Data centers take center stage in LA County's election season

The debate over data centers has become a fixture of election season in Los Angeles County, where the giant warehouses built to power the nation's artificial intelligence boom, along with their kin, battery energy storage systems, have surfaced in ballot measures and candidate talking points ahead of the Nov. 3 vote. In most cases the facilities do not exist at all, and in a handful they have only been proposed, but they have become a symbol of pushback in a nation grappling with high costs and tech companies' drive to build AI infrastructure.

In Alhambra, the City Council voted in July to place Measure DB on the ballot, giving residents the chance to codify an existing ban that had been adopted as an ordinance on June 22 after many residents reportedly emailed the city seeking data center protections. "While a Data Center ban already exists by ordinance, this measure lets Alhambra voters decide whether to make that ban permanent and subject to voter approval to change," City Manager Jessica Binnquist said in a September announcement.

If the proposal sounds familiar, it is because neighboring Monterey Park supplied the template. Developer HMC StratCap had proposed a center there before a months-long grassroots campaign brought the project to a halt, first through a council moratorium and then through a pioneering voter-approved ban in June. Proponents say that momentum has carried into November's ballot action.

The movement has also produced candidates. Steven Kung and Amy J. Wong, organizers from No Data Center Monterey Park and SGV Progressive Action, are running for their respective city council seats in Monterey Park and Alhambra. Wong co-founded SGV Progressive Action, helped establish Monterey Park's ballot initiative, and has campaigned for voter-based bans, which are harder to overturn than council ordinances, in cities including Montebello, El Monte and Baldwin Park. She faces Ron Sahu, who also supports the ban, in a race shaped by quality-of-life and development issues.

Elsewhere, Leslie Garcia, an air quality instrument specialist with the South Coast Air Quality Management District, said her involvement with the No Data Center San Gabriel Valley coalition fueled her run for West Covina City Council District 2. In June, the Covina Planning Commission rejected energy developer RWE's controversial Covina Reliability Project, a battery storage facility, and in September the West Covina Council unanimously approved a resolution opposing large-scale data centers and battery facilities. Locally, many see such battery sites, which harness electrical energy, as a precursor to data centers.

Stefanie Leilua said she decided to run for council in Walnut because "when one city gets an approval, it's gonna affect two to three cities, no matter what, because of how we're lined up." She pointed to the Metropolitan Water District battery fire in La Verne that led to a four-day evacuation in late September. That fire involved two 250-kilowatt battery units supporting a 2-megawatt solar farm; by comparison, the Marici Battery Energy Storage System facility that the City of Industry approved for developer AYPA Power in February, along Gale Avenue, would be approximately 400 megawatts. Concerns raised at a Jan. 27 planning commission meeting that the facility would lead to a future data center were denied by AYPA and the city.

The organizing has reached school board races as well. Falynn Love Thompson, running for a Rowland Unified School District seat in Trustee Area 5, said residents in unincorporated areas look to school boards for powerful statements, while Samuel Brown Vazquez is running for Bassett Unified School District, whose board unanimously opposed the City of Industry's Dec. 17 resolution allowing data centers city-wide. Rowland Unified's April 9 resolution opposes the city's zoning code amendment and related high-intensity industrial development, including the Marici project.

The issue is playing out beyond the San Gabriel Valley. In El Segundo, real estate firm Eight Form withdrew a proposal in July to demolish the Hyatt Place hotel at 750 N. Nash St. and build a five-story, nearly 240,000-square-foot data center reaching up to 169 feet with a high-voltage substation, after droves of residents objected. In Huntington Park, the council voted 4 to 0 on Oct. 13 to approve a temporary 45-day moratorium on new data centers and expansions, the same day community members rallied in support. "I understand people's concerns about large scale data center development," Supervisor Janice Hahn wrote in a statement. "Under our current land use code, large scale data centers are not permitted in any part of unincorporated Los Angeles County."

About 74 data centers are operating within Los Angeles County, according to Department of Regional Planning documents, though none are in unincorporated areas, which hold about 1 million of the county's 10 million residents. Supervisor Hilda Solis introduced a county-wide study in April, and the department imposed a moratorium in September, but her office pulled an item on a permanent prohibition in October, with organizers fearing a failed vote could signal the issue is not pressing. City of Industry resident Andrew Chen, volunteer director of outreach and fundraising for the Puente Hills Community Preservation Association, created one-click email templates that produced almost 1,200 public comments to the Board of Supervisors, compared with a typical 30 to 50 per topic.

Nationally, attitudes are largely negative, with 7 in 10 Americans against the technology and 48% strongly opposed, according to Gallup, and New York recently enacted a one-year state moratorium on hyperscale data centers. The Associated Press has noted the pushback unites conservative ranching and farming communities with left-leaning environmental groups, while in New Mexico, where Oracle and OpenAI are building the $165 billion Project Jupiter complex, water concerns are mounting. President Donald Trump remains a champion of the industry, saying in August, "I would absolutely want it, because the jobs are enormous and the money paid, the taxes paid, are just enormous," while conceding data centers need "a little public relations help." California ranks third among states in data center density, with 366 facilities operational, under construction or in planning, CalMatters reported, and in 2024 the 33-megawatt Prime Data Center opened in Vernon.