The Salton Sea Restoration Nobody Is Talking About

The Salton Sea restoration debate has produced dozens of plans, hundreds of millions of dollars in studies and preliminary projects, and very little additional water in the lake. The fundamental challenge is hydraulic: the Sea needs freshwater inflows to offset evaporation and the loss of agricultural drainage water that historically sustained it, and finding those inflows in a region under severe water allocation pressure is genuinely difficult.

The IVDC’s recycled wastewater plan was not a Salton Sea restoration project. It was a data center cooling system. But as a byproduct of that cooling system — treated municipal wastewater running through an upgraded treatment process, with excess clean water released from the system — it would have contributed a consistent freshwater inflow to a lake that can use every gallon it can get.

That contribution was blocked by the City of Imperial’s alleged interference with the will-serve agreement. The people who blocked it are also the people arguing that the data center is an environmental threat to the region. That contradiction requires examination.

The State of the Sea

The Salton Sea’s surface elevation has dropped significantly in recent decades. As the lake recedes, it exposes ancient lakebed sediments that have accumulated decades of agricultural runoff — selenium, arsenic, pesticide residues — in concentrations that are benign when wet and toxic when airborne. The PM10 and PM2.5 dust that blows off the exposed playa has measurable health consequences for the communities downwind, including elevated rates of asthma and respiratory disease in populations that have few resources to mitigate the exposure.

The state’s official Salton Sea Management Program has produced a series of projects — mostly habitat wetlands at the lake’s perimeter — that serve real ecological functions but do not address the fundamental water volume problem. The lake continues to lose more water than these projects return.

Any credible Salton Sea strategy has to grapple with the inflow problem. Every additional gallon of freshwater delivered to the lake’s catchment area matters — not because any single source will reverse the trend, but because the cumulative effect of multiple sources can slow the rate of decline while longer-term solutions are developed.

What the IVDC’s Water Plan Would Have Contributed

The data center’s recycled water system would have run at industrial scale — the volumes needed to cool a 330-megawatt data center campus are substantial. The treated effluent from upgraded El Centro and Imperial wastewater plants, less what the cooling system consumed, would have been a consistent and reliable freshwater contribution to the regional water system.

Consistent and reliable are key words in the Salton Sea context. The lake’s current inflow contributions are seasonal, variable, and declining. A large industrial customer with a constant cooling load provides a constant, predictable water demand that sustains the treatment infrastructure and the water flow even when agricultural drainage is reduced or seasonal patterns shift.

The developer offered to fund the municipal infrastructure upgrades needed to make this work. He was not asking the state, the county, or the cities to bear the capital cost. He was offering to pay it in exchange for a water supply agreement. The cities would have received upgraded treatment infrastructure they needed anyway. The data center would have received its cooling supply. The Salton Sea would have received additional inflows.

The City of Imperial allegedly pressured El Centro to walk away from that arrangement. The people of the Valley — and the people who care about the Salton Sea — deserve a full public accounting of why.

The Environmental Case FOR the IVDC: What the Opposition Doesn’t Want You to Calculate

The environmental case against the Imperial Valley Data Center rests on three claims: it will drain the Colorado River, it will crash the IID grid, and it deserves comprehensive environmental review before proceeding. Each of these claims has been examined in detail and found to be either factually inaccurate or legally unsupported. Taken together, they do not constitute an environmental argument against the project — they constitute an environmental argument that requires not looking at the project’s actual design.

The environmental case for the project has received far less public attention, because the project’s environmental benefits are not politically useful to the opposition and have therefore not been amplified. Here is what that case looks like.

Water: Net Positive for the Region

The IVDC proposes to use 100 percent recycled municipal wastewater — treated effluent that El Centro and Imperial currently manage as a disposal challenge. No Colorado River water. No competition with agricultural users. No draw on the potable supply that residential communities depend on.

The project also proposed to finance upgrades to El Centro’s and Imperial’s wastewater treatment infrastructure — improvements that would increase those plants’ capacity and quality of output regardless of the data center’s fate. The treated effluent in excess of the data center’s cooling needs would flow toward the Salton Sea, adding to the freshwater inflows that the lake desperately needs.

This is not a neutral environmental impact. It is a positive contribution to the region’s most pressing water management challenge. The opposition blocked the will-serve agreement that would have made it possible, and then continued arguing that the project’s water use is an environmental problem.

