San Diegan to Be EPA’s Man in Mexico

Richard Kiy, a San Diegan who spent three years with the San Diego Economic Development Corp., has been named to a key post in the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency in charge of monitoring environmental compliance by U.S.-owned manufacturing plants in Mexico.

Kiy, who served as an associate vice president at the EDC before joining the staff of Rep. Jim Kolbe (R-Ariz.) in March, will join the staff of the EPA’s Washington-based assistant administrator for international activities.

Kiy said the job was created to help implement the “strong environmental component” of the Bush Administration’s proposed free-trade agreement with Mexico, an agreement which, if passed, would significantly expand U.S. companies’ manufacturing in Mexico. Observers expect Kiy to play an important role as the two countries negotiate environmental elements of the trade pact.

The House on Thursday gave the Bush Administration the go-ahead to begin “fast track” negotiations for the long-sought free-trade agreement with Mexico. The Senate is scheduled to vote on the measure today.

Although the free-trade act will cover a wide range of issues, Kiy on Thursday said Bush has pledged to pay attention to environmental concerns along the border. Environmentalists and other critics of the plants complain that many U.S. companies have fled to Mexico in order to take advantage of that country’s lax environmental enforcement.

As part of the proposed free-trade agreement, Kiy said the United States will increase its monitoring of maquiladoras, which are foreign-owned plants used to manufacture goods mainly for sale in the United States.

Kiy, who acknowledged that maquiladoras have created environmental problems, added that those problems “have largely been exaggerated” by opponents of Bush’s free-trade plan. The “lion’s share of pollution” in the Tijuana area, for example, comes from raw sewage that flows untreated from that city’s residential areas, Kiy said.

A Boston-based environmental group called the National Toxics Campaign has released a study that shows 9% of raw sewage from a maquiladora zone in Tijuana was petroleum, which is about 15,000 times the normally allowed U.S. discharge limit.

“It means that ( maquiladora ) industries are directly discharging gasoline, oil and other petroleum products into the sewer, which is clearly not the way hazardous wastes should be handled,” said Diane Takvorian, executive director of San Diego-based Environmental Health Coalition, a nonprofit environmental watchdog group.

The United States and Mexico last year unveiled plans for a $200-million waste-water treatment plant that would solve the decades-old problem of sewage that flows from Tijuana into the Pacific Ocean off San Diego County. But local environmentalists said high levels of petroleum pollution would cripple the proposed treatment plant.

EDC President Dan Pegg on Thursday described Kiy, a native San Diegan who is bilingual, as “uniquely qualified for the job. . . . He’s handled most of (EDC’s) border-related activities and did a lot of work for the Border Trade Alliance,” a joint U.S.--Mexico business organization that is based in Nogales, Ariz.

“It will be exciting for San Diego to have Richard in Washington because he has a keen understanding of why the San Diego-Tijuana area is so different from other border regions,” Pegg said.

Kiy, who has spent the past three months in Washington working on Kolbe’s staff for congressional approval of Bush’s “fast-track” negotiations, said Congress is not likely to allow maquiladoras to continue contributing to environmental pollution if the free-trade act is signed.

Congressional leaders “are going to call upon the Administration for appropriations of money to clean up the environment” if they sense backsliding by the Administration on environmental issues, Kiy said.

Although the EPA has no jurisdiction in Mexico, Kiy said the trade act would give the agency “the opportunity to work more closely” with its counterpart in the Mexican government. “We have the ability and the desire to help them,” Kiy said.

Kiy said heated Congressional discussion of the proposed free-trade act has been “healthy” for border states “because the debate has given (Washington) an opportunity to discuss problems at the border.”

Times staff writer Chris Kraul contributed to this report.