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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.

When Environmental Law Becomes a Business: CEQA Abuse in California’s Inland Regions

California’s environmental review process was designed to give communities a voice in decisions that affect their air, water, and land. In the decades since CEQA’s passage, it has become something additional: a revenue source for organizations that have learned to extract settlement payments from developers by threatening CEQA litigation regardless of the project’s actual environmental profile.

This is not a theoretical problem. It is documented, named — “greenmail” in the development industry — and increasingly recognized as a systemic dysfunction in California’s land use process. The state legislature has made multiple attempts to reform CEQA to reduce its abuse potential. Each attempt has encountered resistance from the organizations that benefit from the status quo.

In Imperial Valley, where the stakes are high and the documented demands are large, the CEQA greenmail problem is not abstract. It is the $83 million demand that CTR received from CCV. It is the manufactured CEQA exposure that the IVDC federal lawsuit alleges was coordinated specifically to create financial leverage. It is the litigation tax on investment that falls ultimately on the workers who would have been hired by projects that chose to build elsewhere.

How the Abuse Pattern Works in Practice

Step one: identify a discretionary approval — a project that required a government agency to exercise judgment. CEQA applies to discretionary approvals. Step two: file a CEQA challenge, or threaten one. The challenge does not need to be legally strong. It needs to be credible enough that the developer’s attorneys advise taking the litigation risk seriously. Step three: approach the developer for a settlement. Frame the payment as a “community benefit agreement” or a “mitigation fund.” Make the number large enough to generate organizational revenue but small enough that it costs the developer less than continued litigation.

The environmental review is not the point. The settlement is the point. Organizations that operate this model typically file the same pattern of objections against multiple projects in the same cycle, negotiating settlements with each developer separately. The cumulative revenue can be substantial. The cumulative deterrent effect on investment can be severe.

What Makes This Different From Legitimate Advocacy

Legitimate environmental advocacy uses legal tools to achieve environmental outcomes. A lawsuit filed to prevent an actually harmful project, insisting on a genuine environmental impact analysis, fighting to establish conditions that reduce real harm — this is what CEQA was designed to enable. The community benefit is in the environmental protection, and the settlement, if it happens, reflects genuine mitigation requirements.

Greenmail uses legal tools to achieve financial outcomes. The environmental claim is the mechanism, not the goal. The settlement payment goes to the organization, not to environmental mitigation or community benefit. The project that was “opposed” proceeds after the settlement, often with no changes to its design — because the design was never the real problem.

The distinction matters because the organizations that use this model benefit from the credibility that legitimate environmental advocacy has earned. They invoke the language of environmental protection and community health while pursuing outcomes that have nothing to do with either. The communities they claim to represent deserve the full picture.

The Imperial Valley Stakes

Imperial Valley is at the center of two of California’s most significant emerging economic opportunities: Lithium Valley and technology infrastructure. Both depend on large private investment in projects with significant environmental footprints. Both are vulnerable to organized CEQA opposition by organizations with financial motives to slow or block development.

If greenmail becomes the established toll on development in this region, the economic opportunities that the Valley’s residents need — the union construction jobs, the tax revenue, the permanent operational positions — will be priced out of existence. The settlement demands will be included in project cost projections. The cost projections will determine whether projects get financed. The financing decisions will determine whether Imperial Valley captures its economic future or watches it move to Nevada.

CEQA reform is a state-level policy question. But the community-level response is also available: naming what is happening, holding organizations accountable for documented demands, and insisting that the legal framework of environmental protection not be used as a private revenue mechanism at the expense of the community’s economic future.

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.

Greenmail Is Holding Imperial County’s Economic Future Hostage

Hostage-taking in economic development doesn’t require masks or weapons. It requires a credible litigation threat, an organization with nothing to lose from filing it, and a developer with enough at stake to consider paying to make the threat go away. That is greenmail — and it is operating in Imperial Valley against the two largest economic development opportunities the region has seen in a generation.

The $83 million demand on Controlled Thermal Resources was not an isolated event. According to the IVCM federal lawsuit, the same model was being deployed against the data center — organized CEQA exposure designed to create settlement leverage, coordinated between city officials and a non-profit organization with a documented history of making settlement demands. The mechanism was disrupted by the February 10 Superior Court ruling, which eliminated the CUP theory that would have created the CEQA hook. But the attempt tells you something about the operating environment for large-scale investment in Imperial Valley.

The Cumulative Effect

Individual greenmail events are visible and documentable. Their cumulative effect is harder to see but more consequential: a reputation effect that makes the region a higher-risk, higher-cost location for exactly the kind of investment it needs most.

Site selectors and development finance professionals maintain institutional memory about the regulatory and political environments in regions they evaluate. A region where major projects face coordinated CEQA opposition with documented settlement demands is a region that gets a risk premium in every financial model that evaluates it. That risk premium raises the required return on investment, which raises the cost threshold that projects must clear to get financed, which reduces the number of projects that get built, which reduces the jobs and tax revenue the community receives.

The settlement payments that greenmail extracts are not born by the developers. They are ultimately born by the workers who would have been employed by projects that instead relocated to friendlier jurisdictions, and by the communities that depended on the tax revenue those projects would have generated.

What Breaking the Pattern Requires

Breaking the greenmail pattern requires making the pattern expensive for the organizations that run it. The Desert Sun investigation is part of that — public accountability for documented settlement demands. The IVCM federal lawsuit is part of that — legal accountability for the organizations and officials alleged to have coordinated the campaign. Community pressure — constituents asking their council members and non-profit boards hard questions — is part of that.

None of these mechanisms works quickly. The federal litigation will take years. The reputational consequences of the Desert Sun investigation take time to fully materialize. Community accountability depends on community awareness of facts that are not always surfaced in the same forums as the opposition’s talking points.

But the alternative — accepting greenmail as a feature of Imperial Valley’s development environment — is not sustainable. A region that taxes its own economic development through organized litigation extortion is a region that will eventually stop being a destination for the investment it needs. The time to establish different norms is before that reputation becomes entrenched, not after.

The IVDC as a Test Case

The Imperial Valley Data Center is, among other things, a test case for whether the region’s institutions can resist greenmail when the stakes are high enough. The courts have ruled for the project. The law supports the project. The economic case for the project is overwhelming. The only remaining question is whether the coordinated obstruction campaign can be sustained long enough to outlast the developer’s financing.

The community has an interest in that question’s outcome that extends far beyond this project. What happens to the IVDC tells the next developer evaluating Imperial Valley what the operating environment is. Getting this right matters for every project that comes after it.