still a lot of unanswered questions.”
Tuesday’s conversation was angry and chaotic, though, with residents frequently shouting questions from the audience or drowning out responses with boos and jeers. Many residents expressed frustration with councilmembers’ lengthy responses, saying they felt city leaders were dodging direct questions or outright fabricating information about the data center’s potential impact on daily life.
“We’re a vulnerable city,” Gonzalez said Tuesday. “We’re not Lee’s Summit. We’re not Leawood. If this were happening in Leawood, it would never have been pushed through this fast.
We are a working-class community, whether you want to admit it or not. We’re a vulnerable city. Companies like Nebius look at our city and say, ‘Oh, well, do we think their community is going to give that pushback or even care?’”
Wastewater woes
Nebius, a European AI cloud software corporation, plans to open a sprawling $6.6 billion campus in the Eastgate Commerce Center off Little Blue Parkway in Independence.
Nebius purchased the land from Kansas City developer NorthPoint Development in December 2025. If city officials approve the site plan, construction will begin on the 400-acre site in summer 2026 and last for 3 to 5 years, with the first of up to 10 buildings opening in 2028.
The projected cost does not include AI-specific hardware, which could cost up to another $150 billion over time, according to Nebius. Nebius and the city of Independence have said that the data center will not rely on municipal funding or tax breaks.
Spilling out into the hallways of St. Mark’s and often yelling over each other, residents made it clear that their worries about noise, light pollution and other environmental factors had not been assuaged by previous messaging from Nebius and the city.
“Many residents feel this project is being treated as a quick fix,” Vaughn said.
City officials and residents disagreed vehemently Tuesday night on their understanding of the plant’s potential environmental impact, with water waste and usage at the forefront.
Rowland said Nebius had initially proposed a model that would use 12 million gallons of water, which would have been unacceptable to the city. Instead, the center will use between 400,000 and 635,000 gallons of water per year, along with an initial 1.4 million gallons of water per 200-megawatt building on site.
City officials repeated Tuesday that this usage would not dramatically outstrip other major water users in Independence, including Centerpoint Medical Center and the Independence School District. Residents said it’s still too much of a drain on local resources.
Water to keep the data center running
Nebius has not made a final statement on where the company would source the water to keep the data center running. Since water used for building cooling would have to be distilled, McCandless said Tuesday, it would either have to be bought from Independence and distilled off-site or bought pre-distilled and transported in.
The data center would use a closed-loop system, recycling the same water throughout its buildings and replacing about 20% of the total liquid annually. The water would have to be chemically treated and could potentially make its way back into the Independence wastewater system, though this last step would require federal permission, McCandless said.
McCandless compared the planned water treatment to “a soap” that would kill algae and other sediments before entering the data center’s storage tanks.
Residents also pressed city council members to provide a full list of all the chemicals that will be used to treat the water used for cooling in the data center, which could theoretically make their way back into the Independence wastewater system.
“At the end of the day, this is our city,” Vaughn said. “It’s our resources.”
Light, noise and energy
The data center will be largely fueled by the once-defunct Blue Valley Power Plant, which will reopen in stages and eventually produce up to nine times its former capacity in coal or gas energy.
“We have to always have a little bit extra,” McCandless said, “just in case the system gets strained or it’s the hottest day on the planet.”
Residents, though, said they were initially told that the center’s capacity would stop at 800 megawatts, expressing confusion Tuesday night at the expanded scope of the planned Blue Valley Power Plant rebuild.
“I’m more frustrated than what I was before I came,” Mary Hoff, who lives adjacent to the site, told The Star. “We pay for this city, all of us that live here. We should have input on what happens in it, and it should be put before the people to vote on.”
Some pushed back on energy use comparisons to Nebius’ first data center in Finland, which is about 16 times smaller than the planned Independence facility and sits in a much colder climate.
Others, who live close to the planned data center, said they did not receive adequate warning of planned construction.
Crews associated with the data center have already dug 13 runoff ponds around the site, said Hahnfeld, whose property on Bly Road overlooks the planned site. The crews’ arrival in November 2025 was the first warning she and some of her neighbors received, and construction sounds have since become nonstop, she said.
City officials declined to share an estimate of how many decibels of noise the plant will generate, despite repeated inquiries from residents. McCandless said the city will conduct noise level checks every few months and will work with Nebius on sound-dampening measures as needed.
Those who live near the site, however, say they aren’t convinced that noise pollution won’t quickly reach unacceptable levels. “Constant noise makes people go crazy,” Independence resident Gayla Hirst said. “I don’t want to stay. What happens if the things that they say - they’re going to check the noise every six months? Six months isn’t good enough for me. What about every six days?”
Will the project cause financial issues?
