Border Span Fails to Bridge Discord

Nothing connects like a bridge. So it seemed inspired to add a gleaming international footway at the U.S. border with Mexico as the centerpiece of a huge tourist and retail hub that planners envision as a shoppers paradise and a symbolic portal between the two nations.

Designers figured that the toll footbridge, sketched in brilliant white with heroic flair, would give tourists a perfect Kodak moment, herald the region’s growing binationalism and lure cross-border shoppers weary of a pedestrian route that requires dodging cars. Not least, planners hoped, such a bridge would help the nations learn from each other.

The bridge, still a paper dream, has taught plenty already. The lessons have not been pretty.

The proposal for the bridge--and a related $192-million make-over of a scrubby stretch around the closed Virginia Avenue border gate--are caught in a tug of war pitting the federal governments of Mexico and the United States against San Diego, some local officials in Tijuana and developers.

At stake is the proposed International Gateway of the Americas, a village of outlet stores, offices, a hotel and a convention center. Anchored on the U.S. side, it would be the first such commercial development to span the border by bridge, aiming to ignite additional development on the Tijuana side. But construction of the shopping complex, scheduled to begin next year, is suddenly in doubt due to the standoff and mounting criticism.

On one level, the squabble comes down to a mundane question of whether cars or pedestrians should prevail if an idled crossing--a former truck passageway near the huge San Ysidro port of entry--is ever reopened. The United States and Mexico favor vehicle traffic; the city of San Diego backs a footbridge next to the site.

To allow for the footbridge, the city and developers would expand the San Ysidro crossing gates a few hundred yards away so they could handle more vehicle traffic.

But the debate over the proposed bridge, which requires binational permission, has laid bare the peculiar undercurrents--from traffic and commerce worries to issues of enforcement and national sovereignty--that make virtually any decision along the border exceedingly complicated. It reveals too the limits of a touted recent push by the two nations to solve border problems locally. The matter now rests largely with officials in Washington and Mexico City.

Meantime, the bridge exists only in scale model.

“The idea is so amazingly simple,” said developer C. Samuel Marasco III. “But it gets so convoluted.”

Nearly everyone involved says recent meetings have produced the sense that the differences may be unbridgeable. Critics of the shopping center accuse Marasco and San Diego officials of shoddy diplomacy by plunging ahead with plans for the Gateway project, billed as the embodiment of new cross-border cooperation and “the physical face of NAFTA,” without adequately consulting the Mexican government. Marasco and the city say the bridge to Tijuana is a long-standing vision among local planners on the U.S. side and a linchpin of the complex.

A Vision of Shopping Hubs

Developers are free to build their stores and offices but need the Mexican government’s approval for the bridge. Marasco said the project may have to be scaled back considerably without a bridge to give it “sex appeal” and a marketplace novelty.

“If you’re trying to create a piece of art and a pedestrian environment, you’re not going to put 16 lanes of freeway next to it,” said Tina Christiansen, San Diego’s interim economic development manager. “You wouldn’t put it next to the Statue of Liberty.”

Marasco’s company, LandGrant Development of San Diego, proposes 1.4 million square feet of factory outlets, a World Trade Center, movies, offices, plus a central plaza outfitted with state-of-the-art scanners and security gear through which visitors from both sides would clear customs and immigration. Marasco hopes to lure U.S. tourists heading south of the border to his development, and also Tijuana residents who would cross the bridge north to shop.

With one end in the plaza, the pedestrian bridge would span the international line and Tijuana River and stretch a ramshackle end of Avenida Revolucion a few blocks north of where tourists to that famous street are likely to venture now. Drawings also depict a make-over for that neighborhood, but it would be up to Mexican entrepreneurs to carry it out.

Backers see the footbridge, with a 50-cent toll, as the first link between shopping hubs in the two cities and the emblem of a post-NAFTA renaissance at the dreary San Ysidro port of entry.

