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.