An Attorney and an Engineer: Why Rucci’s Dual License Makes Him the Right Developer for This Fight

Most real estate developers hire attorneys. Some developers understand the law well enough to direct their legal strategy intelligently. Almost none are licensed attorneys capable of fully grasping the constitutional arguments in a Section 1983 civil rights complaint from first principles.

Most attorneys who work in land use law understand zoning codes and administrative procedure. Few understand the civil engineering constraints that determine whether a 950,000-square-foot industrial building with a 330-megawatt power load and an 862 MWh battery storage system is technically feasible on a specific 75-acre site.

Sebastian Rucci is both — a licensed civil engineer and a licensed attorney. That combination is unusual in development, and in the specific context of the IVDC fight, it matters in concrete ways.

The Engineering Dimension

The IVDC’s technical design — the recycled wastewater cooling system, the dedicated substation, the BESS, the structural requirements for a near-million-square-foot data hall — is not a standard development engineering challenge. It requires integration of electrical infrastructure, mechanical systems, civil site work, and environmental systems at a scale and complexity that most developers manage through the accumulated judgment of consultants they don’t fully understand.

A developer with a civil engineering license can engage with those technical dimensions directly. He can evaluate the engineering proposals his team produces, identify where the technical constraints intersect with the legal framework, and understand whether the arguments his opponents make about technical impact are accurate. When the opposition claims the project will crash the grid or drain the Colorado River, a developer with engineering training can engage with those claims technically, not just politically.

This matters for the water and energy arguments in particular. The recycled water system design — the treatment upgrades, the closed-loop cooling architecture, the integration with municipal wastewater infrastructure — involves engineering details that determine whether the system works as described. Rucci can evaluate those details in a way that most developers cannot.

The Legal Dimension

The IVDC dispute is not primarily a development dispute. It is a constitutional law case. The Section 1983 civil rights claims, the First Amendment retaliation theory, the Permit Streamlining Act deemed-approved argument — these are federal constitutional and statutory law questions of real complexity. A developer who can engage with those questions directly, rather than depending entirely on legal counsel whose strategic judgments he cannot fully evaluate, has a significant advantage in managing a multi-front legal campaign.

The decision to file the federal civil rights lawsuit — naming individual officials, invoking constitutional theories, accepting the risk and cost of multi-year federal litigation — is not a standard developer decision. It reflects a legal strategic judgment that the conventional developer’s tool kit (administrative appeals, state court litigation, political negotiation) was not sufficient for this fight, and that federal constitutional claims offered a path to both legal vindication and deterrence of continued obstruction.

Making that judgment correctly requires legal sophistication that most developers contract out. Rucci executed it from internal understanding.

The Fit for This Particular Fight

The IVDC fight is simultaneously a technical argument (does the project’s design adequately address water and energy concerns?), a legal argument (was the approval process correct and the city’s challenge legally sufficient?), a constitutional argument (were the developer’s civil rights violated by government officials?), and a political argument (who benefits from this project and who benefits from blocking it?).

A developer who brings both engineering and legal credentials to that multi-dimensional fight is better positioned than one who brings only business judgment and external consultants. The specific combination of skills Rucci holds is matched to the specific nature of the fight he is in. That is not coincidental. It is one of the reasons the project is still proceeding after years of coordinated opposition that would have driven away most developers.

The FBI Returned the Money: What Sebastian Rucci’s Federal Victory Tells Us

In 2021, federal agents from the FBI raided California Palms — Sebastian Rucci’s veteran addiction recovery center — and walked out with over $600,000 in seized funds. The state revoked the facility’s certification. By every visible measure, the episode looked like the end of another chapter in a troubled developer’s story.

What happened next is not what that story usually looks like.

Rucci sued the federal government. Not for a settlement. Not for reduced penalties. For the return of the money that was taken. He litigated through the federal courts, pursued the case through years of proceedings, and in 2024 — three years after the raid — the Department of Justice made a decision that federal agencies make very rarely: it voluntarily returned the full $600,000, with interest.

