The newly installed Coronado City Council will reconsider whether to declare a state of emergency for the ongoing Tijuana sewage crisis.
The former council decided in September against the declaration, saying that, while the matter is dire, the legal mechanisms of a formal emergency declaration did not apply. Instead, the council opted to pass a resolution of urgency.
The new council does not wholly agree with that decision. During the Jan. 21 City Council meeting, two members supported declaring a state of emergency, while two did not.
Earlier that evening, the council had appointed its fifth and final member, Kelly Purvis, who will be installed at the Feb. 4 council meeting. Because of this, leaders opted to wait until that meeting to vote on the matter, with the opportunity for a split vote eliminated.
Supporters of the declaration were Council Member Amy Steward and Mayor John Duncan, who together submitted a Policy No. 9 request to revisit the matter.
Steward said that, while she appreciated the former council’s position and advocacy on the matter, Coronado needs to take optics into account.
“It is my feeling that this is really an emergency,” Steward said. “And if you look at all of our sister cities, they all have declared an emergency, and they look at us and think, ‘You are the second most impacted city. When are you going to declare an emergency?'”
But Council Members Carrie Downey and Mark Fleming disagreed. If doing so doesn’t accomplish anything tangible, they argued, it is irrelevant to declare an emergency.
Governing bodies declare states of emergency when they need to act quickly. For example, after the January 2024 storm this year that brought flooding to the city, Coronado declared an emergency. Doing so allowed the city to waive certain requirements in building the Parker Pump Station bypass. The project was completed in days, when it usually would have taken months.
But Coronado is not in charge of the crumbling infrastructure that causes millions of gallons of untreated sewage from Tijuana to be dumped into the Pacific ocean each day. The International Boundary and Water Commission (IBWC) manages sewage infrastructure in the U.S., with Mexico managing its own infrastructure further south.
“Here’s my problem: why I didn’t support it before, and I’m not going to support it now,” said City Council Member Carrie Downey. “What do we get by doing this? We don’t get anything else. We now have fully the amount (of funding) that we wanted.”
Further, Downey cautioned, declaring a state of emergency for a matter over which Coronado has no jurisdiction, could create a cry-wolf scenario for any future emergencies, in which Coronado did need emergency funds.
Duncan, who was a council member last fall, initially voted against the declaration, but he said that his mind has changed.
“Where I’ve been convinced,” Duncan said at the Jan. 21 city council meeting, “is that it helps advocacy to not have to explain, on a negative basis, why Coronado doesn’t have a state of emergency, when the city of San Diego does. Or, why has the Port of San Diego declared an emergency? Why hasn’t Coronado?”
He also suggested that, with a new U.S. president in office, there was a renewed chance of a federal-level proclamation of emergency. He worried that if Coronado, one of the cities arguably most impacted by the sewage, had not declared an emergency, it might dissuade national leaders.
“We all know that it’s a crisis,” Fleming said. “And as has been pointed out tonight, the city of Coronado has done a lot, perhaps as much or more than any other community in the South Bay area, to work on this issue. I just don’t see what this (emergency declaration) is going to do to make anything any better.”
The federal government has allocated just over $700 million to the IBWC in the last two years to address its long failing infrastructure in a series of projects that, once completed, are expected to reduce the flow of sewage into the ocean by up to 90%.
The most extensive of the projects is the repair and expansion of the South Bay International Wastewater Treatment Plant (SBIWTP), which could take up to five years. The project will double the plant’s treatment capacity from 25 million gallons per day (MGD) to a 50 MGD average flow, with peak flow capacity at 75 MGD.
Tijuana’s population, in the meantime, is skyrocketing. Steward said she was concerned that, by the time the treatment plant’s rehabilitation and expansion is completed, its capacity would no longer meet Tijuana’s needs. Downey countered that needing more money in the future does not warrant an emergency declaration.
Steward also echoed concerns that San Diego County Supervisor Tara Lawson-Remer has: That there may be pollutants in the ground long after the sewage stops flowing. Lawson-Remer and 500 others requested that the Environmental Protection Agency investigate, although it was denied.
“We don’t really know what’s in our sand and what it’s going to take it clean it all up eventually,” Steward said.
The matter will be revisited at the Feb. 4 meeting of the Coronado City Council.
