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1,688 Union Jobs: What the Imperial Valley Data Center Means for Working Families

Imperial County has the highest unemployment rate in California. Not occasionally — consistently, year after year, decade after decade. The Valley’s farmworker families know the math of a seasonal economy by heart: work hard in the harvest, stretch it through the off-season, start over. For a generation of young adults, the calculation has led to one conclusion: leave.

That calculus is exactly what the Imperial Valley Data Center is positioned to change — and exactly why the fight over its approval matters beyond legal briefs and zoning codes.

The Numbers Behind the Jobs

The IVDC project has committed to 1,688 union construction positions across a multi-year build phase. These are not temporary service jobs or part-time retail positions. They are IBEW electrician slots, pipefitter certifications, heavy equipment operator licenses — skilled trades that pay wages a family can actually build on. A journeyman electrician in California earns between $45 and $65 per hour under prevailing wage agreements. A pipefitter on a union contract earns similar rates, with benefits and pension contributions stacked on top.

At those wages, 1,688 positions don’t just represent paychecks. They represent mortgage qualifications. They represent kids who don’t have to move to San Diego or Phoenix to find work. They represent the tax base that funds the schools, the fire stations, and the roads that everyone in the Valley uses.

Beyond construction, the facility will require approximately 100 permanent high-skill operational roles in network engineering, security, and facility management — positions that anchor families to the region rather than pulling them away from it.

What the Opposition Has Offered Instead

The City of Imperial filed a lawsuit to block the project. State Senator Steve Padilla introduced legislation to strip data centers of the legal protections that make this project viable. Environmental groups have lined up to demand reviews, studies, and hearings — each one designed to add years and millions to the developer’s costs until the project collapses under its own carrying costs.

Not one of these actors has proposed an alternative that puts a single union electrician to work in Imperial County. Not one has offered a competing economic development plan. The opposition’s contribution to Imperial County’s unemployment problem is the opposition itself.

The Trades Are Ready

Imperial County’s construction trades have been watching this project. The IBEW locals that would staff the electrical work on a 330-megawatt data center campus represent workers who live in the Valley, pay taxes in the Valley, and send their children to Valley schools. A project of this scale — nearly a million square feet of data hall on a 75-acre industrial site — is the kind of multi-year build that sustains a local trades economy across a full business cycle.

The workers who would fill these positions are not abstractions in an economic impact study. They are the people who attend the same churches as the city council members voting against them. They shop at the same grocery stores as the environmental advocates filing litigation against them. The disconnect between the opposition’s stated values and the material harm their obstruction causes to working families in this community deserves to be named plainly.

The Alternative Is Already Here

Imperial County does not need a study to understand what happens when large employers don’t come. The county has been living that study for generations. The data on chronic unemployment, outmigration of working-age adults, and underfunded public services is extensive and devastating.

The 1,688 jobs attached to the IVDC are not a promise. They are a commitment backed by a $10 billion capital investment — the largest single private investment in Imperial County’s history. The only thing standing between those jobs and the families who need them is a coordinated campaign by officials and organizations who will not be harmed by the unemployment that continues in their absence.

Imperial County chose this project through its legitimate land use approval process. The trades are ready. The land is zoned. The court has ruled. The only question left is whether the people blocking these jobs can be held accountable for the harm that obstruction causes.

The $72.5 Million Windfall Imperial County Is Being Told to Refuse

Counties don’t get many chances like this. A single construction project generates $72.5 million in one-time sales tax revenue — before the first server rack is installed, before the first employee badge is printed, before the first year of $28.75 million in recurring property tax is collected. Just from buying the steel, the concrete, the electrical infrastructure, and the cooling systems that a 950,000-square-foot data center campus requires.

For context: Imperial County’s entire annual general fund budget runs around $600 million, and a significant portion of that is state and federal pass-through funding the county does not control. A $72.5 million capital injection — money that the county can actually direct — is not a budget line item. It is a generational financial event.

What a County Can Do With $72 Million

Deferred infrastructure maintenance is the quiet crisis that every Imperial County department director knows and few outside observers understand. Roads that should have been repaved five years ago. Bridges that are flagged but not fixed. County buildings that are heated and cooled by systems installed in the Reagan administration. The maintenance backlog grows every year because the general fund is perpetually stretched between competing urgent needs and the capital projects keep getting deferred.

Seventy-two million dollars — applied strategically to the county’s infrastructure backlog — would not solve every problem. But it would make a dent that no other single source of funding currently on the table comes close to matching. Bond measures require voter approval and debt service. State infrastructure grants are competitive and conditional. Federal funds arrive with compliance requirements that consume significant administrative capacity.

A one-time sales tax payment requires none of those conditions. It arrives when the equipment is purchased. The county spends it according to its own priorities.

The Alternative Is Not Neutral

There is a common rhetorical move in the opposition’s argument that deserves examination: the implicit suggestion that blocking the project is a neutral act — that the county simply returns to its baseline if the data center doesn’t come. That framing is false.

The baseline is not neutral. The baseline is the infrastructure maintenance that doesn’t happen, the school repair that gets deferred another year, the reserve fund that doesn’t exist when the next fiscal emergency arrives. The $72.5 million is not a speculative future benefit. It is a concrete, calculable loss that accrues to the county’s public infrastructure every year the project is delayed or blocked.

The people making the argument for delay are not the ones who will drive across the potholes, teach in the aging classrooms, or manage the deferred maintenance on a county budget that never quite has enough. They have made a comfortable calculation that the costs of their opposition will fall on someone else.

This Money Would Come From the Developer, Not Residents

Sales tax on construction materials and equipment is not paid by Imperial County residents. It is paid by the developer — in this case, a $10 billion project purchasing hundreds of millions of dollars in equipment, much of it subject to California sales tax. The county collects revenue that was generated by a private party’s investment decision, without imposing any additional burden on the households and small businesses already contributing to the local tax base.

The opposition has not explained how refusing this revenue serves the public interest. They have not identified an alternative source. They have filed lawsuits, introduced legislation, and organized campaigns — all of which cost money that ultimately comes from somewhere — while the $72.5 million waits on the other side of a building permit.

At some point, the question is not whether this project is good for Imperial County. The question is who benefits from preventing it.