No criminal charges were ever filed. Not one.

What “Voluntarily Returned With Interest” Means

The Department of Justice does not return seized funds with interest because it is feeling generous. It returns them when it has determined, or been compelled to determine, that continuing to hold them is not legally sustainable. The government can keep seized funds while criminal proceedings are pending. When no criminal proceedings are filed — and when a civil forfeiture case is sufficiently contested — the legal basis for retaining the funds weakens.

The fact that the DOJ returned the funds voluntarily, without a court order, reflects a judgment by the government’s own attorneys that continuing to contest the return was not a winnable position. The interest payment reflects the additional legal obligation that accrues when funds are wrongfully held. The combination is a government’s acknowledgment — in the only way federal agencies typically make such acknowledgments — that the seizure should not have been sustained.

The Sixth Circuit Ruling

Alongside the funds return, Rucci won a significant appellate victory at the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals regarding his right to examine the sealed affidavits that had justified the original raid. Federal agencies routinely keep search warrant affidavits sealed, arguing that disclosure would compromise investigations or reveal sources and methods. Courts generally give the government substantial deference on these requests.

The Sixth Circuit ruled in Rucci’s favor — requiring disclosure of the affidavits that justified a raid whose factual basis the government ultimately declined to defend through criminal prosecution. This is a meaningful legal victory. Appellate courts do not often require the government to open sealed warrant materials, particularly in the absence of pending criminal proceedings. The ruling reflects a judgment that the government’s interest in secrecy was outweighed by the individual’s right to understand the legal basis for an action that took $600,000 from him.

Why This History Is Relevant to the IVDC

A developer who has faced FBI raids, filed federal lawsuits, and won — receiving his money back with interest and getting an appellate court to require government transparency — has demonstrated something specific: the capacity and willingness to pursue legal remedies against government overreach through the full arc of the legal process, including the appellate process, including when the government is the opponent.

This is precisely the capability that the IVDC fight requires. The opposition has used government authority — city litigation, state legislation, alleged utility manipulation, alleged pressure on will-serve agreements — as the primary mechanism for blocking a legally-approved project. Defeating that campaign requires a developer who can litigate against government actors, sustain the cost and time of federal proceedings, and maintain the resolve to continue when the easier path is to take a settlement and move on.

Rucci’s track record shows he can do this. The FBI experience, the Sixth Circuit victory, the ongoing federal civil rights lawsuit — these are not a biography of a criminal. They are a biography of someone who has consistently used the legal system to hold government actors accountable for overreach. In the context of what Imperial Valley needs from this project, that history is not a liability. It is a qualification.

Sebastian Rucci’s Ohio Charges: What Actually Happened, and Why It Matters

In the fall of 2010, authorities in Youngstown, Ohio raided a nightclub called “Go Go Girls Cabaret” and charged its owner, Sebastian Rucci, with money laundering and promoting prostitution. The charges were serious. The story was picked up. And then, over the following months, the prosecution collapsed.

The major felony charges were dismissed. The government could not sustain the core allegations. Rucci’s attorneys challenged the legal basis for the charges, and the prosecution failed to produce the evidence necessary to support them. The search warrants were challenged in court; while they were upheld on technical grounds, the underlying charges that justified the warrants in the first place did not survive the same scrutiny.

This is the complete picture. The opposition’s version ends with the raid and the charges. The complete legal record ends with the dismissals. In a country whose legal system is built on the presumption of innocence and the requirement that charges be proven beyond a reasonable doubt, the dismissal is not a technicality. It is the definitive legal outcome.

The “Checkered Past” Narrative

Media coverage of the IVDC, particularly the reporting from KPBS, describes Rucci’s background as “checkered” — a characterization that leans heavily on the Ohio charges without giving equivalent weight to their dismissal. The framing implies that the charges reveal something true about Rucci’s character that the legal outcome does not erase.

