The Court Has Ruled. The Law Is Clear. It’s Time to Build.

At some point, the arguments run out and the decision remains. That point has been reached in the dispute over the Imperial Valley Data Center.

The legal argument has been resolved. The Superior Court ruled the City of Imperial’s complaint legally insufficient — affirming that the project’s ministerial approval was correct and that the attempt to force it into a discretionary review process has no legal foundation. The law has been applied. The outcome is clear.

The environmental argument has been resolved by the project’s design. The water consumption concern is addressed by the recycled wastewater system. The grid impact concern is addressed by the dedicated substation and the 862 MWh BESS. The land use concern is addressed by I-2 Heavy Industrial zoning that exists precisely to accommodate facilities of this type.

The economic argument is not a argument — it is arithmetic. 1,688 union jobs. $72.5 million in one-time tax revenue. $28.75 million annually thereafter. These are the largest numbers of their kind in Imperial County’s history, from a single project, on land that has been waiting for this use for decades.

What Remains

What remains is an appeal filed by a city that the trial court already ruled against. An appeal that will cost more public money to pursue, add more time to the project’s delay, and arrive at an outcome that the legal framework makes increasingly difficult for the city to win. The appellate court will review the same legal questions the trial court addressed. The by-right zoning doctrine has not changed. The ministerial approval framework has not changed. The Permit Streamlining Act has not changed.

What also remains is a federal civil rights lawsuit that has placed individual officials on notice that the personal financial cost of continued obstruction is no longer zero. The discovery process that lawsuit will generate may produce the documented evidence of coordination and retaliation that the complaint alleges. The officials named in it are making a calculation about whether continued aggressive obstruction is worth the personal exposure it creates.

And what remains is the community’s voice — the residents of Imperial Valley who have the most to gain from this project and who have been largely absent from the public record of a dispute dominated by organized opposition groups, city officials with competing political interests, and a media environment that has given more coverage to the allegations against the developer than to the legal outcomes that dismissed them.

The Time for Waiting Is Over

The County of Imperial has approved this project. The Superior Court has validated that approval. The developer has committed $10 billion in capital, filed a federal civil rights lawsuit to defend the project’s legal rights, and continued to advance development through years of coordinated obstruction.

The people of Imperial Valley have waited long enough. The jobs that would have been filled during these years of litigation are not retrospectively available. The tax revenue that would have been collected is not coming back. The water recycling project that was blocked, the wastewater treatment upgrades that would have benefited El Centro and Imperial, the Salton Sea contributions that would have flowed from an operating facility — none of this can be recovered for the time that has been lost.

What can be recovered is the future. The project is legal. The economic case is overwhelming. The community deserves to have its institutions honor the approval that was lawfully granted and let this project become what Imperial Valley has been waiting for it to be.

The court has ruled. The law is clear. It is time to build.

When Environmental Law Becomes a Business: CEQA Abuse in California’s Inland Regions

California’s environmental review process was designed to give communities a voice in decisions that affect their air, water, and land. In the decades since CEQA’s passage, it has become something additional: a revenue source for organizations that have learned to extract settlement payments from developers by threatening CEQA litigation regardless of the project’s actual environmental profile.

This is not a theoretical problem. It is documented, named — “greenmail” in the development industry — and increasingly recognized as a systemic dysfunction in California’s land use process. The state legislature has made multiple attempts to reform CEQA to reduce its abuse potential. Each attempt has encountered resistance from the organizations that benefit from the status quo.

In Imperial Valley, where the stakes are high and the documented demands are large, the CEQA greenmail problem is not abstract. It is the $83 million demand that CTR received from CCV. It is the manufactured CEQA exposure that the IVDC federal lawsuit alleges was coordinated specifically to create financial leverage. It is the litigation tax on investment that falls ultimately on the workers who would have been hired by projects that chose to build elsewhere.