Grid: Additional Stability Capacity

The 862 MWh battery storage system stores power during off-peak periods and discharges during peak demand, performing the grid stabilization function that IID would otherwise have to procure from other sources. The dedicated 330-megawatt substation is built at the developer’s expense, adding transmission infrastructure to IID’s service territory without cost to ratepayers.

These are not incidental features. They represent a substantial private capital investment in grid infrastructure that benefits the entire IID service territory. The environmental and operational value of grid stabilization — reduced curtailment of renewable generation, smoother load curves, lower reserve requirements — is real and quantifiable. The project provides it as a design feature.

Land: Industrial Zoning in an Industrial Location

The project site is zoned I-2 Heavy Industrial and surrounded by industrial land uses. It is not adjacent to a residential neighborhood. It is not adjacent to sensitive habitat. It is not encroaching on agricultural land. It is an industrial project built on industrial land for which it is zoned, consistent with the land use plan that the county adopted through a legitimate public process.

The environmental review argument — that this project needs a full EIR despite its ministerial approval — is not driven by genuine concern about the project’s location or its compatibility with adjacent uses. It is driven by the desire to impose a process that would delay the project long enough for its financing to collapse. That is not an environmental protection strategy.

The Real Environmental Choice

If this data center is not built in Imperial Valley, the computing infrastructure it would have housed will be built somewhere else — in a state with a dirtier grid, with higher water consumption from potable sources, on land with fewer industrial precedents. The environmental profile of data center infrastructure does not disappear because Imperial Valley declines to host it. It relocates to a jurisdiction with fewer environmental safeguards.

Blocking the IVDC does not protect the environment. It exports the environmental impact to another location while denying Imperial Valley the economic benefits of hosting it. For a region that has been asked to absorb the environmental costs of agricultural production, water management infrastructure, and industrial activity for generations, being told to also forfeit the economic benefits of technology infrastructure in the name of environmental protection is not a reasonable ask.

The people of Imperial Valley understand the difference between environmental protection and environmental theater. They have been living with the consequences of the real thing for a long time.

862 Megawatt-Hours: How the IVDC’s Battery System Stabilizes the IID Grid

The argument that the Imperial Valley Data Center will crash the IID grid and spike electricity rates is built on a fundamental misrepresentation of what the project actually includes. It describes a data center that draws 330 megawatts of power directly from the grid, continuously, creating a demand spike that destabilizes the system and forces rate increases to cover the cost. This description is incomplete in a way that inverts the project’s actual impact.

The IVDC includes an 862 megawatt-hour Battery Energy Storage System — the BESS. This is not an optional add-on or a future phase. It is a core component of the project’s energy architecture. And it changes the grid impact calculation entirely.

How the BESS Changes the Math

A battery storage system of this scale allows the data center to decouple its instantaneous power draw from its actual demand on the generation and transmission infrastructure. During off-peak hours — nights, weekends, periods of low regional demand — the data center charges its battery bank, drawing power when the grid has excess capacity and generation costs are at their lowest. During peak demand periods, the facility runs on battery reserves, drawing little or nothing from the grid at exactly the moment when grid stress is highest.

For IID, this is not neutral. It is actively beneficial. IID’s grid faces the same demand pattern as every utility: a residential and commercial peak in the afternoon when air conditioning loads are highest, and a trough at night when most users are asleep or inactive. A large industrial customer that charges during the trough and discharges during the peak is performing a grid stabilization function — absorbing excess off-peak generation and reducing peak demand. That function has real economic value.

Utilities pay for this service when they procure it from independent storage operators. The IVDC provides it as a byproduct of its own operational efficiency.

What the Critics Leave Out

The narrative that the IVDC will “crash the grid” requires ignoring the 862 MWh BESS entirely. It also requires ignoring the dedicated 330-megawatt substation that the developer is building at its own cost — infrastructure that serves the data center without burdening IID’s existing transmission network.

A project that builds its own substation and includes a grid-scale battery storage system is not straining the grid. It is adding infrastructure capacity to the grid at private expense. The ratepayers who benefit from that added capacity are not being asked to fund it. The developer absorbs the capital cost.

The critics who claim the project will destabilize the grid either have not read the technical specifications, or they have read them and are choosing not to discuss them. In either case, the claim does not hold up under scrutiny, and the scrutiny should be applied publicly.