This is a legitimate journalistic approach for contexts in which the charges themselves — even unproven — are relevant to the story. Whether a public official facing charges should continue in office while charges are pending is a reasonable question. But in the context of evaluating the legal and economic merits of a development project, what matters is the legal record. The legal record says: major felony charges, dismissed.

The opposition uses the “checkered past” framing to create doubt about Rucci’s credibility that is not supported by the legal outcomes in either the Ohio case or the federal funds seizure. The goal is to make the developer the story rather than the project — to redirect attention from the court ruling that called the city’s legal theory insufficient and toward a biographical narrative that leaves out the most legally relevant facts.

Context About the Case

The Go Go Girls Cabaret operated as an adult entertainment venue in Youngstown, Ohio. Adult entertainment businesses are legal in Ohio and across most of the United States, subject to licensing and regulatory requirements. Controversial? Often. Illegal? Not by virtue of the controversy alone.

Rucci ran a business that was legally permitted under Ohio law. He was raided by authorities who alleged he was running it illegally. The legal process that the opposition uses as evidence of his unsuitability as a developer concluded by dismissing the charges — the formal legal determination that the government failed to establish the illegality it alleged.

People are entitled to form their own opinions about a nightclub owner’s character. They are also entitled to the complete factual record when those opinions are being shaped by media coverage that consistently presents the allegations and consistently omits the outcomes. The complete record is what this article is providing. The reader can draw their own conclusions from the full picture rather than the curated one.

Why Imperial Valley Needs a Developer Who Isn’t Afraid to Sue the Government

Developing major infrastructure in Imperial County requires a specific kind of resilience. It is not a market where you show up, file your permits, and break ground on schedule. It is a market where by-right approvals get challenged in court by neighboring jurisdictions, where utility interconnection agreements get complicated by consultant relationships, where environmental organizations make eight-figure settlement demands as the price of proceeding.

Against this landscape, the relevant question about a developer is not whether his biography is controversy-free. The relevant question is whether he has the legal sophistication, the financial resources, and the personal willingness to litigate against government overreach when the alternative is capitulation to a campaign that has no legal merit.

Sebastian Rucci’s record on that question is unusually specific. He fought the FBI over seized funds and made them give the money back with interest. He litigated the Sixth Circuit into ruling for transparency against the government’s preference for secrecy. He moved his data center project to county jurisdiction when the City of Imperial tried to block it, filed a federal civil rights lawsuit naming individual officials, and continued the project through years of coordinated opposition. These are not the actions of a developer who can be worn down by delay and defamation until he goes away.

The “Wartime Developer” Concept

Rucci has described himself as a “wartime developer” — someone who is not just capable of navigating the normal approval process, but specifically equipped to operate when that process has been weaponized against him. The framing is accurate. The IVDC approval process has been weaponized. The city filed a lawsuit that the court called legally insufficient. A city manager allegedly pressured another city to rescind a water supply agreement. Environmental organizations allegedly coordinated with city officials to manufacture CEQA exposure. A state senator introduced legislation designed to retroactively alter the legal framework the project relied on.

A developer without litigation capability, financial staying power, and personal willingness to fight would have walked away from this project a long time ago. Many would have. The economics of development include a calculation about the expected cost of fighting a sustained opposition campaign versus the expected return on completing the project. For most developers, the numbers don’t hold when the opposition is as organized and aggressive as what the IVDC has faced.

Rucci is still here. The project is still proceeding. The federal civil rights lawsuit is filed. The Superior Court ruling is on the record. The project’s legal position is stronger now than it was before the opposition’s campaign began — because the campaign’s legal theories have been tested and found insufficient, and because the federal lawsuit has put personal liability on the table for the people who organized it.

