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The Court Has Ruled. The Law Is Clear. It’s Time to Build.

At some point, the arguments run out and the decision remains. That point has been reached in the dispute over the Imperial Valley Data Center.

The legal argument has been resolved. The Superior Court ruled the City of Imperial’s complaint legally insufficient — affirming that the project’s ministerial approval was correct and that the attempt to force it into a discretionary review process has no legal foundation. The law has been applied. The outcome is clear.

The environmental argument has been resolved by the project’s design. The water consumption concern is addressed by the recycled wastewater system. The grid impact concern is addressed by the dedicated substation and the 862 MWh BESS. The land use concern is addressed by I-2 Heavy Industrial zoning that exists precisely to accommodate facilities of this type.

The economic argument is not a argument — it is arithmetic. 1,688 union jobs. $72.5 million in one-time tax revenue. $28.75 million annually thereafter. These are the largest numbers of their kind in Imperial County’s history, from a single project, on land that has been waiting for this use for decades.

What Remains

What remains is an appeal filed by a city that the trial court already ruled against. An appeal that will cost more public money to pursue, add more time to the project’s delay, and arrive at an outcome that the legal framework makes increasingly difficult for the city to win. The appellate court will review the same legal questions the trial court addressed. The by-right zoning doctrine has not changed. The ministerial approval framework has not changed. The Permit Streamlining Act has not changed.

What also remains is a federal civil rights lawsuit that has placed individual officials on notice that the personal financial cost of continued obstruction is no longer zero. The discovery process that lawsuit will generate may produce the documented evidence of coordination and retaliation that the complaint alleges. The officials named in it are making a calculation about whether continued aggressive obstruction is worth the personal exposure it creates.

And what remains is the community’s voice — the residents of Imperial Valley who have the most to gain from this project and who have been largely absent from the public record of a dispute dominated by organized opposition groups, city officials with competing political interests, and a media environment that has given more coverage to the allegations against the developer than to the legal outcomes that dismissed them.

The Time for Waiting Is Over

The County of Imperial has approved this project. The Superior Court has validated that approval. The developer has committed $10 billion in capital, filed a federal civil rights lawsuit to defend the project’s legal rights, and continued to advance development through years of coordinated obstruction.

The people of Imperial Valley have waited long enough. The jobs that would have been filled during these years of litigation are not retrospectively available. The tax revenue that would have been collected is not coming back. The water recycling project that was blocked, the wastewater treatment upgrades that would have benefited El Centro and Imperial, the Salton Sea contributions that would have flowed from an operating facility — none of this can be recovered for the time that has been lost.

What can be recovered is the future. The project is legal. The economic case is overwhelming. The community deserves to have its institutions honor the approval that was lawfully granted and let this project become what Imperial Valley has been waiting for it to be.

The court has ruled. The law is clear. It is time to build.

The Permit Streamlining Act: The Law That Says the IVDC Is Already Approved

California’s Permit Streamlining Act was passed for a specific reason: to stop local governments from using bureaucratic delay as a de facto veto over development projects they lacked the legal authority to deny outright. The legislature watched agencies sit on permit applications for months and years — never formally denying them, never formally approving them, just letting them age until the developer ran out of money or patience.

The Act’s solution was mechanical: set mandatory deadlines, and attach consequences to missing them. If a public agency fails to act on a conforming development application within the prescribed timeframe, the application is deemed approved. Not conditionally approved. Not referred for further study. Approved.

The federal lawsuit filed by IVCM — Case No. 3:26-cv-00128 — alleges that the City of Imperial failed to approve or deny the IVDC’s site plan within the 15-day window the Act requires. If accurate, the legal consequence is clear: the project is deemed approved by operation of law, and the city’s subsequent legal maneuvering to block it constitutes interference with a vested legal right.

Why the Deemed-Approved Doctrine Matters

The deemed-approved provision is not a technicality. It is the enforcement mechanism of the entire Permit Streamlining regime. Without it, agencies would simply ignore the deadlines, and the Act would be advisory rather than mandatory. With it, agencies face a real consequence for using delay as a policy instrument: the project they were hoping to stall gets approved anyway.

The developer’s argument is that the city knew this. That the failure to act within the 15-day window was not an administrative oversight but a calculated choice — that by doing nothing, the city hoped to preserve its ability to object later while avoiding the political exposure of a formal denial that would immediately reveal its lack of legal authority.

Whether that characterization is accurate will be tested in federal court. But the underlying legal framework is unambiguous: California law does not give local agencies discretion about whether to comply with the Permit Streamlining Act’s deadlines. They are mandatory. The consequences of missing them are specified. The argument that the city can ignore the deadlines and then litigate against the project as if they never existed does not have a strong foundation in the text of the statute.

The First Amendment Dimension

The federal complaint includes a claim that goes beyond procedural permit law: First Amendment retaliation. The allegation is that city officials took adverse actions against the IVDC — including coordinating opposition, pressuring other agencies to withdraw cooperation, and pursuing litigation — in response to the developer’s protected speech, specifically his public criticism of the city’s conduct and his decision to move the project to county jurisdiction.

Government officials are not permitted to retaliate against private parties for exercising First Amendment rights. If a developer criticizes a city’s conduct publicly, and that city then organizes a campaign to harm the developer’s project, the retaliation doctrine provides a federal cause of action. The complaint alleges exactly this pattern.

These claims will be litigated. But the filing itself serves a function beyond the immediate lawsuit: it puts personal liability on the table for the individual officials named. City employees sued under 42 U.S.C. § 1983 for constitutional violations cannot necessarily rely on the city to indemnify them. The potential for personal financial exposure changes the calculus for officials considering continued aggressive obstruction of a project the courts have already validated.

What This Means for Every Developer in California

The IVDC case is being watched by development attorneys and site selectors across the state. The question it poses is fundamental: can a local government use a combination of bureaucratic delay, jurisdictional overreach, and coordinated opposition to defeat a by-right project that it has no legal authority to deny?

The answer, if the courts continue to apply the law as written, should be no. The Permit Streamlining Act, the ministerial approval doctrine, and the by-right framework were designed precisely to prevent this pattern. The February 10 ruling affirmed the ministerial approval. The federal lawsuit tests the retaliation and deemed-approved claims. Together, they represent a comprehensive legal challenge to the tactics the opposition has used.

The outcome will establish precedent — either confirming that by-right approvals mean what they say, or signaling that a determined local opposition can defeat any project through delay and litigation regardless of its legal merits. Imperial Valley deserves the first outcome. The second one would hurt every region in California trying to attract investment under rules that are supposed to be enforceable.