But on the spot in San Ysidro where planners envision a convention hotel, U.S. and Mexico officials see the chance to ease worsening border traffic congestion by reopening a gate once used for commercial trucks. The crossing, which in Mexico is called El Chaparral, was mothballed in 1994 when trucks were rerouted to a new port of entry in Otay Mesa. Federal officials from the two countries see no need for a new bridge for pedestrians, who now walk alongside the vehicle crossing on a route linking San Ysidro’s business district and tourism-oriented shopping on the Tijuana side.

The private project was flying high just a few months ago. The San Diego City Council embraced the plan as an official redevelopment effort, aided by local tax breaks, in May. Boosters presented a list of heavy-hitter supporters, including Tijuana Mayor Jose Guadalupe Osuna Millan, whose term ended Monday, and local luminaries from the U.S. side.

The campaign crested in September when a parade of boosters, including the head of Tijuana’s economic development council and former U.S. attorney and border czar Alan Bersin, took turns praising likely benefits to the region’s economy and image during a meeting of a U.S.-Mexico panel that reviews new border crossings.

But that same border group already had been presented with a competing vision backed by federal agencies--the U.S. General Services Administration and its Mexican counterpart--to reopen for passenger cars their facilities at the former truck gate. Those plans call for steering southbound freeway traffic into six to eight new inspection lanes there. In this way, the former southbound lanes could be converted for cars entering the United States. Lines sometimes stretch more than a mile onto Tijuana’s already clogged streets.

The Mexican plan also would ease traffic in downtown Tijuana through a new connection that would swing beach-going motorists onto the highway to Rosarito and Ensenada.

One Gateway critic blamed San Diego planners for the bureaucratic snarl. “You don’t go forward planning international border crossings without talking to the federal governments,” said state Assemblywoman Denise Ducheny (D-San Diego).

Opposition Increases

Marasco said federal officials based elsewhere are unused to bottom-up planning on border matters and must “digest” ideas vetted by their colleagues here. “We are rewriting the rules of international relations through local cooperation,” he said.

Leaders of the San Ysidro Chamber of Commerce, however, have objected to the proposed 50-cent toll, an emotional issue in a neighborhood whose meat markets and discount stores live and die by Tijuana shoppers.

Others worry that the developers will seek to move the terminus of the city trolley to the shopping center, leaving dozens of businesses stranded and jeopardizing plans for a transit center in San Ysidro that would provide easy access to a light-rail system that is planned in Tijuana. A station would be placed at the border as part of a transit complex contemplated by the Mexican federal government.

Some Tijuana merchants near the border have expressed fears the shopping center could cut into their business. And residents of a working-class neighborhood next to the current crossing have petitioned the Mexican government to prevent “foreign investors” from carrying out plans they fear will ultimately require razing their colonia.

Immigration officials have taken no public stance.

But a customs official in San Diego said the idea could work.

“This operation could be very similar to a large commercial airport operation,” said area customs chief Rudy Camacho.

Proponents of the Gateway project say their design matches an 8-year-old community plan for San Ysidro calling for “a grand entrance into the United States.” The plan suggested studying the feasibility of a footbridge at the truck crossing.

It is an audacious vision--reshaping the border through a 60-foot-wide footbridge and the urge to shop. For the moment, it is one whose future dangles.

“It’s an elegant proposal,” said Christiansen, “if we can get through the Gordian knot we’re in.”

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2 Views of the Border

A proposed $192 million development in San Ysidro that would include an international footbridge to Mexico has sparked a debate over the need for a new pedestrian passage and how best to ease traffic congestion at the border. Federal agencies of the United States and Mexico want to reopen an idled vehicle crossing instead of adding the footbridge; the city of San Diego and its developer say the vehicle-traffic problem could be solved by widening the San Ysidro port of entry already in use nearby.

Proposal of city of San Diego and developers

Proposed retail and entertainment center and factory outlet

Proposed pedestrian bridge

Northbound and southbound traffic through port of entry

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Proposal of U.S., Mexican officials

Proposed reopened vehicle crossing for south-bound traffic

Sources: LandGrant Development, U.S. General Services Administration, Comision de Avaluos de Bienes Nacionales