What Imperial Valley Gets From This

Imperial Valley has a history of watching large outside investment promises materialize slowly if at all, because the institutional environment makes completion difficult and developers learn that the expected return doesn’t justify the expected fight. The region needs developers who understand this environment and have the capability to navigate it — not because the obstruction is legitimate, but because it exists and will not simply stop existing because it lacks legal merit.

A developer who beat the FBI on a funds seizure, won a Sixth Circuit transparency ruling, and is currently litigating a federal civil rights case against named government officials while continuing to advance a $10 billion project is demonstrating the kind of institutional resilience that Imperial Valley’s development environment specifically requires. Whether you agree with every decision he has made in his career, that resilience is a real asset in the context of this project — and this region.

Imperial Valley deserves a developer who is fighting for it as hard as the opposition is fighting against it. On current evidence, it has one.

Sebastian Rucci: What the Opposition’s Narrative Gets Wrong

The opposition to the Imperial Valley Data Center has two targets: the project and its developer. The campaign against the project runs through the courts and the legislature. The campaign against Sebastian Rucci runs through media coverage designed to make his biography a reason to distrust the project he is building.

The campaign cites two specific episodes. Both ended the same way: with Rucci winning. That outcome is not always the part that makes the headline.

The Ohio Nightclub Case

In 2010, local authorities in Youngstown, Ohio raided Rucci’s “Go Go Girls Cabaret” and charged him with money laundering and promoting prostitution. The charges were serious. The coverage was significant. The outcome — which is what matters in a legal system that presumes innocence — was that the major felony charges were dismissed. The prosecution failed to sustain the core allegations. The case collapsed.

The search warrants were challenged in court and upheld on narrow technical grounds, but the government could not prove the underlying criminal conduct. Rucci ran a controversial business. He was not convicted of running a criminal one. The charges that the opposition’s media allies cite as evidence of a “checkered past” were dismissed. That is not a footnote. It is the most legally relevant fact in the story.

The California Palms FBI Raid

In 2021, federal agents raided California Palms — Rucci’s veteran addiction recovery center — and seized over $600,000. The state revoked the facility’s certification. The headlines were unfavorable. The legal outcome, again, ran the other way.

No criminal charges were ever filed against Rucci. He sued the federal government for return of the seized funds. In 2024 — three years after the raid — the Department of Justice voluntarily returned the $600,000. With interest. The government that raided the facility and seized the funds chose not to prosecute, and then chose to give back the money it took.

Rucci also litigated his right to see the sealed affidavits that justified the original raid. The Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in his favor — a meaningful appellate victory that required the government to disclose the basis for a raid that it ultimately could not justify with criminal charges. This is a rare outcome. Getting a federal appellate court to rule for transparency against the government’s preference for secrecy requires a strong legal argument and sustained effort.

What the Pattern Actually Shows

Read together, these two episodes show something specific about Sebastian Rucci: when government authority — local or federal — is deployed against him without adequate legal justification, he fights back and he wins. The Ohio charges were dismissed. The federal funds were returned. The Sixth Circuit ruled for transparency.

These are not the résumé items of a criminal. They are the résumé items of a person who has navigated aggressive government action through the legal system and emerged with his legal position intact. In a development project that requires fighting through aggressive legal obstruction from local officials and a coordinated opposition campaign, this specific kind of experience is not a liability. It is directly relevant.

The opposition knows this, which is why the narrative it promotes ends before the outcomes. The charges, not the dismissals. The raid, not the returned funds. The allegations, not the appellate victories. The community deserves the complete record, not the curated version.

Lithium Valley, the Data Center, and the Economic Future Imperial Valley Keeps Almost Capturing

The economic potential of Imperial Valley has been recognized and discussed for years. The geothermal resources. The lithium in the Salton Sea brine. The solar irradiance. The land. The independent grid. Academic papers have been written, government reports commissioned, investment conferences held. The Valley is consistently described as one of the most significant untapped economic development opportunities in the American West.

