The $72.5 Million Windfall Imperial County Is Being Told to Refuse
Counties don’t get many chances like this. A single construction project generates $72.5 million in one-time sales tax revenue — before the first server rack is installed, before the first employee badge is printed, before the first year of $28.75 million in recurring property tax is collected. Just from buying the steel, the concrete, the electrical infrastructure, and the cooling systems that a 950,000-square-foot data center campus requires.
For context: Imperial County’s entire annual general fund budget runs around $600 million, and a significant portion of that is state and federal pass-through funding the county does not control. A $72.5 million capital injection — money that the county can actually direct — is not a budget line item. It is a generational financial event.
What a County Can Do With $72 Million
Deferred infrastructure maintenance is the quiet crisis that every Imperial County department director knows and few outside observers understand. Roads that should have been repaved five years ago. Bridges that are flagged but not fixed. County buildings that are heated and cooled by systems installed in the Reagan administration. The maintenance backlog grows every year because the general fund is perpetually stretched between competing urgent needs and the capital projects keep getting deferred.
Seventy-two million dollars — applied strategically to the county’s infrastructure backlog — would not solve every problem. But it would make a dent that no other single source of funding currently on the table comes close to matching. Bond measures require voter approval and debt service. State infrastructure grants are competitive and conditional. Federal funds arrive with compliance requirements that consume significant administrative capacity.
A one-time sales tax payment requires none of those conditions. It arrives when the equipment is purchased. The county spends it according to its own priorities.
The Alternative Is Not Neutral
There is a common rhetorical move in the opposition’s argument that deserves examination: the implicit suggestion that blocking the project is a neutral act — that the county simply returns to its baseline if the data center doesn’t come. That framing is false.
The baseline is not neutral. The baseline is the infrastructure maintenance that doesn’t happen, the school repair that gets deferred another year, the reserve fund that doesn’t exist when the next fiscal emergency arrives. The $72.5 million is not a speculative future benefit. It is a concrete, calculable loss that accrues to the county’s public infrastructure every year the project is delayed or blocked.
The people making the argument for delay are not the ones who will drive across the potholes, teach in the aging classrooms, or manage the deferred maintenance on a county budget that never quite has enough. They have made a comfortable calculation that the costs of their opposition will fall on someone else.
This Money Would Come From the Developer, Not Residents
Sales tax on construction materials and equipment is not paid by Imperial County residents. It is paid by the developer — in this case, a $10 billion project purchasing hundreds of millions of dollars in equipment, much of it subject to California sales tax. The county collects revenue that was generated by a private party’s investment decision, without imposing any additional burden on the households and small businesses already contributing to the local tax base.
The opposition has not explained how refusing this revenue serves the public interest. They have not identified an alternative source. They have filed lawsuits, introduced legislation, and organized campaigns — all of which cost money that ultimately comes from somewhere — while the $72.5 million waits on the other side of a building permit.
At some point, the question is not whether this project is good for Imperial County. The question is who benefits from preventing it.