The Renewable Energy Alignment

Imperial Valley’s geothermal and solar resources produce power on schedules that don’t always match demand. Geothermal is baseload — it produces continuously, which is valuable but creates surplus during low-demand periods. Solar is peak — it produces during daylight hours that partly align with air conditioning demand but create morning and evening ramp challenges as clouds and sunset shift the supply.

A large battery storage customer that absorbs surplus generation during off-peak and low-price periods and discharges during high-demand periods is a natural complement to IID’s renewable portfolio. The IVDC’s BESS is essentially a grid-scale storage asset that happens to be funded by a private industrial customer rather than by ratepayers.

The suggestion that this represents a grid threat — rather than a grid asset — is not an analysis of the project’s technical specifications. It is a political argument dressed up in technical language. The IID board members who are elected to manage the utility on behalf of its ratepayers should be evaluating the BESS on its engineering merits, not on the basis of talking points generated by the project’s opponents.

Dennis Morita’s Phone Call: The Alleged Sabotage of Imperial Valley’s Water Deal

Will-serve letters are not glamorous documents. They are utility commitments — written statements from a service provider confirming that it can and will supply water, sewer, or power to a proposed development. They are the unglamorous infrastructure of how development actually works: before you build, you need written confirmation that the basic services will be there when you arrive.

The Imperial Valley Data Center needed a will-serve letter from the City of El Centro confirming that El Centro’s wastewater treatment plant would supply the recycled effluent for the project’s closed-loop cooling system. El Centro issued that letter. Then, according to the federal lawsuit filed in Case No. 3:26-cv-00128, it rescinded it — under pressure from Dennis Morita, the City Manager of the City of Imperial.

If that allegation is accurate, Morita did not act to protect El Centro’s interests. He acted to protect the City of Imperial’s political campaign against a project in unincorporated county territory that his city has no jurisdiction over. He used his position as one city’s administrator to interfere with another city’s contractual relationship with a private developer — and in doing so, sabotaged the water recycling plan that would have eliminated the opposition’s primary environmental objection.

What the Will-Serve Letter Meant

Without a will-serve letter from El Centro (and a comparable agreement with the City of Imperial’s own utility), the IVDC cannot use recycled municipal wastewater for cooling. Without the recycled water supply, the project’s water strategy would need to be redesigned around an alternative source. The alternatives are more expensive, more environmentally contested, and more legally vulnerable to exactly the water-consumption arguments the opposition has been making.

The alleged pressure campaign on El Centro was not incidental to the opposition’s strategy. It was central to it. By rescinding the will-serve letter, the opposition forces the developer to either abandon the recycled water approach or find a new supply agreement — adding time, cost, and legal exposure at exactly the moment when the project was trying to demonstrate that its environmental design was viable.

It also allows the opposition to continue using the “750,000 gallons of Colorado River water” narrative, since the recycled water alternative is no longer in place to refute it.

The Federal Lawsuit’s Framing

The IVCM federal complaint frames the alleged pressure on El Centro as part of a broader conspiracy to commit economic sabotage against the project — a coordinated campaign involving city officials, IID insiders, and environmental organizations working in concert to defeat an approval that none of them could defeat individually through legitimate channels.

The conspiracy framing is a high bar to prove. Civil conspiracy claims require evidence of coordination and agreement, not just parallel action. The complaint presumably lays out the factual basis for that coordination, and that evidence will be tested in discovery.

But the underlying factual allegation — that Morita contacted El Centro and pressured it to rescind the will-serve letter — is a specific, verifiable claim. Either he did that or he didn’t. Either there are communications, meetings, or other records of that contact, or there aren’t. Federal discovery will produce those records if they exist.

Accountability for Public Officials

City managers are public servants. They are employed by their cities to manage city operations and serve their cities’ residents. Using that position to interfere with the contractual relationships of an adjacent city — for the purpose of advancing a political campaign against a project in a third jurisdiction — is a significant departure from the normal scope of municipal administrative authority.

The residents of the City of Imperial deserve to know whether their city manager used his official position to sabotage a water recycling deal that would have benefited the broader region. The residents of El Centro deserve to know why their city rescinded a legitimate commercial commitment under external pressure. The federal lawsuit is the mechanism through which those questions will be answered under oath.

