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.