And yet the transformation keeps not quite arriving. CTR is fighting through CEQA challenges. The IVDC is fighting through litigation. Other projects in the pipeline face similar obstacles. The gap between the Valley’s recognized potential and its realized economic development is large and persistent.

That gap has a cause. It is not geological, it is not infrastructural, and it is not financial. It is political and institutional. The same patterns that are documented in the IVDC fight — organized CEQA obstruction, coordinated opposition by officials and organizations with competing interests, manufactured legal exposure — appear across multiple projects in the region. The Valley keeps almost capturing its economic future because certain actors benefit from the capture never completing.

What a Realized Lithium Valley Requires

Lithium Valley — the geothermal lithium extraction opportunity in the Salton Sea region — is a national strategic priority. Domestic lithium supply for electric vehicle batteries and grid storage is a critical minerals challenge that affects the United States’ ability to transition its energy system and reduce dependence on Chinese supply chains. Imperial Valley is the most significant domestic opportunity for addressing that challenge.

Realizing that opportunity requires multiple large projects getting built in a reasonable timeframe. CTR and its competitors have invested years and significant capital in development. They have navigated federal, state, and local approval processes. They are capable of building these projects. What they need is an institutional environment that allows permitted projects to proceed — without the greenmail demands, the coordinated CEQA campaigns, and the jurisdictional overreach that have characterized the Imperial Valley development environment.

The IVDC fight is connected to the Lithium Valley fight because the same institutional environment affects both. A region that demonstrates — through the IVDC outcome — that permitted projects can be completed despite organized obstruction sends a different signal to every Lithium Valley developer than a region that demonstrates the opposite.

The Data Center as Infrastructure for Everything Else

The IVDC is not just a data center. It is demand-side infrastructure for the energy economy that the Valley is trying to build. A 330-megawatt industrial customer for IID creates the load that justifies additional generation investment. Additional generation investment makes more geothermal projects financially viable. More geothermal projects bring more lithium extraction. Lithium extraction brings battery manufacturing interest. Battery manufacturing brings the entire value chain of the clean energy transition to a region that has the resources to anchor it.

None of this happens if the first major step — a hyperscale data center on industrial land with access to geothermal power — gets blocked by organized obstruction after clearing every legal hurdle. The IVDC is the anchor tenant of an economic ecosystem that doesn’t exist yet but could. The fight over whether it gets built is a fight over whether that ecosystem ever starts to form.

Imperial Valley has been on the verge of transformation for too long. The people who live there are entitled to see that transformation actually happen, and to hold accountable the actors who have made it their business to prevent it.

How Local Political Careerism Masquerades as Environmental Advocacy

Opposition politics follow predictable incentive structures. An elected official who positions herself as the local defender against an outside corporate interest — a “wartime developer” from Huntington Beach bringing $10 billion and disruption — builds a political brand. She gets quoted in press coverage. She becomes the visible face of community resistance. Her name becomes associated with the fight, regardless of the fight’s merits.

The political return on this positioning is real, and it is not affected by whether the project would actually benefit the community. The narrative of outside interests vs. local defenders works independent of the facts, as long as the facts don’t get sufficient circulation to undermine it.

This is the environment in which the City of Imperial’s campaign against the IVDC was organized. And it is worth being clear about what it has cost the community whose interests it claims to represent.

The Accounting Nobody Is Doing

Political accountability for economic obstruction is rare because the costs are invisible and diffuse while the political benefits are visible and concentrated. The official who blocks a development project gets credit for the fight. The workers who weren’t hired and the tax revenue that wasn’t generated are statistical abstractions — they show up in county budget gaps and unemployment figures years later, without a clear causal chain linking them to the specific decision that produced them.

The 1,688 union jobs attached to the IVDC are not hypothetical. They are committed positions — identified in the project’s economic impact analysis, attached to a $10 billion capital investment that is ready to proceed the moment the legal obstacles are cleared. Every month those obstacles persist is a month of union wages that are not paid in Imperial Valley. The workers who would have earned those wages are not abstract. They are the people in the same community as the officials blocking the project.

