Treating Tijuana Sewage Proposed : Environment: A council committee has suggested pumping Mexican sewage through the Point Loma treatment plant to help solve an escalating health threat from sewage flowing across the border.

Amid warnings that Tijuana sewage poses escalating health threats here, a San Diego City Council committee endorsed a plan Wednesday calling for millions of gallons of Mexican sewage to be processed at the city’s Point Loma treatment plant.

Under the proposal approved by the council’s Public Facilities and Recreation Committee, the city would install a pump near the international border and build a pipeline that would carry up to 14 million gallons of raw Mexican sewage daily to the Point Loma Wastewater Treatment Plant. The full council is scheduled to review that plan later this month.

In addition to the estimated $3.5-million annual treatment cost--an expense that city officials hope the federal government ultimately might pay--another potential liability for San Diego in pursuing such a plan is that the Tijuana sewage could push the Point Loma plant close to its capacity. If that were to happen, city administrators warned, it could lead to a building moratorium in San Diego aimed at preventing additional strains on the local sewage-treatment system.

But Councilman Bob Filner, who proposed the temporary project to remedy what he referred to as “a disaster in the making,” contended that the economic and feasibility questions could be satisfactorily resolved, adding that those factors should not be used as justification for “bureaucratic inertia.”

Though the U.S. and Mexican governments plan to build a joint treatment plant in the mid-1990s to address the longstanding Tijuana sewage problem, San Diego cannot afford to wait that long, Filner stressed.

“We cannot wait until 1995 to solve this problem--an immediate solution must be found,” Filner said. “This requires a capital investment and ongoing operational costs, but these costs are minimal compared to the human costs that are currently being paid by area residents.”

No estimate was given on when the proposed system could be in operation.

San Ysidro residents have long complained about the foul odors, mosquitoes and other health problems associated with the growing sewage problem.

While untreated Mexican sewage has been flowing across the border for decades, Tijuana’s growing inability to handle its own waste water has reached crisis proportions, transforming an occasional problem--one that forced the periodic closure of local beaches--into an almost daily woe with more serious consequences, Filner said.

Since 1987, the councilman added, the amount of raw sewage in the Tijuana River Valley has grown from 6 million gallons per day to the current figure of 12 million to 14 million gallons.

That already critical problem likely will worsen, because Tijuana’s sewage system already is over capacity and many homes there are not even connected to the sewer system, city officials said.

San Diego has treated Mexican sewage on an emergency basis in the past. But that system, which is capable of handling 13 million gallons of sewage daily, has been shut down because of diminished capacity, city officials said.

Without questioning the seriousness of the situation, some city officials expressed a variety of practical and political concerns about the plan to treat Mexican sewage at Point Loma until the new international facility is built.

With San Diegans already facing higher sewage bills to pay for a planned $2.8-billion upgrade of the Point Loma plant and the city’s overall sewage system, the plan endorsed Wednesday could create an additional expense to be borne by local ratepayers--should federal or state dollars not be forthcoming. Beyond the estimated $3.5-million annual operating bill, it could cost “less than $1 million” to build the pump station and other facilities and lines needed to carry the Tijuana sewage to Point Loma, according to Deputy City Manager Roger Frauenfelder.

Moreover, Frauenfelder noted that treatment of the Mexican sewage at the Point Loma plant, which now processes about 190 million gallons daily, could bring it close to its 218-million gallons-per-day capacity.

“Regulatory agencies wouldn’t let us get to capacity before they’d come down . . . with threats of building moratoriums,” Frauenfelder said.