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.