• 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The company whose project prompted the measure had already withdrawn its application by the time voters went to the polls.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no longer being proposed, which says less about caution than about how little residents trusted the arrangement to stay withdrawn.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 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.

At a February city council meeting, an attorney representing HMC threatened litigation if the council banned data centers outright, LA Public Press reported. The council passed a data center ordinance anyway. Then it went further and put a permanent ban to a public vote, a sequence Mayor Elizabeth Yang described as deliberate: an ordinance can be reversed by a future council; a ballot measure approved by voters cannot be undone except by another vote of the public. “This ballot measure is more permanent than a council ordinance,” Yang told LA Public Press.

An 86 percent result is not the kind of margin a single contested land-use dispute typically produces. It suggests the vote was carrying more than one project’s worth of grievance. Andrew Yip, co-founder of SGV Progressive Action, described the result as reflecting sentiment well beyond Monterey Park’s borders: “There’s an appetite for our communities to fight back against the proliferation of data centers and bad planning and bad projects in our community,” he told LA Public Press.

Much of that appetite runs through a regional network called the No Data Centers San Gabriel Valley Coalition, which links organizations across more than a dozen San Gabriel Valley cities and predates the data center fight by years, built originally around mutual aid work, Black Lives Matter organizing and responses to anti-Asian hate incidents. Yip said that existing infrastructure — established channels of communication, practiced coordination between groups — is what let the Monterey Park campaign move from a November tip-off about the project to a ballot measure in a matter of months. “It was actually a very short timeline,” he said. “We found out about this data center in November. So it was only a few months where we organized folks and got a ballot measure in place.”

Monterey Park’s decisive vote sits next to a regional counterexample. The City of Industry, which borders more than a dozen surrounding communities, has continued pursuing large-scale industrial development, including a battery energy storage system tied to a data center project, according to ABC7. Those neighboring cities have no formal say in what Industry approves within its own boundaries, which Yip called “a huge concern” — the same electricity, water and traffic effects that drove Monterey Park’s vote don’t stop at a city line, but the authority to regulate them does.

That mismatch is part of why the coalition’s organizing has extended past any single city’s ballot box. Los Angeles County itself is weighing a broader response: a motion from Supervisor Hilda Solis has advanced a study of data center impacts and the possibility of a moratorium across the county’s unincorporated areas, with a series of public meetings expected as part of that process. Yip said those hearings represent the next opening for the same coalition that organized in Monterey Park.

The distinction between an ordinance and a ballot measure is not a technicality. City councils turn over. A council that campaigns against data centers today can be replaced by one more receptive to a well-funded proposal in four years, and an ordinance passed by the first council carries no special protection against repeal by the second. A measure embedded in the General Plan by popular vote does. That is the mechanism Yang pointed to when she said the city passed an ordinance first, then pursued the ballot measure specifically because “the next council could have come back and reversed it.”

It is also a slower and more expensive tool than an ordinance, which is presumably why most cities facing a single contested data center proposal reach for a zoning fight rather than a ballot campaign. Monterey Park’s organizers built the infrastructure for a ballot campaign because they had reason to doubt an ordinance would hold, and 86 percent of voters apparently agreed with that assessment once it was put to them directly.

The measure stops new data center development inside Monterey Park’s roughly 60,000-resident city limits, per U.S. Census Bureau estimates. It has no jurisdiction over the unincorporated county land nearby, over neighboring cities weighing their own proposals, or over the broader Southern California push toward AI infrastructure that made the HMC project attractive in the first place. As ABC7 put it, pulling the plug on data centers in one Southern California community most likely means the projects plug into somebody else’s.

Yip framed the vote as a beginning rather than a resolution. “What happened in Monterey Park can’t just stop there,” he said. The 86 percent margin gives that claim some weight: a result that lopsided is difficult to read as approval of one narrow zoning change, and easier to read as a city naming, as precisely as a ballot measure allows, exactly how much say it wants over what gets built where its residents live.