The decision, reached earlier this month, made Monterey Park the first city in the United States to prohibit data centers outright. The vote followed months of neighborhood opposition to a proposed facility that drew protests, lawn signs and public pressure on City Hall.

In March, the Monterey Park City Council voted unanimously to send the ban to voters while also extending a temporary moratorium on data centers. Within weeks, the developer behind the proposed project withdrew its plans.

Mayor Elizabeth Yang said residents who campaigned against the project were pleased with the outcome after months of organizing.

“They spent a lot of time door knocking, putting up signs, fundraising, campaigning,” Yang said. “So it was a lot of community effort.”

The Monterey Park vote comes as communities across California and the country weigh the economic promise of data centers against concerns about power consumption, water use, noise and environmental impacts. A March Gallup poll found that 7 in 10 Americans surveyed opposed having data centers built in their area.

Industry representatives, however, warn that bans could discourage investment. Khara Boender, director of state policy for the Data Center Coalition, said Monterey Park’s decision sends a message that the area is “closed for business.”

Data centers are the physical backbone of cloud computing and artificial intelligence systems, housing servers that process and store enormous amounts of digital information. California already has at least 287 such facilities, according to the Data Center Coalition. The group says data centers supported more than 665,000 jobs in the state in 2024 and generated $14.1 billion in state and local taxes.

Major technology companies are also pouring unprecedented sums into the sector. Meta, Microsoft, Amazon and Alphabet are expected to spend a combined $700 billion on data centers worldwide by the end of this year.

Peter Leroe-Muñoz, senior vice president and general counsel for the Bay Area Council, argued that communities risk cutting themselves off from the infrastructure needed for modern business, research and innovation.

“Data centers make modern lives possible,” he said, calling them a platform for “play, productivity and potential” in the current economy.

Still, Monterey Park is not alone in taking a cautious approach. Local governments around California are considering how to regulate the industry as demand for AI-related infrastructure grows.

In Imperial County, supervisors are weighing a temporary moratorium on data center projects after residents criticized the county for moving forward with a proposed facility. In San Jose, where at least 40 data centers already operate, the City Council recently directed the city manager to draft new guidelines for future projects. Some critics remain wary, especially after the city last year promoted a partnership with Pacific Gas & Electric intended to streamline data center development.

For Southern California communities watching the rapid expansion of AI infrastructure, Monterey Park’s vote may serve as a test case for how far local governments are willing to go in pushing back against one of the technology industry’s fastest-growing sectors.

Original source: CalMatters

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SAN DIEGO, CA — Following last week’s lithium battery fire resulting in evacuation orders and warnings at a San Diego Gas & Electric battery storage facility in Escondido, the County Board of Supervisors will consider putting a pause on future such facilities.

The action in front of the supervisors on Wednesday will present several options to the board. The body can request additional fire suppression technical reports and/or include new disclosure requirements to make any new battery energy storage systems go “above and beyond” current code requirements.

Additionally, they will have the choice to put a temporary moratorium on the acceptance of new BESS applications or adopt an urgency ordinance requiring new facilities to use modular designs and follow National Fire Protection Association guidelines.

The item was already scheduled for the board but gained more urgency following the Thursday afternoon fire at the SDG&E facility. The fire was allowed to burn out by itself — per industry standard, a statement from the Escondido Fire Department read.

Just one of the site’s 24 cells caught fire.

While no one was injured by the fire, evacuation orders were issued to businesses in the largely industrial part of the city.

The moratorium the supervisors will discuss couldn’t come any sooner, some residents say.

“Area residents are renewing their call for the county to issue a moratorium on building new lithium battery storage facilities in neighborhoods,” reads a statement from a group of citizens, including JP Theberge of the Elfin Forest Harmony Grove Town Council and Joe Rowley, a retired engineer and battery storage facility developer.

“The Escondido battery fire is unfolding in an industrial area away from homes and residences. However, it reinforces the concerns of residents that a project that is 10 times larger (the Seguro project) is being proposed, which would be surrounded by hundreds of homes and upwind from a hospital in northern San Diego County, near Escondido,” they write. “Despite the current fire being in an industrial area, hundreds of businesses were evacuated and many more were told to shelter-in-place. Schools located downwind were closed today as well.”

Should the supervisors elect the moratorium route, it could freeze the proposed AES’ Seguro storage project in Escondido, not far from where Thursday’s fire took place. This project would be capable of storing up to 320 megawatts or 1,280 megawatt hours worth of energy — several times larger than the facility where the fire continues to burn.

Without the BESS facilities, the county could have a difficult time meeting its climate goals.

The battery storage facilities are a component of the county’s respond to green energy, storing energy from renewable sources such as solar or wind to use as needed. They are intended as an alternative or at least a supplement to fossil fuel energies such as natural gas and oil.

Since 2021, there have been 45 fires at similar BESS facilities, including one at the Otay Mesa battery storage earlier this year and one in Valley Center last year.

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It would be simplistic, however, to assume the pandemic pushed these families to this point. COVID-19 didn’t create the state’s stark wealth inequality or housing affordability crisis. It just illuminated them.

California’s wealth gap has been growing for the last 20 years, especially between Californians of color and white households. In Los Angeles, Black and Latino households have one cent for every dollar of wealth held by the average white household. The same holds true in San Francisco and in cities across the state.

For California Community Builders, and many Americans, homeownership is the primary way to foster financial security, build wealth and create upward mobility. Homeownership rates are already lower in California than the national average: More than 60% of whites own their homes, while only 35% of Blacks and just over 40% of Latinos are homeowners. In this trend, exclusionary zoning — laws that have the effect of excluding low-income residents and people of color, such as minimum lot sizes and prohibitions of multifamily housing — plays a starring role.

The consequences of exclusionary zoning are multifaceted. As long as multifamily homes are illegal on more than two-thirds of the residential land in California, we will never be able to build enough housing to meet the needs of our state, let alone reduce housing prices. Zoning regulations that only permit single-family homes force builders to prioritize larger homes that are by design more expensive, effectively reserving homeownership for wealthier, and primarily white, Californians who have more generational wealth and opportunity .

Even incremental changes to these laws, like simply allowing duplexes where currently one house stands, often are met with extreme opposition from vocal neighbors who benefit from exclusion. But duplexes and smaller homes tend to be a more affordable choice for first-time home buyers, mid- to lower-income families and people of color — and limiting the development of these homes is also limiting the ability of these potential buyers to become homeowners, as well as their hopes of ever building wealth.

This year, the California Legislature has the chance to pass two bills that would make it easier for low- and middle-income Californians to afford housing. Senate Bill 9 would make it legal to build smaller, naturally more affordable second units and create access to more opportunities for homeownership, while protecting existing tenants from displacement. Senate Bill 10 would establish a streamlined path for local governments to rezone neighborhoods for up to 10 units — if they choose to do so — drastically improving the ability to build new homes. Together, these bills would add hundreds of thousands of smaller, more affordable homes to the state’s housing supply, making homeownership possible for more Black and Latino Californians.

The pandemic’s economic and social toll will be felt by millions of families for years to come. But while it has raised the curtain on California’s wealth inequality, it also has given us the opportunity to reckon with it.

Exclusionary zoning needs to end, because without systemic change in how we treat housing development in our state, families of color will continue to be barred from the wealth-building opportunities that have benefited so many other families through generations of homeownership.

Adam Briones and Robert Apodaca | Contributed

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