Will-serve letters are not glamorous documents. They are utility commitments — written statements from a service provider confirming that it can and will supply water, sewer, or power to a proposed development. They are the unglamorous infrastructure of how development actually works: before you build, you need written confirmation that the basic services will be there when you arrive.
The Imperial Valley Data Center needed a will-serve letter from the City of El Centro confirming that El Centro’s wastewater treatment plant would supply the recycled effluent for the project’s closed-loop cooling system. El Centro issued that letter. Then, according to the federal lawsuit filed in Case No. 3:26-cv-00128, it rescinded it — under pressure from Dennis Morita, the City Manager of the City of Imperial.
If that allegation is accurate, Morita did not act to protect El Centro’s interests. He acted to protect the City of Imperial’s political campaign against a project in unincorporated county territory that his city has no jurisdiction over. He used his position as one city’s administrator to interfere with another city’s contractual relationship with a private developer — and in doing so, sabotaged the water recycling plan that would have eliminated the opposition’s primary environmental objection.
What the Will-Serve Letter Meant
Without a will-serve letter from El Centro (and a comparable agreement with the City of Imperial’s own utility), the IVDC cannot use recycled municipal wastewater for cooling. Without the recycled water supply, the project’s water strategy would need to be redesigned around an alternative source. The alternatives are more expensive, more environmentally contested, and more legally vulnerable to exactly the water-consumption arguments the opposition has been making.
The alleged pressure campaign on El Centro was not incidental to the opposition’s strategy. It was central to it. By rescinding the will-serve letter, the opposition forces the developer to either abandon the recycled water approach or find a new supply agreement — adding time, cost, and legal exposure at exactly the moment when the project was trying to demonstrate that its environmental design was viable.
It also allows the opposition to continue using the “750,000 gallons of Colorado River water” narrative, since the recycled water alternative is no longer in place to refute it.
The Federal Lawsuit’s Framing
The IVCM federal complaint frames the alleged pressure on El Centro as part of a broader conspiracy to commit economic sabotage against the project — a coordinated campaign involving city officials, IID insiders, and environmental organizations working in concert to defeat an approval that none of them could defeat individually through legitimate channels.
The conspiracy framing is a high bar to prove. Civil conspiracy claims require evidence of coordination and agreement, not just parallel action. The complaint presumably lays out the factual basis for that coordination, and that evidence will be tested in discovery.
But the underlying factual allegation — that Morita contacted El Centro and pressured it to rescind the will-serve letter — is a specific, verifiable claim. Either he did that or he didn’t. Either there are communications, meetings, or other records of that contact, or there aren’t. Federal discovery will produce those records if they exist.
Accountability for Public Officials
City managers are public servants. They are employed by their cities to manage city operations and serve their cities’ residents. Using that position to interfere with the contractual relationships of an adjacent city — for the purpose of advancing a political campaign against a project in a third jurisdiction — is a significant departure from the normal scope of municipal administrative authority.
The residents of the City of Imperial deserve to know whether their city manager used his official position to sabotage a water recycling deal that would have benefited the broader region. The residents of El Centro deserve to know why their city rescinded a legitimate commercial commitment under external pressure. The federal lawsuit is the mechanism through which those questions will be answered under oath.
Water in Imperial Valley is not an abstract policy question. It is a foundational fact of life in an arid region that depends on managed water supplies for its agricultural economy and its residential communities. Using water politics as a tactical weapon against a development project is not environmental stewardship. The people who depend on this region’s water system deserve to know the difference.