Public comment corpus
Imperial Irrigation District
May 5, 2026 · General public comment (data centers) · 2 spoken public comments
Official meeting recording (Granicus)
| Speaker | Time | Comment (verbatim) |
|---|---|---|
| Jake Tison | 0:20:43 | Good afternoon board. I'm Jake Tyson. Um I'm here to talk about what we all are talking about lately is data centers because that's kind of been on my plate since November. Um you know, Imperial County's been asked to sacrifice its air water land power grid, public health and democracy. So so big tech can come and build industrial. Build industrial. Uh machines and call it innovation. Um that is not progress that is industrial scale harm with a press release. So um you know, I got like 10 things here just on the top about data centers in general. Right? And I think they affect this body because what we're seeing around the county, um like from Coachella all the way to the to the border even in Yuma, you know, lots of people have been contacting me. What do we do? What do we do? But you know, the data centers. The demand itself is astronomical. And what are we producing? You know, what are we producing? I don't it's just there's nothing tangible we're producing. We're we're just we're just bringing this energy in using all this water and we're not giving anything back to the public. There's nothing for anybody. So which is you know, when they don't when they're when they when they have this non-firm grid, they you know, their diesel or their natural gas generators kick on. Because these things can't shut off. So what are we doing? They call it tech progress. But this is not clean. That's not a clean digital future. Right? Because now we have these fossil fuels in the air from this thing. And once again, the public is suffering. Lately, I think this last week, the US News and World Report said it's up to $25 billion a year now. And in environmental costs and and the the Harvard School or the Harvard Journal, they said something like it's $20 billion a year. Out of pocket costs for for health insurance or not health insurance, just out of pocket costs for extra health. So these are these are big issues. Right. And as we're this county, you know, inviting this stuff in or we're looking at this stuff, we need to understand this. This stuff might not just be for us because, you know, I have it right here. We have we all have it in our phones. We already have AI in our phones. We don't need to cater to everybody else. We already have other stuff. We have geothermal. I mean, we need to be good with what we have. Right. And we have agriculture. And this is very important because that is not protecting geothermal. That is not protecting agriculture. That's threatening agriculture and that's threatening geothermal. So and plus, you know, fires were fire capacity. Response capacity is nonexistent in this county with BSS. So I didn't get through all the list, but it just it just there's things to think about as we go forward. Here's, you know, especially, you know, South Imperial Calipat in Imperial, you know, Imperial. I don't know. We just we need to slow down a little bit and maybe talk with the county in enforcing a moratorium. Thank you. |
| Sky Ainsworth | 0:23:58 | Good afternoon, board. My name is Sky Ainsworth. Come to you as a resident of El Centro. My own private capacity as a citizen of this county. I'm coming to speak about the data center and how the county board of supervisors have placed the responsibility for the future of this project in your hands. From what we know and can understand, the electricity and water rates will go up. This will impact everybody, including our farmers. It's going to have a negative impact on our economy. People across the county that I am encountering since I go everywhere and talk about everybody. It goes into three groups. People. People who do not know. The people who support, which is a small minority, and the majority of people oppose. The same goes for veterans. The impact is or the impact for our farmers in an agricultural industry is still unknown. Will the noise and heat have a negative impact on our cattle and the bee and honey industry? So this could have a negative impact for honey or the Westmoreland. So thank you. |