Franklin County MO Commissioners Unanimously Rezone Two Farms for Data Centers, Overriding Their Own Planning Commission

Franklin County, Missouri commissioners voted unanimously on September 15, 2026 to rezone two agricultural properties to industrial use for data-center development: Diamond Farm in Villa Ridge — a 600-plus-acre site near Interstate 44 marketed as the Gateway Digital Campus — and Crooked Creek Farm south of Pacific, which developer Beltline plans as the Meramec Valley Technology Park. Residents packed a meeting at East Central College for hours of public comment on noise, environmental impact and electricity demand.

The override is the finding. The county’s own Planning and Zoning Commission had approved Diamond Farms and rejected Crooked Creek. The commissioners approved both, unanimously — reversing the advisory body’s split judgment in the direction of the applicants on the parcel their own planners had turned down. This is a recurring shape in the data-center siting record: the technical review body says no, and the elected body that can be lobbied says yes.

It runs against the county-level resistance the timeline has tracked through 2026 — moratoria in Linn County IA (2026-07-01–linn-county-ia-18-month-data-center-moratorium-vote), Hall County GA (2026-08-26–hall-county-ga-unanimous-dual-moratorium-data-centers-and-detention-centers), and a denied rezoning in Citrus County FL (2026-06-18–citrus-county-fl-data-center-moratorium-holder-rezoning-denied) — and alongside St. Joseph County IN’s TIF delay the day before (2026-09-14–st-joseph-county-in-council-delays-microsoft-tif-expansion-vote-to-september-22). Franklin County is the counter-case: packed hearing, unanimous approval anyway.

Not established. No hyperscaler end-user is named in any source for either site; the ledger’s field read “Unknown” and that remains correct. Whether a PILOT or TIF abatement accompanied either rezoning is unknown, as is the proposed scale in megawatts or square feet. Leads are open on all three. Sourcing note: two sources carried in the capture ledger (Fox2Now, DataCenterDynamics) returned HTTP 403 on 2026-09-16 and were replaced with live KSDK and Missouri Times reporting located the same day; the Gateway Digital Campus name, the 600-acre figure and the Beltline/Meramec Valley attribution come from that replacement sourcing, not from the ledger.