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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.

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.

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.