Mayor Cortez talks council meeting venue change, other topics

After a city council meeting where it seemed like everyone in Joplin showed up to voice their opinion about the annexation and rezoning of the land from the old Wildwood Ranch, there will be a venue change for the upcoming meeting with the scheduled second and third reading of the ordinances.

The venue for the meeting will be moved from the City Council Chambers to the Corley Auditorium on the campus of Missouri Southern State University in an effort to better accommodate what many expect to be another packed house.

“When we had the council meeting in chambers at City Hall, there were more people than that building could hold,” Mayor Keenan Cortez said on the Morning Newswatch. “Unsafe medical emergency, fight fire—anything like that breaks out, we're in bad shape, bad trouble. We can't do that again. We absolutely cannot. And it's important that we get everybody who wants to be in and have a say to their elected officials and to talk about whatever business that we're conducting. So we've made a decision that we're going to move it and provide more space for citizens, come in and be comfortable and be able to address their councilmen.”

The second and third reading of the ordinances are essentially in place to allow the councilmen to hear everything a second time since the original 7-2 vote was not unanimous. Of course, the reason for the public concern of the annexation and rezoning of the land is because it will probably lead to an AI data center if it passes all of its feasibility studies. 

“There's a lot of things that have to fall into place for that to happen,” Cortez said. “But you know, people are right in assuming that if those pieces do fall into place, there could potentially be a data center on the west end of Joplin.”

There has been a unique public response since the late January council meeting. A “Stop the Wildwood Ranch Data Center Project” petition has been circling online with nearly 1800 signatures.

“Thank God I live in America,” Cortez said. “Thank God I live in a place where if citizens want to get together and do stuff like that, they're free to do that. This is their exercising their constitutionally given rights. And if they want to circulate a petition to get so many signatures to present to the powers that be in our state, in our city. Yeah, go for it. This is America. You can do those things here.”

The mayor also touched on the future of 7th Street, which will see extensive construction over the next couple of years. From Schifferdecker to Rangeline, the street will be repaved, widened, new sidewalks and there will be infrastructure upgrades as well. There will also be a council discussion about a $2.7 million contribution from Joplin for a sanitary sewer system relocation project with MODOT.

“Stormwater runoff, sanitary sewer runoff, all that stuff that affects our downtown corridor, that has a very poignant history of flooding the downtown area, and we don't ever want that to happen again,” Cortez said.