Following the Money: Who Benefits If the IVDC Never Gets Built?
When a political campaign is organized against a project, the first analytical question is not whether the stated objections are valid. It is: who benefits if the project fails? The stated objections can be evaluated on their merits — and in the case of the IVDC, the courts have evaluated several of them and found them legally insufficient. But understanding what is actually driving the campaign requires following the money.
The money in this case leads to several places, and none of them are the farmworker communities whose health and economic welfare the opposition claims to represent.
The Settlement Revenue Model
Environmental organizations that file CEQA lawsuits against development projects do not primarily earn revenue from winning those lawsuits. They earn revenue from settling them. A successful CEQA challenge that results in a court ordering the developer to conduct a full EIR generates no money for the challenging organization — it generates legal costs and a delay. A settlement in which the developer pays the organization to drop the lawsuit generates revenue directly.
This is the model that the Desert Sun documented in CCV’s $83 million demand on CTR. It is a model that works because CEQA litigation is expensive regardless of its merits, and because the settlement cost is usually less than the litigation cost. The organization doesn’t need a strong legal case. It needs a credible threat.
The credibility of the threat against the IVDC depended on the project being forced into a CEQA process. The City of Imperial’s legal theory — that the project required a CUP rather than a ministerial permit — was designed to create that exposure. Without a CUP, there is no discretionary approval, no CEQA trigger, and no legal leverage for a settlement demand. The February 10 court ruling eliminating the CUP theory eliminated the financial leverage too.
The Jurisdictional Power Play
The City of Imperial’s interest in blocking a project in unincorporated county territory is not primarily financial — it is political. By positioning itself as the primary obstacle to the county’s largest development project, the city asserts a regional governance role it does not legally possess. City Council Member Katherine Burnworth, named in the federal lawsuit as the alleged ringleader of the obstruction campaign, built her political profile on this campaign.
The political benefit of visible opposition to a large, outside developer is not trivial. In a political environment where skepticism toward outside investment is rational — where the history of large private interests in the region includes examples of extraction without community benefit — positioning yourself as the community’s defender against an outside threat has real political value. It doesn’t matter that the project would bring union jobs and tax revenue. The narrative of outside corporate interests overriding local concerns is effective regardless of whether it accurately describes the project.
The Consultant’s Market Position
Z-Global’s alleged interest is the simplest of all: capacity. If the IVDC occupies 330 megawatts of IID capacity, that capacity is not available for Z-Global’s renewable energy projects. The financial interest in blocking the data center is direct and proportional to the capacity it would consume.
This is not a conspiracy. It is a conflict of interest — the kind that governance frameworks in regulated industries are specifically designed to identify and manage. What makes it potentially problematic is not the existence of the conflict but the allegation that it was used: that Z-Global’s institutional relationships within IID were leveraged to affect the utility’s posture toward the IVDC in ways that served Z-Global’s competitive interests at the expense of IID’s ratepayers.
What the Community Deserves
The people of Imperial Valley are entitled to make their own judgments about the IVDC. But those judgments should be made on the basis of complete information — including the financial motives of the organizations leading the opposition. The jobs and tax revenue arguments for the project are public knowledge. The water recycling and grid stability facts are available to anyone who reads the engineering documents. The $83 million settlement demand is documented.
What is not always in the same conversation is the question of who specifically benefits if the project fails and why. That question has an answer. It deserves to be part of the community’s deliberation about this project — stated plainly, in the same forums where the opposition’s talking points are aired.