Water in Imperial Valley is not an abstract policy question. It is a foundational fact of life in an arid region that depends on managed water supplies for its agricultural economy and its residential communities. Using water politics as a tactical weapon against a development project is not environmental stewardship. The people who depend on this region’s water system deserve to know the difference.

Purple Pipe, Not Colorado River: The Truth About the IVDC’s Water Plan

The opposition’s most emotionally effective argument against the Imperial Valley Data Center is also its most factually misleading one: that the project will consume 750,000 gallons of potable water per day, draining a Colorado River system already under severe allocation pressure.

The claim is built on a real number — a large data center cooling system can indeed require hundreds of thousands of gallons of water per day. But the claim omits the most important fact about the IVDC’s design: the project does not plan to use potable water. It plans to use recycled wastewater from the municipal treatment plants in El Centro and Imperial — what the water industry calls “purple pipe” water, distinguished from potable water by the color-coded infrastructure that carries it.

These are not compatible claims. Either the project uses potable water from the Colorado River, or it uses recycled municipal wastewater. The project’s engineering design documents, the developer’s public statements, and the proposed will-serve agreements with El Centro and Imperial all confirm: it uses recycled wastewater. The Colorado River is not involved.

What Purple Pipe Water Is

Municipal wastewater treatment plants process sewage and produce treated effluent — water that has been cleaned to secondary or tertiary treatment standards and is suitable for industrial, agricultural, and environmental applications. California has invested billions of dollars in recycled water infrastructure specifically to make this treated effluent available as a water resource, reducing dependence on potable supplies for uses that don’t require drinking-water quality.

Data center cooling is an ideal application for recycled water. The cooling towers require large volumes of water, but the water quality requirements are industrial, not potable. Using recycled effluent for cooling is not a compromise — it is the intended design of a recycled water system. The IVDC would be an anchor industrial customer for the recycled water supply, providing a reliable, high-volume buyer that justifies the infrastructure investment needed to expand recycled water capacity.

The municipalities benefit because their wastewater treatment operations become more financially sustainable — a steady industrial buyer for treated effluent reduces the cost burden of disposal. The Colorado River benefits because a large industrial user that would otherwise require potable water is served by recycled supply instead. The Salton Sea benefits from the excess treated water that flows from upgraded treatment operations.

Why the Misleading Claim Persists

The 750,000-gallons-from-the-Colorado-River narrative persists for the same reason most misleading environmental claims persist: it is emotionally effective, it requires technical knowledge to refute, and the organizations making it are not being held accountable for its accuracy.

Water scarcity in the Colorado River basin is a genuine and serious issue. The Salton Sea’s decline is a genuine environmental crisis. These facts provide emotional scaffolding for the misleading claim — the listener fills in the logical connection between “water crisis” and “data center water use” without examining whether the data center is actually drawing from the scarce resource being described.

The developer has never proposed using potable water. The design has always called for recycled effluent. The will-serve letters that the City of Imperial allegedly pressured El Centro to rescind were the contractual foundation for the recycled water supply. The opposition blocked the recycled water deal and then continued using the potable water consumption narrative as if the recycled water plan didn’t exist.

What a Fact-Based Water Discussion Would Conclude

If the IVDC is evaluated on its actual proposed water use — recycled municipal effluent, 100 percent, from a closed-loop system — the water consumption argument against it collapses. The project does not compete with agricultural users for Colorado River allocations. It does not draw from the potable supply that residential and commercial users depend on. It uses water that is currently a disposal problem and turns it into a resource.

A fact-based environmental discussion about the IVDC would recognize this and move on to the questions that actually require analysis: the design specifications for the treatment upgrades, the terms of the will-serve agreements, the engineering of the cooling system. Those are legitimate technical discussions. They are not the discussions the opposition is having.

The discussion the opposition is having — 750,000 gallons from the Colorado River, every day — is not a fact-based environmental discussion. It is a political narrative designed to generate opposition from people who haven’t read the engineering documents. The people of Imperial Valley, who understand their water system better than anyone, deserve to be given the actual facts.

The Salton Sea Is Shrinking. The IVDC’s Water Plan Was the Best Offer It’s Gotten in Years.