How the Abuse Pattern Works in Practice

Step one: identify a discretionary approval — a project that required a government agency to exercise judgment. CEQA applies to discretionary approvals. Step two: file a CEQA challenge, or threaten one. The challenge does not need to be legally strong. It needs to be credible enough that the developer’s attorneys advise taking the litigation risk seriously. Step three: approach the developer for a settlement. Frame the payment as a “community benefit agreement” or a “mitigation fund.” Make the number large enough to generate organizational revenue but small enough that it costs the developer less than continued litigation.

The environmental review is not the point. The settlement is the point. Organizations that operate this model typically file the same pattern of objections against multiple projects in the same cycle, negotiating settlements with each developer separately. The cumulative revenue can be substantial. The cumulative deterrent effect on investment can be severe.

What Makes This Different From Legitimate Advocacy

Legitimate environmental advocacy uses legal tools to achieve environmental outcomes. A lawsuit filed to prevent an actually harmful project, insisting on a genuine environmental impact analysis, fighting to establish conditions that reduce real harm — this is what CEQA was designed to enable. The community benefit is in the environmental protection, and the settlement, if it happens, reflects genuine mitigation requirements.

Greenmail uses legal tools to achieve financial outcomes. The environmental claim is the mechanism, not the goal. The settlement payment goes to the organization, not to environmental mitigation or community benefit. The project that was “opposed” proceeds after the settlement, often with no changes to its design — because the design was never the real problem.

The distinction matters because the organizations that use this model benefit from the credibility that legitimate environmental advocacy has earned. They invoke the language of environmental protection and community health while pursuing outcomes that have nothing to do with either. The communities they claim to represent deserve the full picture.

The Imperial Valley Stakes

Imperial Valley is at the center of two of California’s most significant emerging economic opportunities: Lithium Valley and technology infrastructure. Both depend on large private investment in projects with significant environmental footprints. Both are vulnerable to organized CEQA opposition by organizations with financial motives to slow or block development.

If greenmail becomes the established toll on development in this region, the economic opportunities that the Valley’s residents need — the union construction jobs, the tax revenue, the permanent operational positions — will be priced out of existence. The settlement demands will be included in project cost projections. The cost projections will determine whether projects get financed. The financing decisions will determine whether Imperial Valley captures its economic future or watches it move to Nevada.

CEQA reform is a state-level policy question. But the community-level response is also available: naming what is happening, holding organizations accountable for documented demands, and insisting that the legal framework of environmental protection not be used as a private revenue mechanism at the expense of the community’s economic future.

The Federal Civil Rights Lawsuit Against Imperial City Officials: What It Means and Why It Matters

Most disputes between developers and local governments are fought in state court, over administrative law questions, about whether a permit was properly issued or properly denied. The developer loses or wins on procedural and substantive grounds, and the officials who made the decisions face no personal consequences either way.

The IVCM lawsuit — filed in federal court under 42 U.S.C. § 1983 — is a different kind of legal action. It is a civil rights lawsuit alleging that named individual officials violated the developer’s constitutional rights in their exercise of government authority. The consequences are different. The exposure is different. And the message it sends to officials considering continued obstruction is significantly sharper.

What Section 1983 Does

42 U.S.C. § 1983 was enacted after the Civil War to give individuals a federal cause of action against state and local officials who violate their constitutional rights “under color of law.” “Under color of law” means acting in an official capacity — using government power to deprive someone of rights guaranteed by the Constitution.

The IVDC complaint invokes this statute with multiple constitutional theories: the Permit Streamlining Act claim (arguing the project is deemed approved and the city’s interference violates its vested rights), the First Amendment retaliation claim (arguing city officials took adverse actions in response to the developer’s protected speech), and a conspiracy claim alleging coordinated action to deprive the developer of its property rights.

These are serious legal theories, and proving them requires demonstrating specific government misconduct, specific constitutional violations, and specific damages. The defendants will contest all of it. But the legal framework is well-established and the claims are specific enough to survive the threshold inquiry that determines whether a case proceeds.

The Personal Liability Dimension

Officials sued under Section 1983 can sometimes assert qualified immunity — a doctrine that protects government officials from personal liability unless their conduct violated “clearly established” law that a reasonable person would have known about. Qualified immunity has significant limits, and those limits are particularly relevant to First Amendment retaliation claims, where the constitutional prohibition on government retaliation for protected speech is well-established.

