Missouri Water First
Sell them the wastewater. Keep the aquifer.
Data centers are shopping Missouri for cheap power and cheap water. Rhodes is not against a payroll. He is against handing them the groundwater under a farm, a town, and a well that a family already drinks.
- 1
People drink first
A household well and a town water system come before any industrial cooling loop. If there is not enough, the server farm waits. The kitchen does not.
- 2
The aquifer is not free
A data center does not get a quiet permit to pump Missouri groundwater as if it were a line item. Aquifer water is for drinking and for the farms and towns that already depend on it.
- 3
They buy the wastewater
If a data center needs water for cooling, it buys treated wastewater from Missouri at a public rate. The plant already cleaned it. The company pays for it. That is the deal.
- 4
The money stays in the county
What they pay goes back into rural water, wells, and the towns carrying the load. It does not vanish into a development brochure.
- 5
No silent drain
A county should not find out its water is spoken for after the trucks arrive. The permit is public. The price is public. The well owner can read both.
What this is not
It is not a ban on every building with a computer in it. It is a price and a line. Cooling water is a product. Drinking water is not inventory.
What he will say in the room
If you want Missouri, you buy Missouri’s treated wastewater. You do not dip a straw in the aquifer and call it economic development.