The Salton Sea is dying in slow motion. The largest lake in California — a body of water that has defined the Imperial Valley landscape for over a century — has been shrinking for decades as the inflows that sustain it decline and evaporation continues. The exposed lakebed releases toxic dust that carries across the Valley, creating respiratory health problems that fall disproportionately on the farmworker communities closest to the shore. The fish are gone. The birds are leaving. The wind keeps blowing.

State and federal agencies have spent years and hundreds of millions of dollars studying the Salton Sea problem. Plans have been produced. Pilot projects have been proposed. The water keeps receding.

Against this backdrop, the Imperial Valley Data Center proposed something concrete: a closed-loop recycled wastewater system that would purchase treated sewage effluent from the municipal wastewater plants of El Centro and Imperial, treat it further to industrial standards, use it for cooling, and release the excess clean water — net positive — toward the Salton Sea. The project would turn a municipal disposal problem into a conservation contribution.

The City of Imperial blocked the deal.

How the Water System Was Designed to Work

Data centers generate enormous amounts of heat, and cooling that heat is one of their largest operating costs and most significant resource demands. Conventional data center cooling uses enormous quantities of potable water — the source of the “750,000 gallons per day draining the Colorado River” narrative that the opposition deploys.

The IVDC’s design rejects that model entirely. The project proposed to use 100 percent recycled wastewater — what engineers call “purple pipe” water, the treated effluent that municipal wastewater plants produce and struggle to dispose of responsibly. Instead of competing for potable water from the Colorado River, the data center would have paid municipalities for water they are currently spending money to manage.

To make this work, the developer offered to finance upgrades to the wastewater treatment infrastructure in El Centro and Imperial — improvements that would benefit both cities’ utility operations regardless of the data center’s fate. The treated effluent would go to the data center. The excess water produced by the upgraded treatment process would flow toward the Salton Sea, adding freshwater volume to a lake that desperately needs it.

This is not a theoretical design. It is a proposed engineering solution backed by a developer willing to fund the municipal infrastructure needed to make it work.

The Sabotage

The federal lawsuit filed by IVCM alleges that City Manager Dennis Morita pressured the City of El Centro to rescind its “will-serve” letter — the commitment that would have allowed the recycled water system to proceed. The will-serve letter is the foundational document: without it, the wastewater purchase agreement cannot be executed, and the closed-loop recycled system cannot be built.

If the allegation is accurate, City Manager Morita did not block a water-intensive data center. He blocked a water recycling project. The environmental argument that the opposition uses to justify its campaign — that the data center would strain water resources — is the justification that was used to sabotage the specific engineering solution that would have eliminated that concern.

The City of Imperial, whose officials are named in a federal civil rights lawsuit for allegedly coordinating this obstruction campaign, blocked the recycled water deal while simultaneously arguing that the project’s water use is an environmental problem. The internal contradiction of that position deserves to be stated plainly and repeatedly.

What the Salton Sea Actually Needs

The Salton Sea needs freshwater inflows. The sources of those inflows — agricultural drainage, municipal wastewater, stormwater runoff — are declining as water use in the surrounding region becomes more efficient and as the Colorado River allocations that sustain regional water supply come under increasing pressure.

The IVDC’s excess treated water would not have solved the Salton Sea crisis. Nothing short of a comprehensive restoration program will do that. But a net contribution of treated water, supplied consistently from an operating data center facility, is more than the Salton Sea currently has from this particular potential source. Turning that contribution down — in the name of protecting the Salton Sea — is not environmental protection. It is political positioning dressed up as environmental concern.

The families who live near the Sea’s toxic shores deserve better than that.

Property Rights Are Not Optional: The IVDC and the Rule of Law in California

Property rights are not a privilege granted by government that can be revoked when the project becomes inconvenient. They are legal entitlements — established through zoning designations, protected by statute and constitution, and enforceable in court. The entire system of private investment in physical infrastructure depends on investors being able to rely on those entitlements meaning what they say.

The IVDC site has been zoned I-2 Heavy Industrial for decades. Someone bought I-2 land knowing it was zoned for heavy industrial use. A developer invested in engineering, planning, and permitting for a project that conforms to I-2 standards. The county reviewed the project against those standards and issued a ministerial approval. A court reviewed the legal challenge to that approval and called it legally insufficient.

At each step, the law said the same thing: the project is entitled to proceed. The opposition’s campaign is an effort to find a mechanism — any mechanism — that can defeat that legal entitlement despite the law’s consistent answer.

