Z-Global and the IID: Who Is Really Blocking Imperial Valley’s Energy Future?

In a region where the utility controls the grid and the grid controls who can develop, access to that grid is not just an engineering question. It is a power question in both senses of the word.

The Imperial Irrigation District operates an independent utility — a significant competitive advantage for Imperial Valley’s economic development. IID is not constrained by CAISO’s transmission grid. It manages its own generation, transmission, and distribution infrastructure. For a developer trying to build a 330-megawatt data center, this independence is attractive: one utility, one interconnection agreement, one set of relationships to manage.

But the federal lawsuit filed by IVCM alleges that IID’s independence is being used against the project, not for it — and that the mechanism is a consultancy named Z-Global with deep institutional ties to IID leadership.

What the Complaint Alleges

The IVCM federal complaint alleges that Z-Global — a firm with established consulting relationships within IID — has a competing financial interest in the transmission capacity and renewable energy development opportunities that the IVDC would utilize. By occupying IID capacity with a 330-megawatt industrial load, the data center would reduce the transmission headroom available for Z-Global’s own renewable energy projects.

The alleged motive is not complicated: a consultancy that wants to develop renewable projects using IID infrastructure has a financial interest in preventing a large industrial customer from taking up the capacity those projects would need. The alleged mechanism is also not complicated: use institutional relationships within IID to make the utility’s engagement with the IVDC difficult, slow, or nonexistent.

Whether these allegations can be proven will be determined in federal court. But the structural conflict of interest they describe — a consultancy with insider access to a utility decision-making apparatus that also has a direct financial stake in the utility’s capacity allocation decisions — is not a far-fetched scenario. It is a well-documented pattern in regulated utility environments across the country.

What IID Owes Its Ratepayers

IID is a public utility. Its rates are set to serve its customers. Its capacity allocation decisions should be governed by what is best for the service territory and its ratepayers — not by what is most profitable for connected consultants.

A $30 million annual net revenue contribution from a single large industrial customer is a material benefit to IID’s financial position. That revenue spreads the utility’s fixed costs across a larger demand base, putting downward pressure on the per-unit rates that residential and small commercial customers pay. Blocking that customer — or allowing institutional relationships to impede its interconnection — imposes a direct cost on every IID ratepayer.

The IID board is elected by those ratepayers. They have a fiduciary obligation to manage the utility in the interests of the people who pay the bills. That obligation requires investigating the allegation that Z-Global’s relationships have influenced IID’s posture toward the IVDC — and providing public answers, not internal assurances.

The Broader Pattern

The IVDC case is not the first time that connected insiders in a regulated utility environment have been accused of using institutional access to advance private interests at the expense of ratepayers. It is a pattern familiar enough that federal and state regulators have developed specific frameworks for identifying and remedying it.

What makes this instance significant is the scale: $10 billion in private investment, 1,688 union jobs, $30 million in annual utility revenue — all potentially affected by the decisions of a consultancy whose institutional access is not visible to the ratepayers bearing the cost. The federal lawsuit has put those allegations into a public record where they can be investigated, challenged, and adjudicated. That process is exactly what the legal system is designed to do with claims of this kind.

The IID ratepayers of Imperial Valley deserve to know what happened. The federal courts will help answer that question.

The $83 Million Question: What Is Comite Civico Del Valle’s Business Model?

Comite Civico Del Valle has done real work in Imperial Valley. Over its history, the organization has conducted air quality monitoring, documented health impacts on farmworker communities, and advocated for environmental regulations that disproportionate affect the Valley’s most vulnerable residents. Luis Olmedo, its Executive Director, is a known figure in the community — a person who has represented legitimate concerns that official agencies have sometimes been slow to address.

This is important context. It is also not the full picture.

A Desert Sun investigation documented that Olmedo and CCV demanded $83 million from Controlled Thermal Resources — a company developing geothermal lithium extraction in the Salton Sea’s “Lithium Valley” — as the price of dropping CEQA-based opposition to CTR’s project. Eighty-three million dollars. To a single organization. In exchange for withdrawing a lawsuit.

