CLEAN SURF OP-ED/San Diego Union-Tribune

SAN DIEGO UNION-TRIBUNE

Not the way to fight border pollution

June 2, 2006

With one exception, my dawn patrol on a recent Monday on the north side of the Imperial Beach Pier was the same solitary excursion to surf an early season south swell as it has been for the past 29 years. After I caught my first wave, the sweet chemical stench of sewage destroyed the joy that I momentarily felt from a quick tube ride. Wastewater from Tijuana spiked the waters of Imperial Beach, just as it has done for more than 300 days over the past two years.

The exponential growth of Tijuana, especially at its western end, where hillside mansions abut canyons filled with thousands of families living in cardboard and plywood shacks, has finally overwhelmed the infrastructure built at U.S. taxpayer expense in the late 1990s to deal with the border city's urban and industrial wastewater.

Coronado, once off limits to the flow of polluted water from Mexico, is also now the recipient of the toxic ocean pollution that was once the sole domain of Imperial Beach and Playas de Tijuana. Since 2004, Coronado beaches have been closed more than 77 days, forcing U.S. Navy Seals to routinely halt ocean training exercises there.

The irony in this situation is that many of the residents of the multimillion-dollar, high-rise condominiums at the Coronado Shores include some of the most influential power brokers of Mexico. The yellow beach closure signs that appear more frequently along the shoreline of the Emerald City are a reminder that border pollution, the distress signal of urban poverty in Mexico, can reach even the wealthiest enclaves in the United States.

However, Bajagua, a proposed sewage treatment plant to be built in eastern Tijuana, put forth by federal officials to solve the problem of beach closures in Imperial Beach and Coronado, would have little or no impact in stopping the rivers of sewage that flow out of Tijuana's poorest neighborhoods and into the ocean. Bajagua, the brainchild of Tijuana developer Enrique Landa and his North County partner Jim Simmons, is an outdated project that would serve primarily to treat wastewater that is now dumped in an ocean outfall a little more than three miles offshore from Imperial Beach. According to researchers,
little of the wastewater from the ocean outfall actually contaminates the beaches of Imperial Beach and Coronado.

The fact that Bajagua is considered a viable option to solve the border pollution crisis at all is due to the estimated $650,000 in campaign contributions the company has made to San Diego area congressmen and President Bush and the hiring of high-power lobbyists, including former U.S. Ambassador to Mexico James Jones. These campaign contributions and lobbyists have given the company an excellent chance of receiving a pending sole-source, no-bid U.S. government contract that will be worth more than $600 million. According to the Project on Government Oversight, an independent agency that recently investigated Bajagua, this deal would not allow the public to “be assured the funds will be going to the most qualified bidder.”

The International Boundary and Water Commission, or IBWC, that will oversee Bajagua once is built, is one of the most inept agencies in the United States government. It is unclear how the IBWC, which is unable and unwilling to maintain even the most basic infrastructure located on the border that is designed to capture sewage flows, would oversee the Bajagua plant. About half of the beach closures along the border could be avoided if the IBWC routinely cleaned up sewage-diversion structures blocked by trash and sediment in the Tijuana River, Smuggler's Gulch and Goat Canyon.

Fixing the sewage system in a rapidly growing Third World city like Tijuana, beset with impoverished squatter settlements without hookups to municipal sewage systems, will require a community-based – and not contractor-based – plan that is flexible, decentralized and adaptive and that can catch and treat sewage at its source.

Our elected officials should permit the people most affected by trans-boundary sewage flows, not their campaign donors, to prescribe and implement a publicly managed sewage treatment plan that is a good deal for taxpayers and results in cleaning up border beaches. Until that happens, Navy Seals and children, surfers and fishermen from both sides of the border will continue to suffer from the ever-increasing flows of Tijuana's untreated sewage.

Dedina, an Imperial Beach resident, is the author of “Saving the Gray Whale” and the executive director of WiLDCOAST.

http://www.signonsandiego.com/uniontrib/20060602/news_lz1e2dedina.html