What Investment Certainty Actually Requires

The argument for protecting by-right development is not primarily ideological. It is functional. California has a serious problem attracting the industrial and commercial investment it needs because the gap between what the law says and what actually happens is too wide. A developer who invests in a site based on its zoning classification and the legal framework governing approvals, only to find that a coordinated opposition campaign can defeat that approval through years of litigation regardless of legal merits, will rationally choose to invest somewhere else.

This is not a threat or a business complaint. It is a description of how capital allocation decisions work. If the expected cost of developing California industrial land — including the legal uncertainty, the litigation risk, and the carrying costs during the appeal period — exceeds the expected return, the capital goes to Arizona, Nevada, or Texas instead. Those states don’t have better land. They have more predictable institutions.

Imperial Valley cannot afford to become the case study that teaches investors California’s industrial land approvals are meaningless. The county’s economic development agenda depends on developers believing that a permitted use on appropriately zoned land will actually be permitted.

The Opposition’s Implicit Argument

The coalition opposing the IVDC does not argue, explicitly, that property rights should not be respected or that by-right approvals should be overrideable by neighbor preference. They argue, instead, that this specific project has specific impacts that require specific review — and that the approval process didn’t adequately account for those impacts.

The court reviewed that argument and called it legally insufficient. The legal framework governing the approval process was followed correctly. The specific impacts the opposition cites — water use, grid impact — are either addressed by the project’s design (the recycled water system, the dedicated substation) or are described in terms that don’t align with the technical facts.

What the opposition’s argument actually requires, stripped of its specifics, is a rule that says: any project large enough to attract organized opposition can be forced into a discretionary review process, regardless of its zoning and regardless of what the law says. That rule does not exist. It should not exist. And the courts have said, clearly, that it doesn’t govern this project.

The Long Game

The rule of law is a long game. Individual decisions get made correctly or incorrectly, and the consequences are often not immediately visible. But the pattern of decisions — whether by-right means by-right, whether ministerial approvals hold, whether vested rights are respected — shapes the investment environment over years and decades.

Imperial County’s ability to attract the next large project, and the one after that, depends on this project’s approval surviving the legal campaign against it. Not just because the IVDC itself matters — though it does — but because what happens to the IVDC tells every future investor something about whether Imperial County is a place where the rule of law holds.

The courts are saying yes. The question is whether the political institutions will follow.

Senate Bills 886 and 887: Sacramento’s Attempt to Change the Rules After the Game Started

There is a principle in American law, grounded in the Due Process and Takings clauses of the Constitution, that government cannot change the rules of a legal game after a party has already relied on the existing rules to their detriment. It goes by several names — vested rights, detrimental reliance, regulatory taking — but the core principle is consistent: you cannot retroactively strip people of rights they have already lawfully acquired.

State Senator Steve Padilla’s Senate Bills 886 and 887 test that principle directly. The legislation would strip data centers of CEQA exemptions — the same ministerial approval pathway that the IVDC used to receive its county approval. If enacted and applied retroactively to the IVDC, it would attempt to impose on an already-approved project the environmental review process that its approval lawfully avoided.

What the Bills Would Do

Under current California law, projects that receive ministerial approvals on appropriately zoned land are exempt from CEQA review. This is not a loophole — it is the intended operation of a statutory framework that distinguishes between discretionary and ministerial government decisions. The IVDC’s approval was ministerial, and it was CEQA-exempt on that basis.

Senator Padilla’s legislation would eliminate or significantly restrict that exemption for data centers. His stated rationale is that data centers should “pay their own way” and face full environmental review given their resource consumption. The argument is facially reasonable — but it ignores the distinction between prospective rule changes (which are legitimate) and retroactive application to already-approved projects (which raises serious constitutional questions).

A developer who obtained ministerial approval under existing law, invested in site preparation and financing, and proceeded in reliance on that approval has acquired legal rights that the state cannot simply nullify by subsequent legislation without triggering compensation requirements. The vested rights doctrine in California is well-established. A project that has received a final approval and demonstrated substantial reliance may be protected from retroactive rule changes.

The Political Context

Senator Padilla represents a San Diego district. He does not represent Imperial County. His constituents are not the farmworker families in Brawley and El Centro who would benefit from the IVDC’s union construction jobs. His constituents are not the children in Imperial County school districts who would receive a share of $28.75 million in annual property tax.

