Imperial County wanted to fast-track approval for a massive 330-megawatt data center — nearly a million square feet of servers, cooling systems, and battery storage — without doing the full environmental review the law requires. A judge just stopped them, ruling that the county can't treat a project this size as a rubber-stamp approval.

This matters because Imperial Valley is desert. The proposed facility would need four 500,000-gallon water tanks, cooling systems, and a wastewater treatment setup, all in a region where water is already scarce and contested. It would also need a massive new electrical substation and a 862-megawatt-hour battery storage system — the kind of lithium battery system that carries real fire risk if something goes wrong.

City of Imperial officials pushed back hard. City Manager Dennis Morita said any approval needs to seriously address impacts on water, energy, air quality, hazardous materials, fire safety, noise, and traffic. Attorney Alene Taber, who represented the city in court, put it plainly: "Massive hyperscale data centers cannot bypass CEQA and public review by employing fast-tracked piecemeal approval."

The court agreed. Now Imperial County has a real choice: do a full, honest environmental review of this project's actual impact on our water, our grid, and our safety — or keep trying to push it through the back door.

Residents shouldn't have to fight in court every time an out-of-state developer wants to build something this size in our backyard. Sign the petition to demand Imperial County complete a full environmental review of this data center before any further approval — our water supply is worth protecting.