Written By , Voice of San Diego, March 14, 2024
Republished per content sharing policy
Editorial note: The above embedded Google map was inserted by The Coronado Times. It was not in the Voice of San Diego original article.
The people in charge of a broken sewage treatment plant along the U.S.-Mexico border won’t tell the public exactly what’s wrong with it.
And even though they haven’t fully explained how the plant fell into ruin, it hasn’t stopped them from asking Congress for more money to fix it.
In the last few years I spent covering the Tijuana sewage crisis, I heard staff from the International Boundary and Water Commission or IBWC (a little known binational federal agency with commissioners in both the U.S. and Mexico which runs the plant) hint that something was very wrong with this key piece of border infrastructure that’s responsible for keeping sewage out of San Diego. They would quote from the results of a “facilities assessment,” but I never saw the full report.
Once I began asking for it, I got no response.
The IBWC finally handed it over, after we sued for it, but it’s the most redacted document my eyes have ever beheld. I could tell the agency looked carefully at every every pump station, sludge tank and grit chamber. But all the information about what’s wrong with each piece of machinery, and what they plan to do about it, is blacked-out.
This matters because the IBWC has, for the first time in recent memory, asked Congress for help in funding all the failing infrastructure along the 1,255 miles of the U.S.-Mexico border that it manages. And some members of Congress are confused by the seemingly sudden and alarming number of problems. A redacted assessment of the South Bay plant’s facilities doesn’t help the IBWC make their case.
Rep. Darrell Issa, a Republican who represents a large swath of San Diego’s border with Mexico, has been sending letters to the IBWC demanding to know how the plant fell so badly behind on upkeep.
“What we’ve received so far from the IBWC demonstrates no transparency of the projects past, present and future and no coherent plan for how this gets done,” said Jonathan Wilcox, Issa’s deputy chief of staff and communications director on Tuesday. “They didn’t disclose the deferred maintenance and sent us a bill. Saying ‘time out’ is the least we can do in the public interest.”
Wilcox said the Congressman “expects” a copy of this report, unredacted.
The IBWC runs the plant with its contractor Veolia Water North America. Another contractor, ARCADIS North America, prepared the facilities study on the IBWC’s behalf. The South Bay plant is supposed to treat 25 million gallons of sewage from the city of Tijuana and send it into the Pacific Ocean via a miles-long underwater pipe. If the South Bay plant wasn’t there at all, much of Tijuana’s sewage would spill over the border into San Diego via the northerly-flowing Tijuana River and into the ocean along California and Mexican beaches.
But the plant can’t do its job well now.
Forty percent of the plant’s facilities that treat sewage are “highly likely to fail,” IBWC Commissioner Maria-Elena Giner (appointed by President Joe Biden in 2021) revealed in September to the San Diego Regional Water Quality Board. The wastewater it discharges to the ocean violates the Clean Water Act, Giner has said.
The IBWC is on the verge of failing to make good on its promises to Mexico under an agreement signed between both nations in 2022. Some of the environmental organizations that settled lawsuits with the IBWC over water quality permits are starting to squirm, again.
The poor state of this key wastewater treatment facility came as a shock to San Diego’s Congressional representatives, who discovered the news after Giner revealed the extreme state of underinvestment in the plant’s upkeep during California Sen. Alex Padilla’s visit to the plant last year. The South Bay plant’s ailments will consume at least half the money Congress appropriated in 2020 to build a bigger and better plant.
Up until that point, the border region was in celebration mode preparing to spend $300 million secured under former President Donald Trump’s U.S.-Mexico-Canada trade agreement in 2020 to double the plant’s treatment capacity among other projects.
The bad news sent San Diego’s Congressmen and women scrambling to scrap together more funding to fix it, eventually securing an emergency funding request of $310 million from the White House to keep the border projects on track. But a deeply divided Congress is way behind on passing a budget after it narrowly averted a government shutdown. So, there’s no telling when more money is coming to the plant.
This facilities assessment was the IBWC’s first step in answering questions about an over $1 billion backlog of projects along the border. But releasing it in such a redacted state only raised more.
“The IBWC’s refusal to release an unredacted report on the condition of the South Bay sewage plant is an outrage,” said Phillip Musegaas, executive director of San Diego Coastkeeper, an environmental group focused on clean water. “The public has a fundamental right to full transparency on every aspect of this pollution crisis, especially the truth on how IBWC completely failed to maintain the South Bay plant and put public health and the environment at risk.”
The IBWC referred Voice of San Diego to the U.S. Department of Justice for comment. We didn’t hear back from them.
In September, Giner appeared before the San Diego Regional Water Quality Control Board which enforces the plant’s Clean Water Act permits.
“I get asked all the time, how did we get to this point? We didn’t ask for money,” she said, referring to past administrations of the IBWC. “I have no problems asking for money.”
Giner testified before a House Committee last summer, sharing that the South Bay plant was just one of two wastewater treatment plants the IBWC manages along the border that’s out of compliance with water quality permit standards.
“We have a backlog of $473 million worth of construction come because of deferred maintenance,” she told the committee. “Every year there’s about $11 million worth of work we don’t do.”
Meanwhile, the border sewage crisis is only getting worse. Tijuana’s own wastewater facilities are constantly on the fritz, which means the plant often takes on more sewage than it was designed handle. That’s part of the reason, its operators say, the plant is in such bad shape. And southern California cities like Imperial Beach spend whole years with shuttered ocean access at their beaches due to contamination from the Tijuana River and other points in Mexico.
“To see (this report) so heavily redacted is concerning and counter to what we, the community and affected residents want to see: increased transparency, accountability and oversight,” said Paloma Aguirre, mayor of Imperial Beach.
San Diego’s Congressional representatives began a renewed campaign late last year for more money to keep the border projects on track. Rep. Scott Peters (whose district includes Coronado which experiences sewage-related beach closures) took to the House floor on Tuesday and pushed for Congress to find that extra $310 million to fix and begin expanding the plant.
“This is a public health and national security disaster. The more we delay in addressing cross border pollution the more costly and difficult it will be to fix,” Peters said.
Editorial note: This YouTube video was embedded by The Coronado Times. It was not included in the original Voice of San Diego article except for a link in the paragraph above.
Written By MacKenzie Elmer and republished per content sharing policy.
MacKenzie is a reporter for Voice of San Diego. She writes about the environment and natural resources.
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