This demand was not a fine, not a regulatory requirement, not a court-ordered remedy. It was a number put on the table by a non-profit organization as the cost of making its legal obstruction go away. The Desert Sun named it. The IVCM federal lawsuit alleges that a version of this same model was being applied to the Imperial Valley Data Center — and that Katherine Burnworth coordinated with Olmedo’s organization to create the legal leverage necessary to make the demand viable.

Understanding the Greenmail Mechanism

CEQA provides any organization with standing — a very low bar in California — the ability to challenge any discretionary development approval. The challenge doesn’t need to win. It needs to exist. The mere filing of a CEQA lawsuit freezes a project’s timeline, activates its legal costs, and triggers the carrying-cost clock on every dollar of financing the developer has deployed.

For a well-capitalized developer, a determined CEQA challenger can add $10-50 million in costs over a multi-year litigation period, even if every court ultimately rules in the developer’s favor. The rational economic response, for many developers, is to settle — to pay the challenging organization a fraction of what continued litigation would cost, receive a settlement agreement dropping the lawsuit, and proceed.

This is greenmail. The organization is not protecting the environment by winning the lawsuit. It is extracting a financial payment by threatening to pursue it. The environment is the pretext, not the purpose.

The Distinction That Matters

CCV’s legitimate community health work does not immunize it from accountability for a business practice that exploits environmental law to extract settlements from developers. These are separable activities. An organization can genuinely advocate for farmworker communities on air quality and also use CEQA litigation as a revenue mechanism. The good work doesn’t cancel out the accountability question raised by the bad practice.

The $83 million demand is documented. The Desert Sun is not a tabloid. The allegation in the IVCM complaint — that a version of this model was being coordinated against the data center — will be litigated in federal court where allegations are tested against evidence.

The community members who trust CCV for its air quality work deserve to know about the $83 million demand. They deserve to know the allegation that their city council member coordinated with the organization to manufacture CEQA exposure for the region’s largest job-creating project. They deserve to make their own judgments with the full picture, not the portion of it that serves one political narrative.

The Effect on Imperial Valley’s Development Future

A region where large development projects face coordinated CEQA-based settlement demands will eventually stop attracting large development projects. The $83 million demand on CTR — if it becomes the established price of doing business in Imperial Valley’s energy sector — will be cited in every site evaluation memo that puts this region on a developer’s short list. Not because developers don’t know how to negotiate, but because the expected total cost of project development includes settlement payments as a line item when that pattern is established.

The Lithium Valley opportunity — geothermal energy, domestic lithium extraction, clean technology investment — depends on the region being a viable place to invest. The data center opportunity depends on the same thing. An $83 million settlement demand, applied consistently to major projects, is a tax on investment that falls ultimately on the workers who would have been employed by projects that chose different sites instead.

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.

Katherine Burnworth and the Politics of Blocking Jobs That Aren’t Hers to Block

Katherine Burnworth is a City of Imperial council member. The Imperial Valley Data Center site is in unincorporated Imperial County — not within the City of Imperial’s boundaries, not subject to the city’s land use authority, not part of the territory that Burnworth was elected to represent.

This jurisdictional gap is not a technicality. It is the central fact that defines the nature of the campaign against the IVDC. Burnworth’s opposition to the project — and the city’s lawsuit, and the alleged coordination with CCV and IID insiders that the federal complaint describes — is not a council member exercising legitimate authority over development in her community. It is a political official inserting herself into a decision that a different government body made, through a different legal process, on land that is not in her jurisdiction.

The question the federal lawsuit forces into the open is why — and whether that why involves conduct that violates the civil rights of the developer and the economic rights of the community.

What the Federal Complaint Alleges

The IVCM complaint identifies Burnworth as the alleged coordinator of a broader obstruction campaign — a coalition that, according to the complaint, included the City of Imperial, CCV’s Luis Olmedo, and IID insiders with ties to Z-Global. The alleged goal was to force the project into a CEQA review process it was legally exempt from, thereby creating the legal leverage necessary to either kill the project or extract a settlement.

