A California lawmaker says Imperial County officials need to rework their controversial lithium spending plan, or they could face state intervention.
In an interview with KPBS, Assemblymember Eduardo Garcia (D-Coachella) said the county was required by state law to direct significantly more lithium tax dollars to towns on the north end of the valley. He said the current spending plan does not comply with those terms.
“I do believe that they're missing the marker,” Garcia said. “My hopes are that they will consider going back to the drawing board and looking at ways that make greater investments in those regions — not based on the formula of population, but based on the formulas of the law.”
The lawmaker’s warning comes after KPBS and the Calexico Chronicle reported on the county’s spending plan in recent weeks.
In an email, a spokesperson for the County of Imperial pushed back, insisting that the spending plan did comply with state law.
With this plan, the county has committed to "sharing significant lithium revenues with communities and stakeholders throughout Imperial County,” wrote county spokesperson Eddie Lopez.
The dispute between state and county officials goes back to a 2022 state law that placed a new lithium tax on companies hoping to extract the valuable mineral — a key component in electric cars and other battery technology — in California.
Garcia was one of the lawmakers who designed that tax. The Coachella Valley assemblymember said he and his co-author, then-state Sen. Ben Hueso, wanted to ensure Imperial County’s emerging lithium industry would be required to share some of its future profits with nearby cities and towns.
Even though it’s a statewide tax, the law will send the vast majority of the revenue it collects back to Imperial County.
According to Garcia, the law also reserves a full 30% of those funds for five Northend towns that will be right next to the planned extraction zone: Niland, Calipatria, Bombay Beach, Brawley and Westmoreland. He said that condition had come out of many conversations between lawmakers and Northend residents.
“We know that those communities closest to where the lithium activities taking place are in dire need of very basic infrastructure services,” Garcia said. “That's why that 30% was put in the law.”
Imperial County officials, though, are not doing that. They say the current version of the law gives them more freedom than Garcia says it does.
The current version of the law directs Imperial County to distribute 30% of the local revenue to “most directly and indirectly impacted by the lithium extraction activities.” It lists the five Northend towns as “directly affected” communities.
But the law also includes a longer list of “indirectly affected” cities and towns across the valley, from Ocotillo to Winterhaven, 75 miles east along the Arizona border.
Lopez said those terms give the county broader power to distribute that 30% share among the longer list of communities. In mid-September, the five-member Imperial County Board of Supervisors unanimously approved a controversial spending plan that did exactly that — divided up the funds across the county based on population instead of focusing on those Northend towns.
That plan drew widespread criticism from many Northend residents. But some advocates did agree that the text of the law is slightly ambiguous.
Garcia acknowledged that his office had received some of that feedback. But he was unequivocal that the county’s current spending plan is not what he envisioned.
“As an author of the legislation, ask me and I will tell you,” he said. “If the law isn't clear enough, then maybe there's an opportunity for our legislators to take action to clarify that on behalf of the community.”
Garcia said he doesn’t have an issue with other parts of the county’s spending plan, which reserves more than half of the funds for different county departments and sets aside the remaining dollars in a county-run community benefit fund. He said he respects the argument that those departments could put the additional funding to good use.
He said he was hopeful that county officials would agree to rework parts of the plan and that the legislature wouldn’t need to intervene.
Michael Luellen, a city councilmember in Calipatria, was glad to hear Garcia’s public message of support for Northend communities. He said state Sen. Steve Padilla (D-Chula Vista) had also recently echoed Garcia’s concerns.
“Understanding that the senator and the assemblymember agree with our local officials is extremely inspiring,” Luellen said. “I just hope that, at the end of the day, they’re willing to hold our county officials accountable.”
