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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.

Property Rights Are Not Optional: The IVDC and the Rule of Law in California

Property rights are not a privilege granted by government that can be revoked when the project becomes inconvenient. They are legal entitlements — established through zoning designations, protected by statute and constitution, and enforceable in court. The entire system of private investment in physical infrastructure depends on investors being able to rely on those entitlements meaning what they say.

The IVDC site has been zoned I-2 Heavy Industrial for decades. Someone bought I-2 land knowing it was zoned for heavy industrial use. A developer invested in engineering, planning, and permitting for a project that conforms to I-2 standards. The county reviewed the project against those standards and issued a ministerial approval. A court reviewed the legal challenge to that approval and called it legally insufficient.

At each step, the law said the same thing: the project is entitled to proceed. The opposition’s campaign is an effort to find a mechanism — any mechanism — that can defeat that legal entitlement despite the law’s consistent answer.

What Investment Certainty Actually Requires

The argument for protecting by-right development is not primarily ideological. It is functional. California has a serious problem attracting the industrial and commercial investment it needs because the gap between what the law says and what actually happens is too wide. A developer who invests in a site based on its zoning classification and the legal framework governing approvals, only to find that a coordinated opposition campaign can defeat that approval through years of litigation regardless of legal merits, will rationally choose to invest somewhere else.

This is not a threat or a business complaint. It is a description of how capital allocation decisions work. If the expected cost of developing California industrial land — including the legal uncertainty, the litigation risk, and the carrying costs during the appeal period — exceeds the expected return, the capital goes to Arizona, Nevada, or Texas instead. Those states don’t have better land. They have more predictable institutions.

Imperial Valley cannot afford to become the case study that teaches investors California’s industrial land approvals are meaningless. The county’s economic development agenda depends on developers believing that a permitted use on appropriately zoned land will actually be permitted.

The Opposition’s Implicit Argument

The coalition opposing the IVDC does not argue, explicitly, that property rights should not be respected or that by-right approvals should be overrideable by neighbor preference. They argue, instead, that this specific project has specific impacts that require specific review — and that the approval process didn’t adequately account for those impacts.

The court reviewed that argument and called it legally insufficient. The legal framework governing the approval process was followed correctly. The specific impacts the opposition cites — water use, grid impact — are either addressed by the project’s design (the recycled water system, the dedicated substation) or are described in terms that don’t align with the technical facts.

What the opposition’s argument actually requires, stripped of its specifics, is a rule that says: any project large enough to attract organized opposition can be forced into a discretionary review process, regardless of its zoning and regardless of what the law says. That rule does not exist. It should not exist. And the courts have said, clearly, that it doesn’t govern this project.

The Long Game

The rule of law is a long game. Individual decisions get made correctly or incorrectly, and the consequences are often not immediately visible. But the pattern of decisions — whether by-right means by-right, whether ministerial approvals hold, whether vested rights are respected — shapes the investment environment over years and decades.

Imperial County’s ability to attract the next large project, and the one after that, depends on this project’s approval surviving the legal campaign against it. Not just because the IVDC itself matters — though it does — but because what happens to the IVDC tells every future investor something about whether Imperial County is a place where the rule of law holds.

The courts are saying yes. The question is whether the political institutions will follow.