Opposition politics follow predictable incentive structures. An elected official who positions herself as the local defender against an outside corporate interest — a “wartime developer” from Huntington Beach bringing $10 billion and disruption — builds a political brand. She gets quoted in press coverage. She becomes the visible face of community resistance. Her name becomes associated with the fight, regardless of the fight’s merits.
The political return on this positioning is real, and it is not affected by whether the project would actually benefit the community. The narrative of outside interests vs. local defenders works independent of the facts, as long as the facts don’t get sufficient circulation to undermine it.
This is the environment in which the City of Imperial’s campaign against the IVDC was organized. And it is worth being clear about what it has cost the community whose interests it claims to represent.
The Accounting Nobody Is Doing
Political accountability for economic obstruction is rare because the costs are invisible and diffuse while the political benefits are visible and concentrated. The official who blocks a development project gets credit for the fight. The workers who weren’t hired and the tax revenue that wasn’t generated are statistical abstractions — they show up in county budget gaps and unemployment figures years later, without a clear causal chain linking them to the specific decision that produced them.
The 1,688 union jobs attached to the IVDC are not hypothetical. They are committed positions — identified in the project’s economic impact analysis, attached to a $10 billion capital investment that is ready to proceed the moment the legal obstacles are cleared. Every month those obstacles persist is a month of union wages that are not paid in Imperial Valley. The workers who would have earned those wages are not abstract. They are the people in the same community as the officials blocking the project.
The officials who organized the obstruction campaign have not been asked to account for this cost. They have been given credit for the fight without bearing responsibility for the outcome. That accounting imbalance is the structural problem that allows political careerism to operate at the community’s expense without consequence.
The Difference Between Advocacy and Career Management
Legitimate environmental advocacy starts with the environmental question: does this project harm the community it is built in? It examines the evidence — engineering documents, environmental impact data, health studies, community input. It makes arguments based on that evidence. It seeks outcomes that reduce genuine harm.
Political career management starts with the political question: what position generates the most favorable coverage and political capital? It selects the environmental argument as the vehicle for that position. It maintains the position regardless of new evidence, court rulings, or changed circumstances, because the political value of the position doesn’t depend on its accuracy.
The Superior Court called the City of Imperial’s legal theory legally insufficient. A fact-based environmental discussion would acknowledge that the recycled water plan addresses the water consumption concern and that the BESS addresses the grid stability concern. Neither of these acknowledgments has been made by the officials organizing the opposition, because making them would undermine the political narrative, not because they are false.
What the Community Can Do
Political careerism thrives when accountability is weak. In communities where political engagement is low, incumbent officials face limited pressure to account for the consequences of their positions. The structural disadvantage — that the costs of obstruction are invisible and diffuse while the political benefits are visible and concentrated — favors the official over the worker.
The antidote is specific and public accountability: naming the positions officials have taken, quantifying the costs of those positions in terms the affected community can understand, and insisting that those costs be part of the public debate about whether the officials’ conduct has served the community’s interests. This is not partisan politics. It is basic civic accountability — the kind that elected officials in a functioning democracy are supposed to face.
The families who would have benefited from 1,688 union jobs deserve to know who blocked them and why. The schools that would have received $28.75 million a year deserve to know who prevented it. The answer is not complicated. It is public record.