Residents in Independence, Missouri on Tuesday voted overwhelmingly to recall a city councilman—apparently over his vote to approve tax incentives for an artificial intelligence data center in the community. In total, 68% of voters in the city's District 1 voted to recall Councilman John Perkins, with just 32% voting to let him stay in…
Page A3From§Eachthe matinee edition — 2 September 2026
Councilman approves tax break for AI data center, awarded city's first-ever recall by 68% of voters
As it ran on the front
THE WRECKING CREW rolls into Independence, Missouri, where the toolbox has a recall statute nobody's touched since the city incorporated. The chief pulls the job sheet: District 1, Councilman John Perkins, one vote for tax incentives on an AI data center, one instrument sitting unused in the code for exactly this occasion.
The planner walks the numbers first, because the planner always does. Tuesday's tally: 68 percent to recall, 32 percent to keep him — not a margin, a verdict. It is the first successful recall in Independence's history. The tool worked on the first pull.…
…(cont) The tinkerer likes to know how a thing was built before taking it apart, so the tinkerer reads the record: Perkins approved the incentive package, the data center got its break, and when Spectrum News Kansas City asked him about it afterward, he said he had no regrets — that he still works a 40-hour week cutting meat at Price Chopper. Two facts sitting next to each other: a vote that reshaped a district's tax base, and the man who cast it back at the counter Monday morning. The recall statute doesn't weigh which fact is more interesting. It only counts votes.
The muscle handles what needed handling before the recall could even get assembled: the structure the whole job was built around. Nobody in this story dismantled the data center itself — the incentive stands, the project presumably breaks ground. What District 1 dismantled was the idea that voting for it costs a councilman nothing. Smaller demolition. It's the one the statute was built for.
Worth noting the shelf had more than one tool on it. In April, Monterey Park, California didn't wait for a councilman to vote first — it reached for a different instrument, an outright ban, and became the first city in the state to keep data centers out of the city limits entirely. Two cities, two tools, same target: a piece of the AI buildout that arrived promising jobs and left a tax bill for somebody else to itemize.
The pilot's job is just to land it. Independence didn't reject the AI economy. It rejected the idea that approving a piece of it is a vote nobody gets to grade. The statute existed before Perkins cast his; 68 percent of a district found it, picked it up, and used it exactly once — which was exactly the number of times it needed to be used.
“They dangle 'jobs' and 'tax base' like it's free money, but the bill always lands on somebody's water rate or somebody's property tax, and this time the district fired the guy who signed for it. Recall statutes sit on a shelf for decades because nobody tells you they're there — District 1 found it, used it once, sent the message. That's the whole racket: they bank on you never checking whether the tool already exists.”
“Look, tax incentives bring jobs, that's basic economic development — you want the data center built in somebody else's district instead? Sixty-eight percent is a — that's a local personnel matter, it doesn't reflect on the incentive strategy itself, which works, it's just this one voter base that got... did I say voter base? I meant community stakeholders.”
The receipts
Residents of the small enclave east of LA not only killed their city's proposed 250,000 square foot data center, they pushed city council to ban them altogether
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front.