- Tension: Monterey Park just became the first city in the country to permanently ban data centers by popular vote, with more than 86 percent of residents in favor.
- Noise: The story has circulated as a tidy underdog narrative, a small city standing up to a big tech project, without much attention to why a ballot measure rather than a city council vote was the tool residents reached for.
- The Direct Message: An 86 percent landslide is not really a referendum on one data center. It’s a city deciding that even a sympathetic future council can’t be trusted to hold the line.
To learn more about our editorial approach, explore The Direct Message methodology.
Voters in Monterey Park, California, approved Measure NDC on June 2 by a margin of more than 86 percent, according to LA Public Press. The measure amends the city’s General Plan to prohibit data center development within city limits, permanently, and specifies that only another public vote — not a future city council — can reverse it. It is the first time American voters have used a ballot measure to block data centers for good, according to Broadband Breakfast.
The company whose project prompted the measure had already withdrawn its application by the time voters went to the polls. Monterey Park banned a data center that was no longer being proposed, which says less about caution than about how little residents trusted the arrangement to stay withdrawn.
The project that started it
The dispute traces to a proposal from HMC Capital, an Australian alternative asset manager, and its StratCap platform, to convert an office building into a data center of roughly a quarter of a million square feet. Steven Kung, who co-founded the group No Data Center Monterey Park after the plans surfaced, told ABC7 Los Angeles that the facility would have tripled the electricity use of the entire city. Organizers with SGV Progressive Action said most residents near the proposed site first learned about it only shortly before it began moving through city review, according to LA Public Press, which prompted a rapid organizing effort that included a community teach-in drawing roughly 150 attendees…