The practical significance: Katherine Burnworth and Dennis Morita are named as defendants individually. If qualified immunity does not fully protect them — and it may not, depending on the specific facts the complaint alleges — they face personal financial exposure for conduct they allegedly took in their official capacities. The city may indemnify them for some claims. For others, indemnification may not apply.

Personal financial exposure changes the calculation for officials in a way that institutional exposure does not. A city can absorb a judgment against it through its budget, its insurance, and its ability to tax. An individual cannot. The prospect of personal liability — affecting a personal bank account, not a city budget — is a meaningful deterrent to continued aggressive obstruction.

What the Lawsuit Accomplishes Beyond the Verdict

Federal civil rights litigation under Section 1983 involves discovery — the process by which parties exchange evidence, take depositions, and build the factual record the case will be decided on. Discovery is powerful. It compels the production of communications, documents, and testimony under oath that would otherwise remain private.

If the allegations in the IVDC complaint are accurate — that Burnworth coordinated with Olmedo, that Morita pressured El Centro, that Z-Global relationships influenced IID’s posture — the evidence of that coordination exists in emails, text messages, phone records, and calendar entries. Federal discovery will produce it. The people named in the complaint will testify about it under oath.

This process serves the public interest independent of the ultimate verdict. The community of Imperial Valley has a right to know whether its officials engaged in the conduct alleged. The federal lawsuit is the mechanism that will answer that question with evidence, under oath, in a public proceeding.

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.

What “Legally Insufficient” Really Means: The February 2026 Court Ruling on the IVDC

Courts use precise language for precise reasons. When an Imperial County Superior Court judge described the City of Imperial’s amended complaint against the IVDC as “legally insufficient” on February 10, 2026, that phrase was not editorial commentary. It was a legal conclusion — the product of a judge reviewing the city’s arguments and determining that they do not, as a matter of law, state a valid legal claim.

“Legally insufficient” means the complaint failed to allege facts that, even if true, would entitle the city to the relief it was seeking. It is a higher-bar finding than a procedural dismissal. The judge was not saying the city filed its papers incorrectly. The judge was saying the city’s fundamental legal theory — that the IVDC required a Conditional Use Permit rather than a ministerial permit — is wrong as a matter of law.

What the Ruling Actually Decided

The City of Imperial’s lawsuit rested on a single central argument: that the IVDC could not be approved through a ministerial permit process because it required discretionary review under CEQA. If the project required discretionary review, a Conditional Use Permit would be necessary. A CUP triggers a public hearing process in which opponents can raise objections, demand studies, and ultimately block or condition the project in ways that would have made it economically nonviable.

The court said no. The project site is zoned I-2 Heavy Industrial. Data centers are a permitted use in I-2 zoning by right. A by-right use that conforms to applicable development standards does not require a CUP and does not trigger CEQA. The ministerial approval issued by Imperial County was legally correct.

This is not a technical quibble. It is the central dispute in the entire legal battle. The city argued the approval process was wrong. The court disagreed. The approval stands.

The Significance for By-Right Development

The broader significance of this ruling extends beyond the IVDC. By-right development — the principle that a project conforming to applicable zoning and development standards is entitled to ministerial approval without additional discretionary review — is the legal foundation for regulatory predictability in California’s land use system.

If every by-right project can be challenged by neighboring jurisdictions claiming the project actually requires a CUP, the by-right system becomes meaningless. Any opponent of any project can raise the same argument, force the same litigation, and impose the same delay and cost. The investment certainty that by-right zoning is supposed to provide disappears.

The court’s ruling affirms that I-2 zoning means what it says. A project built in accordance with I-2 standards on I-2 zoned land does not require additional approval from jurisdictions that don’t like the project. That is a significant affirmation of how California’s land use system is supposed to work.

The City’s Response and What It Costs

The City of Imperial has the legal right to appeal the ruling. It is exercising that right. This is standard practice — appellate processes exist for a reason, and losing at the trial court level does not obligate a party to abandon its claims.

