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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.

Blocking the IVDC Is a Vote to Defund Imperial County Schools

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.

Behind the Unemployment Numbers: What the IVDC Fight Means for Real Families in Imperial Valley

The economic data on Imperial County is comprehensive and consistent. Unemployment rates that regularly run double or triple the state average. Per capita income among the lowest in California. Poverty rates that reflect not just individual hardship but systemic economic exclusion. The numbers are cited in every policy paper, every grant application, every speech by an outside official who comes to the Valley to express concern before returning to Sacramento or Los Angeles.

Behind the numbers are specific people making specific decisions under conditions of genuine scarcity. The family deciding which bill to skip this month. The graduate who took a job in Riverside because there wasn’t anything in Brawley. The worker who drives ninety minutes each way to a job in San Diego because the local economy doesn’t have enough work to fill a week. These decisions accumulate into the demographic and economic statistics that describe Imperial County’s chronic distress.

The IVDC is not a solution to every dimension of that distress. But 1,688 union construction jobs, paying prevailing wages, in a multi-year build that would sustain those positions across a full business cycle, is the largest single jobs commitment in the county’s history. What is being done to block it matters — and the people blocking it should be required to explain themselves to the families who would have filled those positions.

What Union Wages Actually Mean

The difference between a union construction job and a non-union service job, in terms of its effect on a working family’s life, is not a policy abstraction. An IBEW journeyman electrician on a prevailing wage contract earns $45-65 per hour, plus health insurance that doesn’t require a $3,000 deductible before it starts paying, plus pension contributions that accumulate across a career, plus apprenticeship programs that allow workers to build skills while earning a full wage.

Compare that to the economic profile of the jobs that have historically been available in Imperial County: seasonal agricultural work, retail positions at county minimum wage, public sector roles that require credentials most working-age residents don’t hold. The structural gap between what the local economy offers and what a construction trades career provides is not marginal. For many families, it is the difference between building equity and perpetual subsistence.

The Politics of Who Gets Hurt

The organizations and officials leading the opposition to the IVDC are not recruiting their membership from the households most affected by Imperial County’s unemployment. They are recruiting from environmental advocacy networks, from city officials whose political careers are built on opposing rather than building, from state legislators whose districts do not include the communities where these jobs would actually land.

This is not to say that everyone who raises questions about the project is acting in bad faith. Legitimate concerns about water use, environmental review, and development impacts deserve serious answers — and the project’s water recycling plan, if allowed to proceed, provides those answers far better than blocking the project does.

But there is a meaningful difference between raising legitimate concerns and filing lawsuits designed to delay a project until its financing collapses. One serves the community. The other serves the interests of whoever benefits from the project never being built.

The Voices That Aren’t Loud Enough

Public hearings on development projects attract the organized and the motivated. Environmental groups are organized. City officials with a political stake in the outcome are motivated. The IBEW local that would staff this project is organized but fighting on multiple fronts simultaneously. The farmworker family in El Centro who would send their oldest son to an apprenticeship program if the project broke ground is not appearing at any hearings.

The political economy of land use opposition consistently overweights the preferences of people who have enough stability in their own lives to spend time at hearings, file comments, and maintain organizational memberships. It consistently underweights the preferences of people who are working two jobs, managing childcare, and navigating an economy that doesn’t have enough to offer them.

The IVDC fight is, at its core, a question about whose interests the institutions of Imperial County are organized to serve. The court has ruled that the project is legally sound. The economic case for it has never been seriously contested. What remains is the political will to let it happen — and the accountability for the families who bear the cost when it doesn’t.