Digital Realty Is Offering Every Household in a Kansas Town $1,000 a Year. Four Hundred Residents Signed a Petition Anyway.

Toni Caldwell lives in De Soto, Kansas, and she has a one-word read on the check Digital Realty wants to send her household every year for the next decade: a bribe. "It's a bribe, is what it looks like," she told a local TV reporter. Her neighbor Sara VanDeCreek is less certain. VanDeCreek says the company "isn't really answering the questions that we have" about water, noise, and the power grid, and then, in the same conversation, allows that "De Soto has a lot of people that could use $1,000 a year." That split, between real money and real distrust, is the whole story here, playing out in a city of roughly 6,100 people that is now being asked to host its second hyperscale data center campus in under a year.

The offer is specific enough to take seriously. Digital Realty has proposed a $20 million community fund that would pay every household in De Soto up to $1,000 a year, likely as a property tax or utility bill credit, for as long as ten years. It's not a one-time check and it's not aimed only at the handful of neighbors closest to the site. It's every household in a small Kansas City-area town, funded by one company, tied to one project. De Soto's planning commission has already approved the first phase of that project, a roughly 280-to-300-acre site plan signed off on September 22nd, with construction expected to start in 2027.

The project is Astra North, locally filed as "Project Jayhawk," and it sits inside the Astra Enterprise Park on the former Sunflower Army Ammunition Plant site, the same tract where Panasonic built its roughly $4 billion EV battery plant a few years ago. Digital Realty's own first phase alone is projected to run close to $4 billion, with the full build-out eventually covering as much as 1,400 acres across two parcels and up to nine buildings, roughly 3 million square feet of data halls at full scale. Digital Realty projects up to 1,000 peak construction jobs and roughly 250 permanent operating jobs once the campus is running, figures the company has published but that no independent audit has tested yet.

This isn't De Soto's first data center fight, either. The city council already approved Beale's "Project Pilot," a separate roughly $3.1 billion campus near the same Panasonic plant, with an end user the city still hasn't named; its own filings merely note that Google, Meta, Amazon, and Microsoft are the kind of companies that lease space like this, which is not the same as naming a tenant. Two unrelated hyperscale campuses, one small town of about 6,100 people, approved in less than a year. De Soto's mayor, Rick Walker, framed the broader wave of interest back in June as a chance to fund city services a different way, while cautioning that growth "needs to be smart." Whether a second campus, stacked on top of the first, still counts as smart growth is exactly the question residents are now asking him to answer.

The power deal is the part that should actually reassure a skeptic

The number that matters more than the household checks is the one in Digital Realty's energy service agreement with Evergy: 600 megawatts of committed capacity by early 2028, with room to grow to as much as 2 gigawatts at full build-out. Two new substations are planned, one built by Digital Realty and one by Evergy, and the company says it is covering roughly $300 million of that infrastructure itself, the substations and the transmission lines, rather than asking Evergy's other customers to absorb the cost of building for a load this size. That's the large-load tariff question this blog keeps coming back to: who pays when a utility has to build new infrastructure for one customer. Here, on the numbers reported so far, the customer is paying for its own interconnection rather than spreading the bill.

The water story is less dramatic than some of the fights this blog has covered elsewhere, and that's worth saying plainly instead of manufacturing drama where there isn't any. Digital Realty says cooling will rely mainly on outside air, with evaporative cooling kicking in only during peak heat, and the company has agreed to fund a new city-operated industrial wastewater treatment plant that De Soto didn't otherwise have the money to build. Residents have still flagged water use as a top concern, which is reasonable given how often a data center's early cooling-design promises turn out to need revision once a facility is actually running at scale. But on the public record right now, this is one of the more straightforward water stories in the sector, not one of the alarming ones.

A bribe, or $1,000 a year for a town that could use it

Caldwell and VanDeCreek aren't outliers. A citizen petition seeking to put "high impact" data center development in De Soto to a public vote has collected more than 400 signatures as of this month. City officials, by their own account, aren't sure whether a petition like this is even legally binding against a zoning or site-plan decision; the mechanism is new enough that nobody has tested it in court yet. An earlier, separate petition back in May, now closed, gathered more than 650 supporters behind a two-year moratorium, citing health, noise, water, and electricity-rate concerns. Two petitions, two different asks, same underlying frustration: residents feel like the pace of these approvals is outrunning their chance to weigh in.

The $20 million fund and the TIF district the city would need to approve it both still sit ahead of the project, not behind it. A public hearing on the proposed tax-increment financing district is expected November 19th, and that hearing, not September's site-plan approval, is where the money question actually gets decided. De Soto has leaned on TIF before, for the Panasonic plant, so the tool itself isn't new to this town. What's new is doing it twice in roughly three years, for a company residents say still hasn't answered their most basic questions about what the campus will draw from the grid and the water system at full build-out.

What's actually signed, and what's still a plan

This is exactly the kind of gap the Kill Test is built to flag: a planning commission's approval of a 280-acre site plan is real, but it sits well below a signed community benefits agreement, an approved TIF district, and a fully executed power contract on the evidence ladder. Right now, De Soto has the first of those and not the other three. A reporter covering this project, or a company doing diligence on a site nearby, has to keep those facts separately, because the press coverage this month is already treating the $20 million fund as settled when the city's own calendar says the vote on financing it hasn't happened yet.

I think the real lesson in De Soto isn't that $1,000 a year is or isn't enough money. It's that a well-structured power deal, where the customer pays for its own substations instead of pushing the cost onto everyone else's bill, doesn't automatically buy the trust a town needs to say yes a second time. De Soto already lives next to one approved mega-project. The questions residents are actually asking, about water at full scale, about noise, about whether anyone asked them before the first site plan was already through the planning commission, were never going to be answered by the size of the check. Those questions get answered, if they get answered at all, at the November 19th hearing and in whatever the city's lawyers eventually decide about a petition nobody anticipated having to rule on.