Missouri
Missouri is worth asking about even if your place is modest, because the state sets its qualifying bar far below its neighbours. A new facility here needs 25 million dollars of investment and 10 jobs, where Kansas asks 250 million and Texas asks 200 million. Smaller projects clear that, and smaller projects fit on smaller ground. Beyond that it is the usual questions: which utility serves you, what transmission runs nearby, and whether the acreage holds together. Send us the county, a rough acreage, and what you have noticed around the place. We check it against public records at no cost and answer either way.
Everyone asks this first and it deserves a straight response. We are not going to publish a per acre number for Missouri. A figure quoted before anybody has looked at your ground is a guess wearing a dollar sign, and the only thing it reliably does is set you up to be disappointed or taken advantage of. What we can do is say precisely what moves it.
The electrical picture around the property does more than acreage, soil, or frontage. Ground beside a substation with headroom is a different asset to ground fifteen miles from any, and nothing in the deed or the assessor's record separates them.
Where a state demands 200 million dollars of investment, only a handful of companies can play. Missouri's lower bar means more parties can qualify, and more parties looking at a property is generally better for whoever owns it.
Contiguous ground held by a single owner is worth more than the same acreage assembled from three farms. Buying up neighbours afterwards is slow and uncertain, and every party involved prices that in from the start.
Some landowners take a payment for a period of exclusivity while a project works out whether it can build, and keep farming the whole time. Others sell. The money, the certainty, and the tax treatment differ, and which suits you is about your family rather than your acreage.
An option period commonly runs a year or more and the ground nearly always keeps being farmed or grazed through it. Survey crews and soil borings appear from time to time and work around the operation.
Large low buildings, a substation, security fencing, and lighting at night. It is an industrial site and we will not describe it as anything gentler. Quieter than a highway, a great deal busier than pasture.
Whether large new loads raise other customers' bills is a live question in Missouri as elsewhere, and it has been raised by people who have looked at the numbers carefully. Expect it at a county commission meeting, and expect it to be a fair question rather than an objection to brush off.
Planning and zoning in much of rural Missouri is handled at county level by people you know by name. That cuts both ways, and it is worth having thought about before you are the item on the agenda.
For most landowners, yes. A 25 million dollar bar means a project does not have to be enormous to qualify, and a project that is not enormous does not need an enormous tract. It brings ordinary farms into a conversation that states like Kansas effectively reserve for very large properties.
Because Missouri requires the jobs at a qualifying facility to pay at least 150 percent of the county average. That makes a county with a lower average wage an easier place to satisfy the test than a wealthier one, which is a genuinely unusual piece of arithmetic and it works in favour of rural counties.
If your ground is genuinely rural, a cooperative is a likely answer, and those are supplied by Associated Electric Cooperative. Ameren covers the east, Evergy the west and a southern territory, Liberty the southwest. It matters because whoever serves you owns the connection. Your bill says which.
There is no single number and anybody offering one without seeing your ground is guessing. Whether the acreage is contiguous, and what runs near it electrically, matters far more than the total, and Missouri's lower threshold means smaller places are worth asking about here.
Do not sign, and do not treat a deadline in the letter as binding on you. Find out whether they are buying for themselves or for a party they have not named. Have a Missouri attorney read it before you agree to anything. That goes for a letter from us as much as from anyone else.
Often not. Plenty of arrangements involve part of a property while the rest carries on as it was. It is a reasonable thing to raise in the first conversation and we would rather you did than leave it late.
Missouri divides roughly three ways. Ameren Missouri serves the eastern part of the state including St. Louis and a wide arc of countryside. Evergy covers the western side around Kansas City and a separate territory further south. Liberty serves the southwest around Joplin. Behind all of that, Associated Electric Cooperative supplies generation and transmission to the distribution cooperatives that cover a very large share of rural Missouri, so if your ground is genuinely rural a cooperative is a likely answer. That matters because the cooperative and its generation partner, rather than an investor-owned utility, are who a project has to work with. Your bill names your provider.
Missouri exempts qualifying data centers from state and local sales and use tax, including tax on utilities, under section 144.810 of the Revised Statutes. The programme is run by the Department of Economic Development rather than granted automatically, and the operator has to be primarily engaged in data processing and hosting or in internet publishing and search. The number that matters is the threshold, and it is far lower than anywhere around it. A new facility needs at least 25 million dollars of investment within 36 months of conditional approval, and at least 10 new full-time jobs in facility operations within the same period. Construction jobs and part-time jobs do not count. For comparison, Kansas asks 250 million dollars, Texas and Louisiana each ask 200 million, and Georgia asks between 100 and 250 million depending on county size. There is a real condition attached in exchange. Those jobs have to pay at least 150 percent of the average wage in the county where the facility sits, which is a genuinely demanding test and one that gets harder in counties with higher average wages rather than easier. None of this money reaches you as a landowner. It matters because a lower bar means smaller projects qualify, smaller projects fit on smaller ground, and more companies can afford to be in the conversation about your land. It is also, as elsewhere, publicly argued about, and analyses have questioned what the state and local governments give up for it.
Programs change. Confirm anything that matters to your decision with your own advisor before acting on it.
Clay, Platte, Cass, Johnson and their neighbours, in Evergy territory, with existing transmission and the workforce a wage test needs. Land here is priced accordingly and the county wage averages make the job requirement harder to satisfy than further out.
St. Charles, Lincoln, Warren and Jefferson counties, on the Ameren side, with real infrastructure and enough distance from the city that farms are still farms. Similar wage arithmetic applies.
Boone, Callaway, Audrain and the country either side of the interstate, with transmission linking the two metropolitan areas and land at a fraction of what it costs at either end.
Largely cooperative served, thinly populated, with lower county wage averages that make the jobs test easier to clear, and land prices to match. The transmission picture varies sharply from one county to the next, so this is country worth checking rather than assuming about.
Around Springfield and Joplin, with Liberty and cooperative territory, established industry, and existing transmission from a long history of manufacturing and distribution.