The specific allegations against Burnworth include: coordinating with Olmedo to organize and amplify opposition, using her city council position to direct city resources toward litigation against the county project, and engaging in conduct designed to retaliate against the developer for his public criticism of the city’s actions and his decision to move the project to county jurisdiction.

These are serious allegations. They will be tested in federal discovery and, if the case proceeds, at trial. The defendants will have full opportunity to contest them. But the filing itself — the fact that a developer spent the resources to put these specific names and specific allegations into a federal civil rights complaint — represents a significant escalation of the consequences that come with leading this kind of campaign.

The Political Calculus

Why would a city council member organize opposition to a project outside her jurisdiction? The political logic is not hard to identify. Opposition to a large outside developer — a “wartime developer” from Huntington Beach, bringing $10 billion to change the face of the region — can be politically profitable in a community where skepticism of outside interests has historical foundation.

The narrative writes itself: a well-funded outside developer trying to impose a massive industrial facility on the region, and a local official standing up to protect the community. It does not matter that the community in question — unincorporated Imperial County — is different from the city whose residents elected Burnworth. It does not matter that the project was approved through a legitimate process by the county government that actually has jurisdiction. The political narrative of local defender against outside interests is effective regardless of these inconvenient details.

What it costs is harder to see: the 1,688 union jobs that haven’t been filled, the $28.75 million in annual tax revenue that hasn’t reached the schools, the water recycling project that was blocked, the federal civil rights lawsuit that will cost the city and its officials time and money and potential personal liability.

The Personal Liability Question

The federal lawsuit names Burnworth individually, not just in her official capacity. Claims under 42 U.S.C. § 1983 can expose individual officials to personal financial liability for constitutional violations. Cities typically indemnify their officials for acts taken within the scope of their authority — but conduct that falls outside official authority, or that constitutes deliberate constitutional violations, can create personal exposure that indemnification does not cover.

The prospect of personal financial liability does not appear to have deterred the obstruction campaign. But it does change the calculus for any official considering whether to continue or escalate it. The federal lawsuit is designed, in part, to impose costs on the individuals making obstruction decisions — costs that make those decisions more expensive than continuing them is worth.

Whether that calculus lands is a question the federal courts will eventually help answer. In the meantime, the residents of the City of Imperial — who are paying for the city’s litigation expenses — are entitled to ask their council member what she has accomplished with their money, and at what cost.

The City of Imperial Is Fighting a Project It Has No Authority Over. Why?

If you are a resident of the City of Imperial, a specific question is worth asking: your city government has spent significant public funds — your funds — litigating against a project that is not in your city, not subject to your city’s authority, and not something your city has any legal power to approve or deny. The Superior Court called the legal theory behind that litigation “legally insufficient.” The city is now appealing that ruling, spending more of your money to continue the campaign.

What have you gotten for that expenditure? What did the city claim it was trying to protect you from? And did the people who made these decisions on your behalf have the authority — or the justification — to spend your resources this way?

The Jurisdiction Gap

The IVDC site sits at the intersection of Aten and Clark Roads in unincorporated Imperial County. “Unincorporated” means it is not within the boundaries of any city. It is governed by Imperial County — the county board of supervisors, the county planning department, the county zoning code. The City of Imperial has no land use authority over it.

California law does provide mechanisms for neighboring jurisdictions to challenge land use decisions in limited circumstances. But those mechanisms require establishing legal standing — a genuine, cognizable legal interest in the outcome. The Superior Court’s ruling that the city’s complaint was legally insufficient is, in part, a statement about the adequacy of the legal theory the city used to assert that standing.

The city sued. The court dismissed the key claims. The city appealed. At each stage, the city has been spending public money on litigation that a judge has already described as legally insufficient. The residents who fund that spending deserve to know what the city expects to accomplish — and who in city government made the decision to keep spending after the initial dismissal.