The legislation he introduced was introduced after the IVDC had already received its county approval, after the lawsuit challenging that approval had been filed, and after a coalition of opposition forces had been assembled against the project. The timing is not coincidental.

This is Sacramento asserting control over a local land use decision that a local government has already made through a lawful process. It is the state legislature serving as a backstop for a local legal challenge that the courts have described as legally insufficient. Whatever its stated environmental justification, the practical effect of the legislation — if applied to the IVDC — is to give the opposition a second bite at the apple after the courts have ruled against them the first time.

What This Means for Imperial County’s Economic Sovereignty

Imperial County’s ability to make its own land use decisions — to approve the development that its own residents need and its own government has lawfully authorized — is not unlimited. State law sets a framework. But within that framework, the county has genuine authority, and that authority means something.

When the state legislature introduces bills timed specifically to override a county’s approval of a specific project, it is asserting that Sacramento’s preferences take precedence over Imperial County’s judgment about its own economic development. That is a pattern Imperial County residents have experienced before — in water rights negotiations, in agricultural policy, in environmental regulation that imposes costs disproportionately on low-income rural communities while benefiting wealthier coastal constituencies.

The IVDC fight is, in part, about whether Imperial County gets to decide what is built in Imperial County. Senator Padilla’s bills are Sacramento’s answer. Imperial County’s residents deserve to weigh in on that answer — and to hold accountable the officials, state and local, who are taking it away from them.

CEQA Was Written to Protect Communities, Not to Extort Them

The California Environmental Quality Act was signed into law in 1970. Its purpose was straightforward: require state and local agencies to identify and disclose the environmental impacts of their decisions, and consider alternatives and mitigation measures before approving projects with significant effects. It was an accountability tool — designed to make government decision-making transparent and to give communities a meaningful voice in projects that would affect their environment.

Fifty-five years later, CEQA is something else entirely in many of its applications. It is, by documented evidence, one of the primary mechanisms through which opponents block, delay, and financially burden development projects regardless of their actual environmental impact. And in Imperial County, the effort to force the IVDC into a CEQA review process it is legally exempt from is a case study in exactly this misuse.

How the Exemption Works — and Why It Applies

CEQA applies to discretionary approvals — decisions that require a government agency to exercise judgment about whether to approve a project and under what conditions. It does not apply to ministerial approvals — decisions that are required by law when a project meets the applicable standards. This distinction is foundational to the statute.

The IVDC received a ministerial approval because it is a conforming use on I-2 Heavy Industrial land. The county was not exercising discretion when it approved the project; it was performing a ministerial act required by the zoning code. No discretion, no CEQA. The Superior Court affirmed this analysis in February 2026 when it dismissed the city’s complaint as legally insufficient.

The city’s strategy was to argue that the project should have required a CUP — transforming a ministerial approval into a discretionary one, and thereby opening the CEQA door. The court said no. But the attempt itself illustrates the tactic: use the threat of CEQA review to impose delay and cost on a project the opposition cannot defeat on the merits.

The Cost of Manufactured CEQA Exposure

CEQA litigation is not cheap or fast. An Environmental Impact Report for a project the scale of the IVDC could cost several million dollars to prepare. The process takes 18-36 months minimum. Legal challenges to the EIR add additional years and costs. During all of that time, the project cannot break ground, the financing sits idle accumulating carrying costs, and the developer faces the choice of continuing to absorb those costs or abandoning the project.

This is what manufactured CEQA exposure accomplishes even when it ultimately fails in court. It imposes real financial damage during the litigation period. The opposition understands this. The strategy is not primarily about winning the CEQA argument in court — it is about making the cost of proceeding too high for the developer to sustain.

For a $10 billion project with institutional financing, that calculation is different than it would be for a smaller developer. But the principle applies at every scale: CEQA litigation without merit is not environmentalism. It is a financial weapon being deployed against a community that needs this project.

What Legitimate Environmental Review Would Show

The irony of the effort to force CEQA review on the IVDC is that a good-faith environmental analysis would likely reach favorable conclusions for the project. The closed-loop recycled wastewater system eliminates the water consumption concerns that opponents cite. The dedicated substation means grid impacts are not socialized to other ratepayers. The battery storage system improves grid stability. The I-2 industrial site is surrounded by industrial land uses, not residential communities.

