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.