The Cost to City Residents

Municipal litigation is expensive. Outside counsel for complex land use and administrative law litigation in California can cost $300-600 per hour or more. A multi-year case — from initial filing through trial court dismissal, appeal briefing, and potential appellate argument — can easily consume $500,000 to $1.5 million in legal fees.

The City of Imperial is not a wealthy municipality. It operates a budget that, like every small California city, requires careful management of competing demands. Legal expenses of this scale represent real tradeoffs — services that don’t get funded, maintenance that gets deferred, staff that doesn’t get hired because the money went to outside counsel pursuing a case the trial court already called legally insufficient.

This is a governance question that Imperial residents are entitled to ask directly: was this the best use of your city’s limited resources? What did you get for it? And who decided to keep spending after the court’s initial ruling?

The Regional Cost

Beyond the city’s residents, the City of Imperial’s litigation campaign has imposed costs on the broader region. Every month of legal delay is a month of construction that doesn’t start — a month of union wages that aren’t paid, a month of supply chain spending that doesn’t flow through Imperial Valley businesses, a month of county tax revenue that doesn’t arrive.

The IVDC’s tax revenue benefits the county — including the unincorporated areas the city doesn’t govern and the cities (including Imperial) that receive county services funded partly by county revenue. By litigating to prevent that revenue from being generated, the City of Imperial is imposing costs on communities whose residents had no say in the decision to file suit and no representation on the city council that made it.

That is a feature of the political economy of this dispute, not a bug. The people bearing the cost of the obstruction campaign are different from the people making the obstruction decisions. Changing that alignment — making the decision-makers accountable to the people bearing the cost — is what elections, lawsuits, and sustained public pressure are for.

The Non-Profit Industrial Complex: How Environmental Organizations Became Real Estate Players

Non-profit organizations are tax-exempt on the theory that they serve the public interest rather than private financial interests. The designation carries legal privileges — exemption from income tax, eligibility for tax-deductible donations — that are justified by the assumption that the organization’s activities benefit the community rather than enrich its principals.

What happens when a non-profit organization’s primary revenue mechanism is extracting settlement payments from private developers by threatening litigation? The public benefit theory starts to strain. The organization has a financial interest in the existence of major development projects — not because those projects benefit its community, but because those projects are the targets from which it extracts payments. More development means more potential targets. Larger projects mean larger potential settlements.

This is not a hypothetical concern. The Desert Sun documented an $83 million demand. The IVCM federal lawsuit alleges coordinated CEQA-based obstruction designed to create leverage for a similar demand. These are specific allegations about specific organizations making specific financial demands. They are worth taking seriously.

The Organizational Economics

Running an environmental advocacy organization requires money. Grant funding is competitive and often restricted to specific program areas. Individual donations are unpredictable. Membership dues are limited by the size of the membership. Litigation settlements — large, unrestricted payments from developers seeking to end expensive legal disputes — are none of these things. They are large, flexible, and repeatable.

An organization that learns to generate revenue through CEQA settlements has a rational incentive to build the infrastructure for that model: maintaining legal capacity, developing the expertise to file credible CEQA challenges, establishing relationships with law firms that can execute the litigation on contingency, and identifying the projects with the highest settlement potential. This is organizational behavior responding to financial incentives, not conspiracy. But the consequences for the communities bearing the cost are the same.

The Credibility Problem

The greenmail model works because environmental organizations have genuine credibility earned through legitimate advocacy work. The same organizations that document real air quality impacts, fight for real environmental protections, and genuinely represent underserved communities also — sometimes — use the legal tools those fights generate to pursue financial outcomes that have nothing to do with environmental protection.

This creates a real challenge for anyone trying to evaluate specific CEQA challenges: is this a legitimate environmental objection that deserves serious engagement, or is it a financial maneuver using environmental language as cover? The answer is not always obvious, and the organizations that use the greenmail model benefit from that ambiguity.