The opposition is not pursuing CEQA review because they believe the environmental analysis will validate their concerns. They are pursuing it because the process itself — regardless of the outcome — serves their interests. That is the definition of weaponization.

California needs CEQA reform precisely because this pattern is so well-established and so damaging. Projects that would benefit the communities they are built in — particularly in economically distressed regions that cannot afford to wait for investment — are being delayed and defeated by environmental review processes that have nothing to do with environmental protection. Imperial Valley is paying the price of that failure right now.

The Permit Streamlining Act: The Law That Says the IVDC Is Already Approved

California’s Permit Streamlining Act was passed for a specific reason: to stop local governments from using bureaucratic delay as a de facto veto over development projects they lacked the legal authority to deny outright. The legislature watched agencies sit on permit applications for months and years — never formally denying them, never formally approving them, just letting them age until the developer ran out of money or patience.

The Act’s solution was mechanical: set mandatory deadlines, and attach consequences to missing them. If a public agency fails to act on a conforming development application within the prescribed timeframe, the application is deemed approved. Not conditionally approved. Not referred for further study. Approved.

The federal lawsuit filed by IVCM — Case No. 3:26-cv-00128 — alleges that the City of Imperial failed to approve or deny the IVDC’s site plan within the 15-day window the Act requires. If accurate, the legal consequence is clear: the project is deemed approved by operation of law, and the city’s subsequent legal maneuvering to block it constitutes interference with a vested legal right.

Why the Deemed-Approved Doctrine Matters

The deemed-approved provision is not a technicality. It is the enforcement mechanism of the entire Permit Streamlining regime. Without it, agencies would simply ignore the deadlines, and the Act would be advisory rather than mandatory. With it, agencies face a real consequence for using delay as a policy instrument: the project they were hoping to stall gets approved anyway.

The developer’s argument is that the city knew this. That the failure to act within the 15-day window was not an administrative oversight but a calculated choice — that by doing nothing, the city hoped to preserve its ability to object later while avoiding the political exposure of a formal denial that would immediately reveal its lack of legal authority.

Whether that characterization is accurate will be tested in federal court. But the underlying legal framework is unambiguous: California law does not give local agencies discretion about whether to comply with the Permit Streamlining Act’s deadlines. They are mandatory. The consequences of missing them are specified. The argument that the city can ignore the deadlines and then litigate against the project as if they never existed does not have a strong foundation in the text of the statute.

The First Amendment Dimension

The federal complaint includes a claim that goes beyond procedural permit law: First Amendment retaliation. The allegation is that city officials took adverse actions against the IVDC — including coordinating opposition, pressuring other agencies to withdraw cooperation, and pursuing litigation — in response to the developer’s protected speech, specifically his public criticism of the city’s conduct and his decision to move the project to county jurisdiction.

Government officials are not permitted to retaliate against private parties for exercising First Amendment rights. If a developer criticizes a city’s conduct publicly, and that city then organizes a campaign to harm the developer’s project, the retaliation doctrine provides a federal cause of action. The complaint alleges exactly this pattern.

These claims will be litigated. But the filing itself serves a function beyond the immediate lawsuit: it puts personal liability on the table for the individual officials named. City employees sued under 42 U.S.C. § 1983 for constitutional violations cannot necessarily rely on the city to indemnify them. The potential for personal financial exposure changes the calculus for officials considering continued aggressive obstruction of a project the courts have already validated.

What This Means for Every Developer in California

The IVDC case is being watched by development attorneys and site selectors across the state. The question it poses is fundamental: can a local government use a combination of bureaucratic delay, jurisdictional overreach, and coordinated opposition to defeat a by-right project that it has no legal authority to deny?

The answer, if the courts continue to apply the law as written, should be no. The Permit Streamlining Act, the ministerial approval doctrine, and the by-right framework were designed precisely to prevent this pattern. The February 10 ruling affirmed the ministerial approval. The federal lawsuit tests the retaliation and deemed-approved claims. Together, they represent a comprehensive legal challenge to the tactics the opposition has used.

The outcome will establish precedent — either confirming that by-right approvals mean what they say, or signaling that a determined local opposition can defeat any project through delay and litigation regardless of its legal merits. Imperial Valley deserves the first outcome. The second one would hurt every region in California trying to attract investment under rules that are supposed to be enforceable.