Measure NDC Lands Hard

Monterey Park has done something the AI buildout was not supposed to make easy. It turned a data center into a local ballot question, then answered it with a landslide. The official Los Angeles County results page showed Measure NDC ahead by 6,602 votes to 1,041 as of Wednesday afternoon, a margin of 86.38 percent to 13.62 percent. That is not a hesitant protest vote. That is a city saying it has heard enough.

The measure matters because of its form as much as its substance. Monterey Park had already moved against data centers by ordinance, after a proposed 247,000-square-foot facility drew local anger. The Los Angeles Times reported that the site would have been less than 500 feet from the nearest home and would have used three times the electricity of the 60,000-person city. Measure NDC makes the ban harder to unwind. The county result text says the prohibition continues until ended by voters, which means a future council cannot quietly trade the policy away after developers change their pitch deck.

That is the part Silicon Valley should find unnerving. Not because every town will copy Monterey Park exactly. Most won't. Data centers arrive with tax promises, construction jobs, utility upgrades, and the dull authority of national strategy. However, the local objection now has a working shape. Put it on the ballot. Name the thing plainly. Ask whether a neighborhood wants to host the physical cost of someone else's model race.

The AI industry likes to talk about infrastructure as if it were an abstraction: compute, capacity, clusters, gigawatts. Monterey Park answered in the older language of city politics. A building goes somewhere. The noise goes somewhere. The diesel backup generator is not a metaphor. The ratepayer sees the bill, or fears seeing it, and the fear does not become less political because the server racks are meant to support an impressive benchmark.

Politico described the vote as part of a wider backlash against AI infrastructure, with concerns about electricity, water, and air pollution from backup generators. Government Technology, republishing the Los Angeles Times story, noted temporary moratoriums in Montebello, El Monte, and Baldwin Park, plus an Alhambra zoning-code ban. Newsweek's map pushed the frame wider again, pointing to moratoriums and possible bans in places as different as Denver, Tulsa, Huron County, and several New Jersey municipalities. The pattern is not yet a wall, but it is more than a NIMBY reflex. It is a new veto point.

I wrote about Maine's data-center moratorium in April, and that story felt like the state version of a coming argument: how much grid, land, water, and patience should be reserved for machines whose owners live somewhere else. Monterey Park makes the argument smaller and therefore sharper. A city about ten miles east of downtown Los Angeles did not need to settle the future of AI infrastructure. It only needed to decide whether one category of building belonged inside its limits.

There is a temptation to treat this as symbolic, because one city cannot slow the global hunger for compute. Maybe not. But symbols become procedures when they work. Measure NDC gives opponents a script, and the script is simple enough to travel: no emergency theory of AI, no technical essay about model scaling, just a municipal question about noise, power, water, air, and who gets to decide.

Sources:

In a First for the Country, Voters in Monterey Park Ban Data Centers — Los Angeles Times

Official Results: City of Monterey Park Special Municipal Election, Measure NDC — Los Angeles County Registrar-Recorder/County Clerk

2026 Special Election Information — City of Monterey Park

California Voters Had Their First Chance to Be Heard on Data Centers. They Didn't Hold Back. — Politico

These SoCal Residents Are Nation's First to Ban Data Centers — Government Technology

Map Shows Where Data Center Bans Could Strike Next — Newsweek