South Bay Residents Protest Federal Tijuana Sewage Plan

City Council members listened Monday and nodded in agreement with irate South Bay residents opposing a makeshift federal solution to Tijuana sewage spilling over to the U.S. side of the border, but admitted that San Diego does not have the clout to halt the project.

Mayor Roger Hedgecock, in an interview after the council session, criticized the federal authorities for taking a “Band-Aid approach” to the international sewage problem and for ignoring what he considers a major health hazard from the wastes.

The International Boundary and Water Commission (IBWC) announced recently that it plans to build a sewage line to divert the Mexican city’s waste from a sewage line break at Smuggler’s Gulch to a holding pond on the American side of the border in the Tijuana River valley.

The open pond also receives about 2 million gallons a day of Tijuana sewage overflow which the Mexican city cannot handle.

In a closed session Monday afternoon, the council voted to refuse to grant the federal agency city rights-of-way for the pipeline because the water commission would not agree to protect the city against lawsuits from unhappy property owners in the Tijuana River valley who fear that sewage spills will occur. But Hedgecock said that the city’s refusal “won’t stop the pipeline project. The IBWC has the right to do whatever it wants and we, the city, can’t stop them.”

Mildred Hill, a San Ysidro resident, said that the smell from the temporary sewage holding pond about two miles from her condominium “is just awful.” She accused new county Supervisor Brian Bilbray and U.S. Rep. Duncan Hunter (R-Coronado) of “wanting to clean up the beaches and (being) not at all concerned with the residents in the (Tijuana River) valley.”

Ruth Schneider, an Otay Mesa-Nestor Community Planning Group representative, protested the abruptness of the federal action, made without notice to surrounding residents.

Schneider said the holding pond is only effective in containing Mexican sewage spills during periods of dry weather. Most sewage spills occur during wet periods, she said, when the pond poses a danger of overflowing and causing more property damage and pollution on the U.S. side of the border than would the unrestricted flow of the Mexican sewage down the Tijuana River and into the Pacific near Imperial Beach.

Hunter announced 10 days ago that the $250,000 pipeline would be built to intercept the sewage spill at Smuggler’s Gulch, diverting it to the holding pond rather allowing it to flow down the Tijuana River to the ocean. The Mexican sewage is pumped from the pond to the city’s treatment plant at Point Loma for processing during non-peak hours.

Hedgecock criticized the water commission for “spending a lot of time and a lot of money on Band-Aid solutions.”

“It seems to me that we are sitting on a time bomb, and we don’t know when it is going off,” Hedgecock said. “It’s lethal,” he said, despite county health officials’ reports that the sewage does not pose an immediate health hazard. “If it were harmless, why would we be spending billions of dollars on treatment plants on this side of the border? If it were harmless, it would be flowing in the streets.”