The way to resolve the ambiguity is to follow the money. When an organization makes a specific dollar demand as the price of dropping a lawsuit, the financial motive is no longer ambiguous. The $83 million demand on CTR is not ambiguous. It is a documented number. The community it was made in — Imperial Valley — is entitled to use that documentation when evaluating the organization’s involvement in subsequent campaigns.

What Accountability Looks Like

Non-profit accountability is weaker than corporate accountability in most respects. Shareholders can sue corporate boards. Voters can remove elected officials. But the principals of a non-profit organization are largely accountable only to their boards — and boards in the non-profit world are often selected by and from the same community as the executives they oversee.

External accountability comes from journalism, from litigation, and from the communities the organizations claim to represent. The Desert Sun provided the journalism. The IVCM federal lawsuit provides the litigation. The remaining mechanism is community accountability — the residents of Imperial Valley deciding whether organizations that make $83 million settlement demands and coordinate campaigns against the region’s largest job-creating project are actually serving their interests, and responding accordingly.

Luis Olmedo, CTR, and the $83 Million That Changed How We Should Think About CEQA Opposition

The Desert Sun‘s investigation into Comite Civico Del Valle’s dealings with Controlled Thermal Resources was a significant piece of regional journalism. It documented, specifically, that Luis Olmedo — CCV’s Executive Director — demanded $83 million from CTR as the price of dropping CEQA-based opposition to CTR’s geothermal lithium extraction project in the Salton Sea region.

CTR is developing exactly the kind of project that Imperial Valley needs: domestic lithium extraction from geothermal brine, integrated with clean energy production, in a region that has been waiting for decades to convert its geothermal resources into economic diversification. The “Lithium Valley” narrative that has attracted significant state and federal attention depends on projects like CTR actually getting built.

The $83 million demand does not appear to have been about lithium extraction’s environmental impacts. It appears to have been about the financial value of CCV’s ability to threaten those impacts through CEQA litigation. Eighty-three million dollars is not a mitigation cost. It is a toll.

Connecting the Dots to the IVDC

The IVCM federal complaint alleges that the same model — organized CEQA opposition designed to create settlement leverage — was coordinated against the Imperial Valley Data Center, and that the coordination involved both Katherine Burnworth and CCV. The allegation is that Burnworth worked to force the project into a CEQA process it was legally exempt from specifically to create the leverage that a settlement demand would require.

The February 10 Superior Court ruling that the city’s legal theory was “legally insufficient” disrupted this strategy at the threshold level. Without the CUP requirement, there is no CEQA trigger. Without the CEQA trigger, there is no litigation threat. Without the litigation threat, there is no settlement leverage. The court ruling did not just validate the project’s approval — it may have effectively eliminated the financial mechanism the opposition coalition was depending on.

The Pattern That Should Concern Imperial Valley

The $83 million demand on CTR is documented. The allegation of coordinated CEQA-based opposition to the IVDC is in a federal complaint. If both are accurate, the pattern is clear: major development projects in Imperial Valley’s energy and technology sectors are facing coordinated opposition that uses CEQA litigation as a financial extraction tool rather than an environmental protection mechanism.

Lithium Valley and data center development are the two largest economic opportunities currently visible in Imperial Valley’s future. If both are subject to organized greenmail campaigns, the effective tax on development in the region rises substantially. That tax is paid first by developers who adjust their site selection decisions, and ultimately by the workers who never get hired because the projects that would have employed them never got built.

What the Community Should Demand

Luis Olmedo has the right to lead the organization he leads. He has the right to use legal tools that are available to him. He does not have the right to represent his activities as environmental protection when the documented evidence suggests they are financial extraction. The community he claims to represent deserves the honest version of both narratives.

The honest version includes: CCV has done real environmental health work in Imperial Valley. It has also, according to documented reporting, demanded $83 million from a clean energy developer. It has also, according to a federal complaint, been named as a participant in a coordinated campaign to create CEQA leverage against the region’s largest job-creating project.

These facts can coexist. The community’s job is to hold them together and make its own judgments — which means insisting on access to all of the relevant facts, not just the ones that support a predetermined conclusion.

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.

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.