When politicians talk about defunding schools, they usually mean budget cuts, levy failures, or state funding formula disputes. In Imperial County, defunding the schools looks different. It looks like a lawsuit filed by the City of Imperial against a data center that the county already approved.
The connection is direct and arithmetic. The Imperial Valley Data Center would generate $28.75 million in annual property tax revenue. A significant share of property tax in California flows to the local school districts in which the property sits. The project site is in unincorporated Imperial County. The schools that would receive that funding serve children in communities where the median household income is among the lowest in the state.
Every year the project is delayed by litigation, the school districts go without that revenue. Every year the project is blocked, the math compounds.
The Arithmetic of Obstruction
Property tax in California is apportioned among county agencies according to formulas established under Proposition 13 and subsequent legislation. Approximately 40-50 percent of property tax typically flows to school districts, with the balance divided among county general funds, special districts, and other local agencies. Applied to $28.75 million in annual IVDC property tax, that suggests roughly $11-14 million per year flowing directly to Imperial County’s school districts — from a single parcel.
Over ten years, that is $110-140 million that school districts in the area would receive. Over twenty years — the typical planning horizon for major infrastructure decisions — it approaches $300 million in school funding from a single project.
The City of Imperial’s lawsuit, if successful, eliminates that revenue stream entirely. The state court has already called the city’s legal theory “legally insufficient.” But the appeal will consume more time, more money, and another year or more of delayed revenue. The cost of that delay is not paid by the city officials who filed the suit. It is paid by the students in the school districts who will never see the teachers, the programs, and the facilities that $28.75 million a year would have funded.
The Opportunity Cost Nobody Is Calculating
Public debate about the IVDC has been dominated by the opposition’s framing of costs and risks. Water consumption. Grid impact. Environmental review. These are the questions that get asked at hearings, cited in press releases, and repeated in media coverage.
The question that does not get asked with equivalent urgency: what does Imperial County’s education system look like without this revenue? What does the child in a Brawley elementary school classroom lose when the tax base that should fund her education is permanently blocked by a lawsuit her city filed outside its own jurisdiction?
The opposition has not answered this question because they have not been required to answer it. The advocacy campaign around this project has allowed the framing of costs and risks to stand unchallenged, when the actual risk calculus — accounting for the cost of blocking the project, not just the cost of building it — runs the other way entirely.
Who Should Be Asking These Questions
School board members in Imperial County have a fiduciary responsibility to the children in their districts. County supervisors have a responsibility to manage the county’s fiscal position in the interests of all residents. Elected officials at every level have an obligation to weigh the full consequences of the policy positions they support — including the consequences of supporting or acquiescing to litigation that blocks major revenue sources.
The City of Imperial spent taxpayer money filing a lawsuit that the Superior Court called legally insufficient. It now proposes to spend more appealing that ruling. At no point in this process has anyone filing these legal actions been required to account for the cost their obstruction imposes on the school districts, the fire departments, and the other public services that would have received IVDC revenue.
That accounting needs to happen. And it needs to happen in public, where the residents who benefit from those services — and whose children sit in those classrooms — can make their own judgments about the people making decisions on their behalf.