Edgerton, Kan., is locked in a fight over a facility proposed by a Trump ally
By Deborah Acosta
About 45 minutes outside of Kansas City, Kan., a fight is raging in a small town over plans to build an AI data center.
The battle in Edgerton isn't just between the developer and its detractors. City officials took the rare step of suing their own residents to allow the project to proceed. While a judge dismissed that suit in September, residents filed a separate lawsuit to force the city to include a potential ban on data centers on the ballot next month.
Residents packed into a city council meeting this month and some argued that the city council should step down.
The dispute is one of many playing out across America amid the race to build enough processing power to meet the demands of AI giants. But unlike other data center projects, the real-estate developer in Edgerton is a close ally of President Trump.
Dubai-based Damac Properties has worked with Trump on several developments in the Middle East, including a luxury golf community bearing Trump's name, and has paid millions of dollars in management and licensing fees to the Trump Organization since 2013, federal filings show.
The project in Edgerton is one of several Damac plans to build across the country, part of a pledge by its chairman Hussain Sajwani to spend $20 billion on U.S. data centers after Trump was re-elected.
"We've been waiting four years to increase our investments in the U.S. to a very large amount of money," Sajwani said in January 2025 at Mar-a-Lago, weeks before Trump's second inauguration. He declined to comment for this article.
"Hussain, we're going to work with you and make sure everything goes smoothly," Trump said onstage, after rattling off states where Damac would build. Trump suggested the projects would secure expedited reviews, bypassing what he called "the quagmire of environmental and various other regulations and rules." He said others who invest more than $1 billion could expect the same.
Kansas wasn't mentioned on stage that day, but Edgerton soon became Damac's primary launchpad when it purchased a warehouse and parcel in early 2026. When asked whether Trump supported the Damac project in Edgerton, a White House spokeswoman said: "President Trump's bold leadership is turning data centers into engines of growth and opportunity for communities across the country that want them, all while cementing America's dominance over China" in the global AI race.
This community of roughly 2,000 is populated partly by blue-collar commuters living alongside soybean, corn and wheat farmers. Voters overwhelmingly supported Trump in each of the last three elections.
Edgerton's mayor, Donald Roberts, has been a proponent of the industrial complex on the outskirts of town where the data center would be built. Roberts hasn't come out publicly in favor of or against the Damac data center project, a city spokeswoman said.
William LaFalce bought his home in the early 1990s on an Army salary, drawn to the bucolic charm of Edgerton. "It was just like a Rockwell painting," he said. "Three churches, a grocery store and no stoplight."
He opposes the Damac project because it would continue to add to the industrial complex that is already disrupting the harmony of the community, he said, and is pushing up local taxes and living costs. His 35-year-old daughter, a printing press operator, was priced out of her loft apartment in a town nearby because of rising regional rents and moved back in with him.
"Now I'm stuck," the 65-year-old said. "For me to sell my house to afford a lifestyle on retired pay, I'd have to move hundreds of miles out."
Before Damac arrived in Edgerton, the groundwork had been laid by NorthPoint Development, a Kansas City-based developer. Over roughly the last decade, NorthPoint built the logistics park that remade Edgerton from a quiet farming town into a lucrative industrial hub. The development also reshaped local politics.
Logistics Park Kansas City spans more than 2,300 acres and is anchored by a railway intermodal facility. More than 15 million square feet of industrial space houses distribution hubs for corporate giants including Amazon, funneling freight from West Coast ports into the heartland.
To build that facility, NorthPoint swept up acreage through a web of entities masked under names like Hillsdale Land and Cattle LLC. Land acquired by NorthPoint in unincorporated Johnson County was subsequently annexed into the City of Edgerton. By the time local farmers realized who was behind the land purchases, the developer held a substantial share of the surrounding farmland.
When the data center boom took off, NorthPoint was sitting on thousands of acres already approved for industrial development, many with empty warehouses already built on top of them, and a cooperative municipal government.
In March 2025, NorthPoint asked city staff to confirm that data centers fit into existing development codes. The following month the city designated data centers as permitted "by right" within the industrial zone. That classification allowed the project to bypass mandatory rezoning public hearings.
NorthPoint didn't respond to requests for comment.
The state of Kansas was also working to attract this kind of development. Last year, state lawmakers passed legislation offering 20-year tax incentives for hyperscale data centers.
At the same time, local taxpayers in Edgerton have faced mounting property tax bills. Last year, LaFalce withdrew funds from his IRA to help cover his property taxes, which rose about 31% over five years.
The city also added a 1% special project sales tax. To ease the burden on homeowners, the city offered a one-time 40% tax rebate for next year. The city offered a 10% tax rebate this year.
Edgerton sits near Hillsdale Lake, a regional reservoir supplying drinking water to about 56,000 residents.
Kim Twente, one of the residents sued by the city over the ballot petition, is concerned about the project's ecological impacts and the potential for runoff into a small stream running across Damac's property that ultimately feeds into the Hillsdale watershed.
Damac has promised a closed-loop cooling system, which will require less water to operate. Those systems must be flushed for routine maintenance. Damac has told the city that it won't discharge into the wastewater or groundwater, the city spokeswoman said. "Anytime they need to flush those lines, they'll truck it off-site," she said.
To ensure servers never go offline, Damac's plans also call for backup diesel generators. Stored on-site in large, aboveground generators with "belly tanks," the fuel presented a fire and environmental concern for the city's planning commission.
When Damac submitted its site plan, Edgerton's planning commission rejected it in June 2026, citing safety and environmental risks associated with the fuel tanks. The city council stepped in and overturned the denial after Damac confirmed the tanks would be underground. The city spokeswoman said the council stepped in only because Damac had appealed the decision.
A group of citizens began circulating a petition late in July to give residents the ability to vote on whether data centers should be allowed. "When the city added data centers 'by right' they bypassed the public process and didn't give us a voice," said Twente.
The group collected more than double the number of signatures needed to include the ballot measure, and delivered it to the county's voter office, where it was determined to meet all legal requirements.
In court, the city has argued that the data center ban question doesn't belong on the ballot because zoning approvals are administrative, and therefore exempt from public ballot initiatives. "There's obviously some concern that it could open us up to legal issues because Damac is a property owner," the city spokeswoman said.
The lawyer representing the petitioners, Linus Baker, said the ballot initiative concerns a new land use policy, and therefore is legislative. "It's a red herring that just because Damac is a property owner they have some sort of right to build a data center," said Baker.
The measure hasn't been placed on the November ballot.