Members of the Imperial Irrigation District board of directors are pitted against one another in a months-long battle that has spilled from public meetings to controversial closed-door sessions and now into a courtroom. At stake is an agreement with organized labor that will determine who gets tens of millions of dollars of IID business.
Only days before a new board was seated in December 2020 and after major campaign contributions by unions failed to gain support for their preferred candidates IID s outgoing board quickly pushed through a project labor agreement, or PLA. This group of contracts, approved on a 3-2 vote, would for the next decade set the terms of the labor IID must use for projects expected to cost $750,000 or more.