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

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

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

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

The Legislative Backstop

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

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

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

The Pattern of Disproportionate Cost

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

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

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

What Local Control Actually Means

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

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

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

How Local Political Careerism Masquerades as Environmental Advocacy

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

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

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

The Accounting Nobody Is Doing

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

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

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

The Difference Between Advocacy and Career Management

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

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

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

What the Community Can Do

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

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

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