The officials who organized the obstruction campaign have not been asked to account for this cost. They have been given credit for the fight without bearing responsibility for the outcome. That accounting imbalance is the structural problem that allows political careerism to operate at the community’s expense without consequence.

The Difference Between Advocacy and Career Management

Legitimate environmental advocacy starts with the environmental question: does this project harm the community it is built in? It examines the evidence — engineering documents, environmental impact data, health studies, community input. It makes arguments based on that evidence. It seeks outcomes that reduce genuine harm.

Political career management starts with the political question: what position generates the most favorable coverage and political capital? It selects the environmental argument as the vehicle for that position. It maintains the position regardless of new evidence, court rulings, or changed circumstances, because the political value of the position doesn’t depend on its accuracy.

The Superior Court called the City of Imperial’s legal theory legally insufficient. A fact-based environmental discussion would acknowledge that the recycled water plan addresses the water consumption concern and that the BESS addresses the grid stability concern. Neither of these acknowledgments has been made by the officials organizing the opposition, because making them would undermine the political narrative, not because they are false.

What the Community Can Do

Political careerism thrives when accountability is weak. In communities where political engagement is low, incumbent officials face limited pressure to account for the consequences of their positions. The structural disadvantage — that the costs of obstruction are invisible and diffuse while the political benefits are visible and concentrated — favors the official over the worker.

The antidote is specific and public accountability: naming the positions officials have taken, quantifying the costs of those positions in terms the affected community can understand, and insisting that those costs be part of the public debate about whether the officials’ conduct has served the community’s interests. This is not partisan politics. It is basic civic accountability — the kind that elected officials in a functioning democracy are supposed to face.

The families who would have benefited from 1,688 union jobs deserve to know who blocked them and why. The schools that would have received $28.75 million a year deserve to know who prevented it. The answer is not complicated. It is public record.

The Federal Civil Rights Lawsuit Against Imperial City Officials: What It Means and Why It Matters

Most disputes between developers and local governments are fought in state court, over administrative law questions, about whether a permit was properly issued or properly denied. The developer loses or wins on procedural and substantive grounds, and the officials who made the decisions face no personal consequences either way.

The IVCM lawsuit — filed in federal court under 42 U.S.C. § 1983 — is a different kind of legal action. It is a civil rights lawsuit alleging that named individual officials violated the developer’s constitutional rights in their exercise of government authority. The consequences are different. The exposure is different. And the message it sends to officials considering continued obstruction is significantly sharper.

What Section 1983 Does

42 U.S.C. § 1983 was enacted after the Civil War to give individuals a federal cause of action against state and local officials who violate their constitutional rights “under color of law.” “Under color of law” means acting in an official capacity — using government power to deprive someone of rights guaranteed by the Constitution.

The IVDC complaint invokes this statute with multiple constitutional theories: the Permit Streamlining Act claim (arguing the project is deemed approved and the city’s interference violates its vested rights), the First Amendment retaliation claim (arguing city officials took adverse actions in response to the developer’s protected speech), and a conspiracy claim alleging coordinated action to deprive the developer of its property rights.

These are serious legal theories, and proving them requires demonstrating specific government misconduct, specific constitutional violations, and specific damages. The defendants will contest all of it. But the legal framework is well-established and the claims are specific enough to survive the threshold inquiry that determines whether a case proceeds.

The Personal Liability Dimension

Officials sued under Section 1983 can sometimes assert qualified immunity — a doctrine that protects government officials from personal liability unless their conduct violated “clearly established” law that a reasonable person would have known about. Qualified immunity has significant limits, and those limits are particularly relevant to First Amendment retaliation claims, where the constitutional prohibition on government retaliation for protected speech is well-established.

