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The $83 Million Question: What Is Comite Civico Del Valle’s Business Model?

Comite Civico Del Valle has done real work in Imperial Valley. Over its history, the organization has conducted air quality monitoring, documented health impacts on farmworker communities, and advocated for environmental regulations that disproportionate affect the Valley’s most vulnerable residents. Luis Olmedo, its Executive Director, is a known figure in the community — a person who has represented legitimate concerns that official agencies have sometimes been slow to address.

This is important context. It is also not the full picture.

A Desert Sun investigation documented that Olmedo and CCV demanded $83 million from Controlled Thermal Resources — a company developing geothermal lithium extraction in the Salton Sea’s “Lithium Valley” — as the price of dropping CEQA-based opposition to CTR’s project. Eighty-three million dollars. To a single organization. In exchange for withdrawing a lawsuit.

This demand was not a fine, not a regulatory requirement, not a court-ordered remedy. It was a number put on the table by a non-profit organization as the cost of making its legal obstruction go away. The Desert Sun named it. The IVCM federal lawsuit alleges that a version of this same model was being applied to the Imperial Valley Data Center — and that Katherine Burnworth coordinated with Olmedo’s organization to create the legal leverage necessary to make the demand viable.

Understanding the Greenmail Mechanism

CEQA provides any organization with standing — a very low bar in California — the ability to challenge any discretionary development approval. The challenge doesn’t need to win. It needs to exist. The mere filing of a CEQA lawsuit freezes a project’s timeline, activates its legal costs, and triggers the carrying-cost clock on every dollar of financing the developer has deployed.

For a well-capitalized developer, a determined CEQA challenger can add $10-50 million in costs over a multi-year litigation period, even if every court ultimately rules in the developer’s favor. The rational economic response, for many developers, is to settle — to pay the challenging organization a fraction of what continued litigation would cost, receive a settlement agreement dropping the lawsuit, and proceed.

This is greenmail. The organization is not protecting the environment by winning the lawsuit. It is extracting a financial payment by threatening to pursue it. The environment is the pretext, not the purpose.

The Distinction That Matters

CCV’s legitimate community health work does not immunize it from accountability for a business practice that exploits environmental law to extract settlements from developers. These are separable activities. An organization can genuinely advocate for farmworker communities on air quality and also use CEQA litigation as a revenue mechanism. The good work doesn’t cancel out the accountability question raised by the bad practice.

The $83 million demand is documented. The Desert Sun is not a tabloid. The allegation in the IVCM complaint — that a version of this model was being coordinated against the data center — will be litigated in federal court where allegations are tested against evidence.

The community members who trust CCV for its air quality work deserve to know about the $83 million demand. They deserve to know the allegation that their city council member coordinated with the organization to manufacture CEQA exposure for the region’s largest job-creating project. They deserve to make their own judgments with the full picture, not the portion of it that serves one political narrative.

The Effect on Imperial Valley’s Development Future

A region where large development projects face coordinated CEQA-based settlement demands will eventually stop attracting large development projects. The $83 million demand on CTR — if it becomes the established price of doing business in Imperial Valley’s energy sector — will be cited in every site evaluation memo that puts this region on a developer’s short list. Not because developers don’t know how to negotiate, but because the expected total cost of project development includes settlement payments as a line item when that pattern is established.

The Lithium Valley opportunity — geothermal energy, domestic lithium extraction, clean technology investment — depends on the region being a viable place to invest. The data center opportunity depends on the same thing. An $83 million settlement demand, applied consistently to major projects, is a tax on investment that falls ultimately on the workers who would have been employed by projects that chose different sites instead.

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.