Residents of Monterey Park voted overwhelmingly to ban data centers, making the San Gabriel Valley city the first in the nation to do so by public vote.
Yard signs in Monterey Park, which just became the first city in the nation to ban data centers by a public vote. Residents of Monterey Park voted overwhelmingly to ban data centers on election day, making the San Gabriel Valley city thesweeps the country.
But the Monterey Park vote can only be overturned by another ballot measure, making it the most permanent data center ban in a jurisdiction. Monterey Park’s City Council had already banned data centers by ordinance, after a proposed 247,000-square-foot data center met an That facility would have been less than 500 feet away from the nearest home, and used three times the electricity of the entire 60,000-person city.
Residents said it would cause noise and air pollution and drive up electricity rates.
“This ensures long-lasting protections for current and future generations,” Amy Wong, co-founder of the group San Gabriel Valley Progressive Action, said of the vote. “It means that future city councils cannot overturn a data center ban, even if data center developers wanted to spend money to fund pro-data center candidates. ” The measure had no formal opposition. The developer of the proposed facility, investment firm HMC StratCap, said it wouldn’t engage in the ballot fight when it withdrew in March.
“It sends a signal that the area is closed for business, both for data centers and for other significant economic development projects,” state policy director Khara Boender said. “It deprives local residents of the opportunity to compete for jobs and investment, while also causing the area to relinquish substantial long-term economic investment, high-wage jobs, and critical tax revenue to neighboring areas or other states.
”in the City of Industry and fighting a move by City of Industry, Santa Fe Springs, Vernon and City of Commerce to welcome data centers and other industry with fast-tracked permitting and tax incentives. City of Industry, in the San Gabriel Valley, and Vernon, south of downtown L.A. , are primarily industrial areas, each with around 300 permanent residents. They are employment centers and tens of thousands of workers commute in daily.
There has been little vocal opposition to data centers among the few residents of these cities. Wong said the protest is primarily coming from the surrounding neighborhoods.
“If a data center gets built in City of Industry, residents across the region would bear the brunt of pollution and increased utility costs,” Wong said, noting that it is surrounded by 16 other cities and unincorporated communities. Data center proposals have been limited in California compared to Virginia, Texas, Georgia, Illinois and Arizona, which sit at the center of a recent boom in hyperscaler facilities to power artificial intelligence.
California has the third most data centers in the country, with 300, but high electricity rates, expensive land and regulatory hurdles mean that fewer, and smaller, facilities In the San Gabriel Valley, Montebello, El Monte and Baldwin Park have all enacted temporary moratoriums, and Alhambra recently banned data centers as part of a zoning code update. Wong said she hopes the ballot measure vote will galvanize the opposition.
“The vote is a testament to the people power of our region,” she said. “Our region is worth protecting, and we won’t let data centers determine our future. ”Rebuilding L.A. : How One Eaton Fire Survivor Has Found the Strength to Move On and Rebuild Eighteen months after the Eaton and Palisades Fires, survivors are rebuilding — not alone, but together.
On Poppyfields Drive in Altadena, Whitney Haggins and at least 6 of her neighbors are leading the way. Modern LA earned its first smoggy nickname 450 years ago, as the “bay of smokes. ” At the La Brea tar pits, we take a short walk through a long history with curator Regan Dunn, who explains how and why the first Angelenos would have set fires that filled the broad bowl of LA and foretold the curse of smog.
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