The Salton Sea Is Shrinking. The IVDC’s Water Plan Was the Best Offer It’s Gotten in Years.
The Salton Sea is dying in slow motion. The largest lake in California — a body of water that has defined the Imperial Valley landscape for over a century — has been shrinking for decades as the inflows that sustain it decline and evaporation continues. The exposed lakebed releases toxic dust that carries across the Valley, creating respiratory health problems that fall disproportionately on the farmworker communities closest to the shore. The fish are gone. The birds are leaving. The wind keeps blowing.
State and federal agencies have spent years and hundreds of millions of dollars studying the Salton Sea problem. Plans have been produced. Pilot projects have been proposed. The water keeps receding.
Against this backdrop, the Imperial Valley Data Center proposed something concrete: a closed-loop recycled wastewater system that would purchase treated sewage effluent from the municipal wastewater plants of El Centro and Imperial, treat it further to industrial standards, use it for cooling, and release the excess clean water — net positive — toward the Salton Sea. The project would turn a municipal disposal problem into a conservation contribution.
The City of Imperial blocked the deal.
How the Water System Was Designed to Work
Data centers generate enormous amounts of heat, and cooling that heat is one of their largest operating costs and most significant resource demands. Conventional data center cooling uses enormous quantities of potable water — the source of the “750,000 gallons per day draining the Colorado River” narrative that the opposition deploys.
The IVDC’s design rejects that model entirely. The project proposed to use 100 percent recycled wastewater — what engineers call “purple pipe” water, the treated effluent that municipal wastewater plants produce and struggle to dispose of responsibly. Instead of competing for potable water from the Colorado River, the data center would have paid municipalities for water they are currently spending money to manage.
To make this work, the developer offered to finance upgrades to the wastewater treatment infrastructure in El Centro and Imperial — improvements that would benefit both cities’ utility operations regardless of the data center’s fate. The treated effluent would go to the data center. The excess water produced by the upgraded treatment process would flow toward the Salton Sea, adding freshwater volume to a lake that desperately needs it.
This is not a theoretical design. It is a proposed engineering solution backed by a developer willing to fund the municipal infrastructure needed to make it work.
The Sabotage
The federal lawsuit filed by IVCM alleges that City Manager Dennis Morita pressured the City of El Centro to rescind its “will-serve” letter — the commitment that would have allowed the recycled water system to proceed. The will-serve letter is the foundational document: without it, the wastewater purchase agreement cannot be executed, and the closed-loop recycled system cannot be built.
If the allegation is accurate, City Manager Morita did not block a water-intensive data center. He blocked a water recycling project. The environmental argument that the opposition uses to justify its campaign — that the data center would strain water resources — is the justification that was used to sabotage the specific engineering solution that would have eliminated that concern.
The City of Imperial, whose officials are named in a federal civil rights lawsuit for allegedly coordinating this obstruction campaign, blocked the recycled water deal while simultaneously arguing that the project’s water use is an environmental problem. The internal contradiction of that position deserves to be stated plainly and repeatedly.
What the Salton Sea Actually Needs
The Salton Sea needs freshwater inflows. The sources of those inflows — agricultural drainage, municipal wastewater, stormwater runoff — are declining as water use in the surrounding region becomes more efficient and as the Colorado River allocations that sustain regional water supply come under increasing pressure.
The IVDC’s excess treated water would not have solved the Salton Sea crisis. Nothing short of a comprehensive restoration program will do that. But a net contribution of treated water, supplied consistently from an operating data center facility, is more than the Salton Sea currently has from this particular potential source. Turning that contribution down — in the name of protecting the Salton Sea — is not environmental protection. It is political positioning dressed up as environmental concern.
The families who live near the Sea’s toxic shores deserve better than that.