The practical significance: Katherine Burnworth and Dennis Morita are named as defendants individually. If qualified immunity does not fully protect them — and it may not, depending on the specific facts the complaint alleges — they face personal financial exposure for conduct they allegedly took in their official capacities. The city may indemnify them for some claims. For others, indemnification may not apply.

Personal financial exposure changes the calculation for officials in a way that institutional exposure does not. A city can absorb a judgment against it through its budget, its insurance, and its ability to tax. An individual cannot. The prospect of personal liability — affecting a personal bank account, not a city budget — is a meaningful deterrent to continued aggressive obstruction.

What the Lawsuit Accomplishes Beyond the Verdict

Federal civil rights litigation under Section 1983 involves discovery — the process by which parties exchange evidence, take depositions, and build the factual record the case will be decided on. Discovery is powerful. It compels the production of communications, documents, and testimony under oath that would otherwise remain private.

If the allegations in the IVDC complaint are accurate — that Burnworth coordinated with Olmedo, that Morita pressured El Centro, that Z-Global relationships influenced IID’s posture — the evidence of that coordination exists in emails, text messages, phone records, and calendar entries. Federal discovery will produce it. The people named in the complaint will testify about it under oath.

This process serves the public interest independent of the ultimate verdict. The community of Imperial Valley has a right to know whether its officials engaged in the conduct alleged. The federal lawsuit is the mechanism that will answer that question with evidence, under oath, in a public proceeding.

Sacramento vs. Imperial County: Who Gets to Decide What Gets Built Here?

Imperial County has a long and specific relationship with Sacramento. It is a relationship in which the county’s resources — water, geothermal energy, agricultural land — are allocated, regulated, and distributed partly through decisions made in the capital by legislators and agencies whose primary constituents are not in Imperial Valley. It is a relationship in which the costs of those decisions often fall on the Valley while the benefits flow elsewhere.

Water is the most obvious example. The Colorado River allocations that sustain Imperial Valley’s agricultural economy were negotiated through a political process in which the Valley’s interests competed against far more powerful coastal constituencies. The ongoing pressure to transfer water from agricultural to urban uses runs directly against the economic foundation of the region’s working communities.

The IVDC fight has added a new dimension to this familiar pattern: Sacramento’s attempt to retroactively override a county land use approval that Imperial County made through its own lawful process.

The Legislative Backstop

Senator Padilla’s Senate Bills 886 and 887 — introduced after the IVDC had already received its ministerial approval — were designed to strip data centers of the CEQA exemptions that make by-right development viable. If applied retroactively to the IVDC, they would attempt to impose on an already-approved project the review process that its approval lawfully bypassed.

This is Sacramento acting as a backstop for an obstruction campaign that the courts have already partially rejected. The city’s CUP theory was legally insufficient. The Superior Court said so. The legislative response is to change the law so that the insufficiency doesn’t matter — so that the project is required to undergo CEQA review regardless of what the courts said about its approval.

Imperial County approved this project. A state court has affirmed the approval. A state legislator whose district does not include Imperial County is introducing bills to override both. That is not how a system of local governance is supposed to work.

The Pattern of Disproportionate Cost

Environmental and land use regulation in California consistently imposes disproportionate costs on rural, inland, and low-income communities while generating benefits that flow primarily to wealthier coastal constituencies. CEQA, in particular, is most frequently weaponized against projects in communities that most need the investment those projects represent.

A data center in Palo Alto or San Jose would face a very different political environment than the same project in Imperial County. The political and economic weight of the surrounding community would provide a counterbalance to organized opposition. In Imperial County, that counterbalance is weaker — the community has less political power, less economic leverage, and fewer institutional allies in Sacramento than the coastal communities whose environmental interests tend to dominate state policy.

The result is that the communities with the least capacity to absorb the economic cost of delayed or blocked development are the ones most exposed to the mechanisms that produce it. That is not an accident. It is a structural feature of California’s political economy that deserves explicit recognition and explicit resistance.