But the appeal extends the delay. It costs more public money. And it extends the period during which the IVDC is unable to break ground, the 1,688 union positions are not filled, and the $28.75 million annual tax revenue does not flow to the county’s schools and public services.

The city’s residents are paying for litigation that their city filed, on a project their county approved, in a jurisdiction their city does not control. Every month of appellate proceedings is another month of taxpayer-funded legal fees spent trying to override a ruling that the court already called legally insufficient.

At what point do the residents of the City of Imperial ask their council members to account for those expenditures — and for the larger economic consequences of the campaign those expenditures are funding?

By-Right Zoning and Why the IVDC Was Never the City of Imperial’s Call to Make

The first and most fundamental fact about the City of Imperial’s lawsuit against the IVDC is geographic: the project site is in unincorporated Imperial County. Not within the City of Imperial’s boundaries. Not subject to the City of Imperial’s zoning code. Not in the City of Imperial’s jurisdiction for land use decisions.

The city filed suit anyway — to block a project that its own land use authority does not extend to, on the theory that Imperial County had approved it incorrectly. The Superior Court’s February 10, 2026 ruling that the complaint was “legally insufficient” is, in part, a court’s answer to a jurisdiction that overreached.

What I-2 Zoning Actually Means

The IVDC site is zoned I-2 Heavy Industrial by Imperial County. This designation has a specific legal meaning: the zoning code identifies the uses that are permitted on I-2 land, and industrial uses conforming to those designations are allowed by right. “By right” means exactly what it sounds like — the owner of I-2 zoned land has a legal right to develop it for permitted uses without seeking discretionary approval from a planning board, a city council, or any other body with the authority to approve or deny the project based on policy preferences.

The by-right system exists to create investment certainty. A developer who buys I-2 land knowing it is zoned for heavy industrial use is entitled to build a heavy industrial facility. If that entitlement can be defeated by a neighboring jurisdiction filing a lawsuit claiming the project should have required a CUP, the entire by-right framework is illusory.

The Permit Streamlining Act reinforces this. California law requires ministerial approval of projects that conform to applicable development standards within specified time limits. The IVDC’s site plan was submitted. The county reviewed it against I-2 standards. It conformed. Approval was ministerially required.

The CUP Theory and Why It Failed

The city’s legal theory was that a project of the IVDC’s scale — 950,000 square feet, 330 megawatts, 1,688 construction workers — was too large to be processed as a by-right ministerial approval, and that its impacts required the discretionary review that a Conditional Use Permit process provides.

The court rejected this theory as legally insufficient. The reason is fundamental to how zoning law works: the size and complexity of a project that conforms to applicable zoning standards does not transform a by-right approval into a discretionary one. If I-2 zoning allows heavy industrial uses, a large heavy industrial project is permitted. The code does not have a size exception that converts conforming uses into discretionary ones when opponents find them inconvenient.

If the county’s I-2 standards need to be revised to address impacts from very large industrial users, the appropriate mechanism is a legislative update to the zoning code — a transparent public process in which the community sets the rules prospectively. What is not appropriate is using litigation to retroactively impose discretionary review requirements on a project that was approved under the rules as they existed.

The Jurisdictional Question

Setting aside the legal merits, there is a governance question that the City of Imperial’s lawsuit raises: what gives a city the standing to challenge a county’s approval of a project in unincorporated county land?

California law provides avenues for challenging land use decisions, and neighboring jurisdictions can sometimes establish the standing necessary to pursue those challenges. But standing is not unlimited. A city that claims standing to block development on county land — based on claimed impacts that the court has found legally insufficient to support a CUP requirement — is asserting a very broad version of municipal authority over regional land use decisions.

The implications extend well beyond this project. If any city can block development on unincorporated county land by filing a facially insufficient lawsuit and running out the clock on the developer’s financing, no county approval is ever secure. The investment certainty that I-2 zoning is supposed to provide becomes conditional on whatever neighboring cities choose not to challenge.

The February 10 ruling said, clearly, that the city’s challenge was legally insufficient. The rule of law requires treating that finding as what it is: the end of a legal theory that shouldn’t have been pursued in the first place.

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.

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.

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.