Part 1: Bad Faith and Bad Deals

Hi everyone, Pat Wallis here:

Last Saturday, I attended the Mojave Basin Conservation Association (MBCA) annual meeting at the Yucca Valley Community Center. If you didn’t know, MBCA has been serving this community for 57 years. Their mission is to “advocate and educate for a healthy desert environment that nurtures wildlands and supports our communities’ rural character, economic well-being, and culture.”

All the presentations were excellent. And there were two I’m still thinking about. In this blog, I’ll cover the one that was by Pioneertown resident and MBCA Board President, Steve Bardwell. In the second part, I’ll cover the other presentation on affordable housing and homelessness.

What you should know from Steve’s presentation is that San Bernardino County needs help regulating commercial development proposals being proposed for rural neighborhoods. There is an apparent mismatch in the required supporting infrastructure (water, sewer, roads, electricity) with the proposed land use. Also, these are being proposed in rural residential districts!

It’s not just about who our land is for, but who gets to decide.

What does that mean for the communities having to bear the consequences should these projects make it through the county permitting process? More light pollution at night continues to blot out our clear star-filled skies. They’ll scrape the land, clearing out the desert brush that keeps the dust down when our winds howl — and they do howl. They’ll tap into our aquifer’s dwindling water supply, making it harder for the people who live out here to get the water they need.

However, the real harm is to the fabric that holds our neighborhoods and communities together. How do we solve this? By stopping the injection of commercial ventures into the heart of our rural communities. We can’t prioritize visitors who have no long-term stake in this land over the families trying to build a future here.

Prioritizing short-term profit-seeking in neighborhoods built for long-term living is not in the best interest of our people and our land. Turning our residential housing stock into extraction sites for short-term gain is a bad deal for us.  Once this logic takes root, it's hard to weed it out. We can already see outside speculators salivating at the prospect of flipping our land. They plan to turn them into resource extraction sites with little to no benefit to us. Who wins when these ventures solve problems in other parts of the state and the nation? Not us.

There are three projects I’m considering that illustrate my point. The first is the Sienna Solar and Storage Project in Lucerne Valley—a utility-scale solar and battery facility planned across roughly 1,850 acres of unincorporated desert land east of Highway 247. At 525 megawatts, it’s one of the most significant industrial solar developments ever proposed in the Morongo Basin.

To put that scale in perspective, it’s enough to power roughly 160,000 homes—nearly half the households in our congressional district. And yet, very little of that power is intended to directly benefit the people who live here.

The project was approved under an earlier entitlement often described as a grandfathering loophole despite significant changes in size and scope. Generally, projects of this scale are now prohibited in community plan areas. The problem is the conversion of rural residential and conservation land into an energy export zone, with dust, habitat loss, scenic degradation, and no meaningful long-term benefit for local residents.

The second is the expanding logistics and warehousing build-out tied to Highway 247. These efforts are driven in large part by the proposed Barstow International Gateway (BIG) rail hub and speculative warehouse development by national firms. This projected growth will transform Highway 247, a two-lane rural highway, into a heavy freight corridor. If you’ve never driven on the 247, it cuts through some of the most beautiful land in the state and was recently designated a State Scenic Highway.

These proposed changes will clog not just the 247 but Highway 62 from Yucca Valley all the way down to the I-10 corridor. Thousands of diesel truck trips are projected to pass through remote communities like Johnson Valley and Landers, even though the road was never designed for that kind of industrial traffic. The safety risks, road damage, noise, and loss of rural character are being imposed on residents who had no say in the decision.

The third is Congressman Obernolte’s proposed “Liquid Cooling for AI Act” (H.R. 5332). While marketed as a forward-looking tech policy, the bill promotes data-center cooling policy without including explicit water-use limits or guardrails. In an arid region like ours—where aquifers are already overdrawn—this effectively invites large tech facilities to consume millions of gallons of water a year to cool servers. The legislation prioritizes corporate computing needs over local water security and would turn the Mojave into a resource colony for data infrastructure serving markets far outside our district.

We need to stop approving projects that disrupt the very peace and character that brought us to the 23rd District in the first place.

But, big picture, what patterns should we be concerned about? What Steve showed us was that the land use mismatches for proposed development was mostly occurring on unincorporated county land. NONE was happening within the bounds of Twentynine Palms and Yucca Valley. Further, if we are to build towards a future where the regional economies within our district are self sufficient and reliant, we need to consider the down and upstream impacts to neighboring communities.

What does this tell us? Our interests aren’t being served—that’s what. This isn’t random. When these projects appear only where residents have the fewest tools to push back, it stops being negligence. So, it’s not just poor planning, it’s bad faith governance.

Too much of our region’s recent growth has been built on warehouse sprawl, speculative development, and extractive industries that strain our roads, air, and water—while offering jobs that don’t pay enough to rent an apartment, let alone buy a home. Poor decisions upstream always show up downstream—often years later and at higher cost. It’s about whether our communities remain livable.

I believe in a different kind of growth: jobs that let families stay, save, and build a future. This district doesn’t need to choose between the valley, the mountains, or the desert. Our future depends on recognizing that we rise—or fall—together.

Please visit my campaign site at www.patwallis.com to donate and find links to our social media channels, then follow and share them. It’s a team effort, and I need your help to get the word out.

Thanks, and please donate to the campaign if you can, then share this with your friends.

Pat-