What the facility record does—and does not—show
A project tracker maintained by Warren County Citizens for Responsible Development identifies an existing 36,000-square-foot H5 Data Centers colocation facility at 710 N. Tucker Boulevard, Suite 610, in the Globe Building. The tracker cautions that the building’s full 550,000 square feet should not be counted as H5 data-center space. That information documents a facility’s reported footprint; it does not establish what the city’s license records show.
The license-record dispute remains unresolved in the available reporting. KSDK’s account of the committee discussion says a Globe Building lobbyist told officials the tenants were licensed and had been missed by the city. Louis Hamilton said he believed the database was wrong. License Collector Mavis Thompson defended the figures and said her small office depends on businesses to come forward. The supplied material does not independently resolve the competing claims.
The proposed fee
Board of Aldermen President Megan Green has proposed charging data-center operators $5.70 per megawatt-hour of electricity used, tying the annual business-license fee to power consumption rather than employee count. The St. Louis American reports that current data-center business-license fees generally total less than $5,000 a year. It says proceeds would support residential energy-efficiency work, including rooftop solar, battery storage and power-grid improvements.
In its account of Green’s presentation, KSDK reports that she compared the fees with restaurant licenses, which she put at about $3,750 a year, while the data-center licenses her office had located were $200 or $1,500. Green argued that the existing fee structure did not reflect the different scale of restaurants and data centers.
Industry objections and next steps
KSDK reports that Jeff Mazur of Greater St. Louis Inc. said Google, Meta and AWS were not represented in the city’s data and argued that smaller data-center businesses could bear the cost instead. Green said the expected revenue would be modest and wanted the proposal to reach voters promptly. The St. Louis American reports that, if the Board approves the proposal and the mayor signs it, the question would go to city voters on April 6. KSDK says the committee had not voted and planned to take up the measure again.
The wider electricity-cost question
The proposed city fee sits alongside larger questions about the cost of serving prospective data centers. St. Louis Public Radio reported that developers had paid Ameren $28 million toward transmission upgrades for potential projects. The report also said the average energy demand of businesses considering a move into Ameren’s territory rose from 3.2 megawatts in 2019 to 181.2 megawatts in 2025, and that Missouri’s economic-development agency was courting 10 data centers with peak demands as high as 2,000 megawatts.
Rules for assigning large-load electricity costs
The proposed city fee is separate from rules governing utility costs for large electricity users. The Missouri Public Service Commission says Senate Bill 4 requires rates for large-load customers, including data centers, to reflect their share of costs and protects other customers from unjust or unreasonable costs arising from service to those large loads.
In that report, Harvard Law School electricity-policy expert Ari Peskoe warned that utility infrastructure spending for data centers could increase costs for other customers. The city committee’s pending decision concerns the proposed license fee; the underlying disagreement over St. Louis’s existing licenses remains unsettled in the supplied reporting.
