Tiny Imperial Beach Faces Uphill Battle for Survival

If anyone in Imperial Beach had listened to E.A. (Russ) Russell in the 1950s, the city would not be corseted in a tiny strip of beachfront at the southwesternmost corner of the United States.

Had local tavern owner Russell had his way, Imperial Beach would have extended its city limits eastward, embracing Palm City, Otay, San Ysidro, Nestor and all the flat, fertile farmland along the U.S. border clear out to the San Ysidro Mountains.

However, less imaginative minds prevailed back in 1956 and Imperial Beach townsfolk voted to incorporate only a 13-block mishmash of beach homes and shops at the base of San Diego Bay, unaware that the property Russell coveted would bloom 30 years later into the county’s growth area of the 1980s.

Two months after the Imperial Beach vote to become a city, San Diego elbowed out Chula Vista and grabbed the 22-square-mile border strip that Imperial Beach had ignored. The South San Diego annexation was accomplished by creating an invisible umbilical cord down San Diego Bay to link the border land to its mother city of San Diego. That move sealed off newly incorporated Imperial Beach and sealed its fate as a low-rent district, a bend in the road to Coronado and a crash pad for impecunious itinerants--military families, motorcycle gangs, forever-summer beach bums and the like. Outnumbered permanent residents can only hope that some day, some way, their beach city will become what they want it to be, a tourist mecca.

Mayor Bill Russell--no relation to that earlier Russell--admits that right now there’s nothing in Imperial Beach to attract an affluent visitor. No seaside hotels, no open-air restaurants, no boardwalk, no chic boutiques. In fact, the only new commercial buildings along the Imperial Beach strand in the last 25 years have been 7-Elevens.

But, Mayor Russell hastens to add, the town has “potential”--a word that echoes hollowly down the decades of Imperial Beach history.

In the 1880s, a developer first saw the potential in Imperial Beach. He built a 27-room resort hotel on the beach near the mouth of the Tijuana River. It was grand by any standard, with fireplaces in every room and “electric buttons” for room service. A boardwalk to the beach and a swimming lagoon (presumably the Tijuana Slough) nearby attracted tourists south from San Diego on scheduled schooners for a week’s or a weekend’s stay.

In those days before sewage pollution, the resort hotel fell victim to competition--the larger, grander Hotel del Coronado--and to the flood of 1891. A backcountry storm swelled South Bay rivers to torrents and left the southern part of what is now Imperial Beach buried “under an impassable blanket of heavy mud,” the Otay Review reported. The hotel, which was converted to a sanitarium after the flood, was the only resort hotel ever built in Imperial Beach.

I.P. Banta, an Imperial Valley man, was the next entrepreneur to see potential in Imperial Beach. He founded the town of Banta there, then later bowed to his promoters’ urgings that the name be changed to Imperial Beach to attract the flow of inland residents fleeing the summertime heat in the Imperial Valley.

In 1913, beachfront lots were selling for $25 down, $25 a month in Imperial Beach and business was not brisk. Most homebuyers of that era preferred a site near the railroad or nearer “town,” which meant San Diego.

Three-quarters of a century later, commerce is still slow. Rumors of plans for a marina in the Tijuana Slough have surfaced over the years, sparking speculators’ interest in the South Bay beach area, but that talk has never turned into reality. One plan--a $50-million residential yacht marina proposed by landowners on Oneonta Lagoon near the site of that early-day resort--energized environmentalists to persuade the state and federal governments to preserve the area as a wildlife sanctuary that now produces mosquitoes, not tax dollars for revenue-poor Imperial Beach.

County Supervisor Brian Bilbray, the town’s former mayor, stiffens at the memory of the demise of the Imperial Beach yacht marina project. To him, it is just another example of the insensitivity of environmental groups to human needs.

“They plow up Little League fields to plant flowers,” Bilbray sneered. Putting 2,500 acres of prime Imperial Beach real estate off limits to residents is “for the birds,” Bilbray said. If creation of an estuarine preserve is such a good idea, “I say let them put half of Mission Bay back into a wildlife preserve and give us half the Tijuana Slough for development into an aquatic park” like Sea World or Marineland, that would inject a flow of money into the city.

Imperial Beach, with its lack of commerce and industry, ranks at the bottom of the list among San Diego County cities in sales tax revenue and nearly went bankrupt after the passage of Proposition 13 in 1978, which revoked local governments’ rights to raise property tax rates at will.

Even residents who say they would never leave Imperial Beach admit that the community has a bad self-image. Many travel miles away to other beaches, ignoring the pounding surf at their doorsteps.

“I keep an informal poll going in my office and I ask them where people go to the beach,” said Dr. John Morton, a physician who has lived in Imperial Beach for 10 years. “And you know what they tell me? They say they go to Silver Strand or San Diego beaches, but not to Imperial Beach.”

A more obvious cause for the city’s residents to turn their backs on the local beaches is the burgeoning sewage pollution.

The spill was first spotted in 1958 when county health officials closed two miles of beach around the mouth of the Tijuana River.

Bilbray was a kid then, leaving skateboard scars in Imperial Beach flower beds. When he became mayor 20 years later, he mounted a bulldozer and symbolically built an earthen dike to contain the contaminated flows from fast-growing Tijuana across the border.

The immensity of the international sewage pollution problem, Bilbray said, works in favor of the small city. It insures that a solution will be reached when the effluent that already has invaded the Silver Strand and Coronado shores reaches San Diego.

The problem “will become so bad that it will either be mitigated or it will lead to total confrontation. It will either be handled or the beaches of La Jolla will be closed,” he contends. “They won’t just be dumping on us in Imperial Beach. They are going to be dumping on everybody.”

Not all of the city’s problems are caused by outsiders. The city has been beset by political infighting and factional splits ever since its incorporation squeaked by with a 24-vote plurality.

Many community leaders believe that real estate agents and developers were able to muscle the city government into changing zoning laws several years ago to allow the building of high-density apartment complexes. Those units, which some locals fear will deteriorate into slums in future years, also subtract from the percentage of homeowners in town, now estimated at less than 15% of the 23,000 residents.

Redevelopment projects that could turn the city’s tacky beachfront into a pleasant place have been turned down by voters who fear that improvements would bring an end to their affordable way of life.

“The worst thing that has ever happened to Imperial Beach was not the wrong actions but no action,” Bilbray summed up.

There are even some people who question whether the city should be a city at all. There are those who say that Imperial Beach would be better off if it became a part of San Diego.

“Annexation (to San Diego) has been an undercurrent around here,” said Morton. “If they could get enough committed people together who supported the idea, they might get it across. But I don’t think that it would necessarily be a good idea. Look at what is happening in South San Diego. They are in just as bad shape as we are.”

Although three years ago, Imperial Beach leaders decided the city could no longer afford its own police department and eliminated it in favor of a law enforcement contract with the sheriff, Bilbray does not believe that the factions will ever agree to turn their city over to San Diego, no matter how dire the municipal financial picture becomes.

“We’re different from other beach areas like Mission Beach or Pacific Beach or Ocean Beach,” he said. “We’re a city.”