Both Rowland and the moderators acknowledged that several failed development projects in city limits, including the recently closed Adventure Oasis water park, the troubled Little Blue Parkway Bridge and the slowly progressing updates to portions of U.S. Highway 40, have left behind major debts or areas of blight, along with a bad taste in residents’ mouths.
Rowland said Independence’s budget is currently balanced, meaning the city is not in debt and has the legal threshold of 16% of its total funding in reserve at all times.
However, funding further city services or fixing other active construction issues in the city would require an outside funding source, which the council hopes Nebius can provide, Rowland said.
“Do we have the budget to operate the services that we’re providing today? Yes,” Rowland said. “Do we have the budget to provide for this list right here? No, we don’t.
Would you like more fire and police in your future, better roads in the future? … If we want to provide those services, we need to have additional revenue.”
What about residents’ property values?
Vaughn and other data center opponents, however, feel that selling land to large corporations like Nebius ultimately does residents more harm than good, posing a risk to their efforts to build future wealth through property values.
“That’s what we vote you guys in to do - to make our city thrive,” Vaughn said. “... But at what cost? The cost of selling ourselves to billion-dollar companies? We’re talking about our health. We’re talking about our environment. We’re talking about our future.”
Multiple residents told The Star that they are worried their home values will drop significantly due to their proximity to the planned data center - which Hoff, Hahnfeld and others said will pose a serious setback to their retirement plans.
“We’ve lived in our place for almost 30 years,” Independence resident Jane Nash told The Star. “We’re worried about our property value… I’m really worried that it’s a done deal.”
City officials expect the data center to generate about 125 “specialized” jobs and about 500 contract-based positions for construction and other forms of on-site labor. Residents pressed the panel Tuesday to verbally commit to hiring Independence residents, but were unsuccessful.
“Something as monumental as this should not be seen as a savior, because ultimately it’s going to destroy,” Independence resident Rina Sartain told The Star.
Health concerns
Hahnfeld and others worry that living in close proximity to a massive data center will have multiple negative impacts on both their short-term quality of life and their long-term health.
“I could care less about the city and their money and all that,” Hahnfeld said. “It’s the long-term effects. They haven’t had data centers out that long. We don’t know what the ramifications are for us.
…We should be able to go out in our yards and stay out there all day if we want to, and not have to worry about being poisoned and getting sick and getting cancer, losing our hearing, being driven crazy by the noise.”
Those who live along Bly Road and other streets surrounding the proposed site are also worried about pain and anguish on the part of pets and livestock.
“That’s the only greenspace left in Independence, and they’re taking that away,” Hoff said.
Communication issues between the city and residents
Nebius representatives hosted an open house in Independence several weeks ago and have spoken at multiple city council meetings about plans for the site.
A Nebius spokesperson told The Star that the company is “committed to being a long-term partner that invests in the future of Independence and delivers real, meaningful benefits.”
“Responsible development for us means purposeful design to minimize impact while maximizing resource efficiency, and engaging with local communities in a transparent manner,” the Nebius spokesperson wrote.
Residents say, though, that they mostly feel left in the dark when it comes to the company’s progress and plans.
“I feel like they’re just gaslighting us, plain and simple,” Sartain told The Star. “They would not answer questions that were yes or no questions. They would not answer yes or no when asked, ‘Can you guarantee that this will not cause any harm?’”
Residents also said that they felt the planned data center had been presented to them as a finalized project with full city approval, which they no longer feel is accurate framing.
“We’ve been told two different things,” Gonzalez said. “We’ve been told that this is a done deal, the land was zoned in 2022… but we’ve also heard that we’re still very early in this process, we haven’t approved the building permits, that kind of thing.”
Assistant City Manager Dissell said Tuesday that the city considers itself to be “still in the planning process”.
“We don’t necessarily have everything answered, and a lot of the things that you all are asking are required to be answered before we move forward,” Dissell said.
Petition asks City Council to oppose development plans
Rowland, the outgoing Independence mayor, told The Star he is committing to attending further group meetings with residents ahead of the council’s upcoming vote on site plans. He also told The Star he was not surprised by the high levels of anger residents expressed Tuesday night, and that noise levels are now his largest concern.
“For most people, it’s just the amount of concern that they have with respect to other cities that have gotten the raw end of the deal after data centers came,” Rowland said.
Some residents said they would also like to see the city make more of an effort to hear concerns from those within a five-mile radius of the data center, along with more non-electronic updates for older residents without consistent access to technology.
A petition asking the city council to oppose the development plan for the site, which would impede its progress and delay further construction, had more than 1,350 signatures as of Wednesday afternoon.
“Data centers do nothing but consume, consume, consume,” Hahnfeld said. “They are giving us nothing. They don’t contribute.”
This story was originally published February 12, 2026 at 8:20 AM.