What Local Control Actually Means

The principle of local control in land use decisions is not absolute. State and federal law set floors and frameworks. But within those frameworks, local governments — county boards of supervisors, city councils, planning commissions — are the primary decision-makers for what gets built in their jurisdictions. They are accountable to the residents who elect them. They have the local knowledge and local stakeholder relationships that make their decisions legitimate.

Imperial County used its local control authority to approve the IVDC. It did so through a lawful process, on land appropriately zoned for the use, following the legal framework that exists precisely to make these decisions predictable and enforceable. The campaign to override that decision — through litigation, through legislation, through coordinated institutional pressure — is a campaign against local control masquerading as environmental advocacy.

Imperial County’s residents are entitled to defend that local control. And they are entitled to hold accountable — at the ballot box, in public forums, through their own organized advocacy — the officials and organizations that are working to take it away from them.

Greenmail Is Holding Imperial County’s Economic Future Hostage

Hostage-taking in economic development doesn’t require masks or weapons. It requires a credible litigation threat, an organization with nothing to lose from filing it, and a developer with enough at stake to consider paying to make the threat go away. That is greenmail — and it is operating in Imperial Valley against the two largest economic development opportunities the region has seen in a generation.

The $83 million demand on Controlled Thermal Resources was not an isolated event. According to the IVCM federal lawsuit, the same model was being deployed against the data center — organized CEQA exposure designed to create settlement leverage, coordinated between city officials and a non-profit organization with a documented history of making settlement demands. The mechanism was disrupted by the February 10 Superior Court ruling, which eliminated the CUP theory that would have created the CEQA hook. But the attempt tells you something about the operating environment for large-scale investment in Imperial Valley.

The Cumulative Effect

Individual greenmail events are visible and documentable. Their cumulative effect is harder to see but more consequential: a reputation effect that makes the region a higher-risk, higher-cost location for exactly the kind of investment it needs most.

Site selectors and development finance professionals maintain institutional memory about the regulatory and political environments in regions they evaluate. A region where major projects face coordinated CEQA opposition with documented settlement demands is a region that gets a risk premium in every financial model that evaluates it. That risk premium raises the required return on investment, which raises the cost threshold that projects must clear to get financed, which reduces the number of projects that get built, which reduces the jobs and tax revenue the community receives.

The settlement payments that greenmail extracts are not born by the developers. They are ultimately born by the workers who would have been employed by projects that instead relocated to friendlier jurisdictions, and by the communities that depended on the tax revenue those projects would have generated.

What Breaking the Pattern Requires

Breaking the greenmail pattern requires making the pattern expensive for the organizations that run it. The Desert Sun investigation is part of that — public accountability for documented settlement demands. The IVCM federal lawsuit is part of that — legal accountability for the organizations and officials alleged to have coordinated the campaign. Community pressure — constituents asking their council members and non-profit boards hard questions — is part of that.

None of these mechanisms works quickly. The federal litigation will take years. The reputational consequences of the Desert Sun investigation take time to fully materialize. Community accountability depends on community awareness of facts that are not always surfaced in the same forums as the opposition’s talking points.

But the alternative — accepting greenmail as a feature of Imperial Valley’s development environment — is not sustainable. A region that taxes its own economic development through organized litigation extortion is a region that will eventually stop being a destination for the investment it needs. The time to establish different norms is before that reputation becomes entrenched, not after.

The IVDC as a Test Case

The Imperial Valley Data Center is, among other things, a test case for whether the region’s institutions can resist greenmail when the stakes are high enough. The courts have ruled for the project. The law supports the project. The economic case for the project is overwhelming. The only remaining question is whether the coordinated obstruction campaign can be sustained long enough to outlast the developer’s financing.

The community has an interest in that question’s outcome that extends far beyond this project. What happens to the IVDC tells the next developer evaluating Imperial Valley what the operating environment is. Getting this right matters for every project that comes after it.