Mexico Offers to Build 2 Sewage Plants

For the first time in a year and a half of bilateral negotiations over border sewage problems, Mexican officials Monday presented their U.S. counterparts with a detailed plan to build a Mexican-owned and -operated sewage treatment system in Mexico.

U.S. officials last fall proposed a joint U.S.-Mexico plant to treat Tijuana sewage in the United States, but they said Monday that they were impressed with Mexico’s presentation and would keep their minds open to the unilateral proposal.

“It was a beautiful piece of work. Their presentation was excellently done,” said Fitzhugh Green, associate administrator of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and head of the U.S. delegation. “We want to learn more.”

The meeting at the Hotel Lucerna here was the first of three scheduled this month. The next two are to be held in Mexico City next Tuesday and Tijuana Feb. 26.

Mexico called the series of meetings after the United States threatened to oppose a $46-million Inter-American Development Bank loan that Mexico was seeking to build a waterworks in Tijuana.

U.S. Ambassador John Gavin said the waterworks would double the volume of sewage at the border and said U.S. officials wanted to know how Mexico planned to treat the additional sewage. Mexico’s loan request is pending.

On Monday, officials from the Mexican Ministry of Urban Development and Ecology used glossy color charts along with a bas relief map outlining their combined water and sewage works for Tijuana. They were accompanied by officials of the Ministry of Treasury and Foreign Relations and by Mexico’s representative to the Inter-American Development Bank.

The Mexican proposal is a two-pronged plan to build, within a year, a sewage treatment plant four miles south of Tijuana near La Joya that would treat as much as 50 million gallons of sewage a day, and to build a second plant within five years at the juncture of the Tijuana and Alamar rivers, near Mesa de Otay. That second plant would treat 25 million gallons of sewage a day.

The plants, estimated to cost $10 million each, would be made up of aeration ponds to disinfect the sewage and a water reclamation system.

“This is the first meeting we have ever had where we said, ‘OK, we are going to build it, now let’s talk about how and where,’ ” said U.S. Rep. Duncan Hunter (R-Coronado). “We are no longer talking in broad terms. We are talking about concrete being laid, the implementation of a sewage facility, the laying of pipeline.”

Hunter said U.S. officials are concerned about the reliability of a Mexican sewage treatment plant. He said that if Mexico’s sewage pipes break, the raw effluent will never make it into a Mexican sewage plant but will spill downhill across the border as it has in the past.

“We want capacity, reliability, timeliness and protection . . . The best way for the U.S. to guarantee that is to participate in the treatment and that could only occur on the border,” Hunter said.

He said that aeration ponds in Mexicali do not work because of electricity and sludge problems.

Tijuana Mayor Rene Trevino said that the Mexican government does not want to rely on a U.S. plant and that U.S. officials will have to trust Mexico to build a reliable system.

“Mexico should be responsible for resolving our own problems,” Trevino said. “It is a question of trusting that we will do as we say. This represents an ideal solution for us because it deals with water, sewage and recycling water that we can use for agricultural uses and the reforestation of our lands. The cost of this plan is in keeping with the resources of our country.”

U.S. officials said they questioned whether Mexico’s proposed sewage treatment system could handle all of the sewage Mexican officials said it would.

Mexico currently produces close to 20 million gallons of sewage daily, with only half of the city’s residences hooked up to the system. Officials estimate that another 20 million gallons daily are dumped into the ground storm drains and the Tijuana River. The planned water and sewage works would double the sewage flowing into the system.

The Mexican plan assumes that Tijuana will have 1.2 million inhabitants by the year 2000 but some estimates put the population at nearly that figure now.

Tijuana currently has no sewage treatment system. San Diego treats about 13 million gallons of Tijuana sewage daily at its Point Loma plant; the rest of Tijuana’s collected sewage is dumped untreated into the ocean. When the pipes carrying Tijuana sewage break, the raw sewage runs downhill into San Diego and the Tijuana River, and from there into the ocean on the U.S. side of the border.

The problem of sewage flowing across the border dates to the 1920s. Because of the sewage problems, San Diego beaches have had to be closed periodically since the 1960s.

The latest round of bilateral negotiations on the issue began in August, 1983, when Presidents Ronald Reagan and Miguel de la Madrid signed an agreement in La Paz calling for solutions to border environmental problems.

Since then, representatives of EPA, the U.S. State Department, the International Boundary and Water Commission, and their Mexican counterparts have met intermittently.

The U.S.-proposed solution calls for a $30-million joint U.S.-Mexico plant to be built on federal land north of the border. That plant would treat about 30 million gallons of Mexican sewage daily but could be expanded.

U.S. officials said they did not know which proposal would be the ultimate solution.

“The truth of the matter is that they can pretty well do what they want in Mexico,” said George High, a State Department official. “Saying that, I must add that there is every indication that they want to come up with something that satisfies our concerns.”

Green added that the Mexican officials seemed intent on resolving the sewage problem, partly because of the bank loan and partly because of their “genuine desire to end this long sore that affects our relations in this area.”