I grew up in Monterey Park, attending both middle school and high school there. The Monterey Park I know is a small, family-centered community where people go to the park, kids go trick-or-treating, and youth sports are full of life. It has been recognized as one of America’s best places to live in the United States. I remember it as a working-class city in the San Gabriel Valley where kids still had room to be kids.
Recently, a developer proposed building a 250,000-square-foot data center next to La Loma Park, a park that I grew up down the street from. When Monterey Park became the first city in California to permanently ban data centers, I understood why that would be the city council’s reaction.
In late 2025, HMC StratCap proposed a 50-megawatt data center at 1977 Saturn Street, just off the 60 freeway, next to a public park. Residents raised concerns about noise, diesel generators, and a facility that would draw enough electricity to power every home in the city twice over. The city imposed a moratorium and ultimately passed a permanent ban on data centers.
State campaign finance filings show the No Data Center MPK committee was run by a professional political consultant based in Rancho Mirage, not a Monterey Park resident. Its donors included staff from the Asian Pacific Environmental Network, SEIU 2015, and several other environmental and advocacy organizations from outside the community. At city council hearings, the organized labor presence that showed up in numbers came in support of the project, not to oppose it, building trades unions drawn by the construction and operations jobs it would have brought.
At a recent energy policy panel at the Hoover Institution, researcher and author Robert Bryce said something that struck me. People are standing up to Big Tech in the real world because they had no power to stop them in the virtual one. They didn’t get a vote on their data privacy, but they get a vote on their neighborhoods.
After Monterey Park said no, HMC StratCap withdrew its application in April 2026 and the project moved to Australia. Its parent company is now redirecting that capital to a data center in Sydney. The jobs, the tax revenue, the infrastructure investment were gone. HMC had already paid $39 million for the Saturn Street site, so this was not a speculative idea on a drawing board that vanished without consequence. It did not get redirected to another California city, but to another country.
Monterey Park’s experience is not an isolated one.
According to data from Hoover’s Markets vs. Mandates conference, there are 769 data centers currently under construction across the U.S., representing 58 gigawatts of power capacity. There have been 81 rejections or restrictions in 2026 alone, up from 49 in all of last year. Bryce noted at the panel that one rejection happened in heavily Democratic Ferguson, Missouri, and another in heavily Republican Wichita Falls, Texas, in the same week.
Cities rejecting data centers matter for California’s economy and its place in the AI revolution happening right now.
One reason is simple. Communities that say yes can gain a great deal. Loudoun County, Virginia, now one of the country’s biggest data center hubs, brings in roughly $895 million a year in data center tax revenue, nearly matching its entire operating budget. Loudoun receives $26 in tax revenue for every $1 in services it provides to data centers. That kind of fiscal return has helped the county keep property taxes lower than neighboring jurisdictions for a decade. Monterey Park’s annual budget is only about $50 million, which makes the scale of the opportunity it turned away even harder to ignore.
We are in an awkward period. The technology is moving faster than the policy meant to govern it. Policymakers have a long track record of writing rules about technologies they do not yet understand, and the result is almost always policy that looks outdated within a decade. In 1952, UNIVAC filled an entire room just to process election returns. A modern smartwatch has millions of times that computing power. AI infrastructure is at that same early, oversized stage, and the footprint will likely shrink through future innovation.
Permanent bans close the door before innovation has time to happen. If data centers evolve toward quieter, less power-demanding, less disruptive facilities, and the evidence increasingly points in that direction, Monterey Park’s vote will look rather foolish in the future. Permanent ordinances create legal obstacles that future city councils will have to revisit and send a message that California doesn’t want companies investing in innovation in our state.
It’s inevitable that data centers and communities like Monterey Park will have to coexist. What the right policy course policymakers should take is a question being figured out in real time. When in doubt, local and state elected officials would be wise to let free markets guide the way.
Anthony Velasquez, MBA, is Pacific Research Institute’s Communications Specialist.
