Sewage Cleanup Is Focus of Talks

For decades, untreated waste has poured from a sieve-like system in Tijuana and flowed downhill through the Tijuana River into the United States, where it eventually dumps into the Pacific Ocean.

Officials from the U.S. and Mexico are preparing for talks this month that many hope will solve the problem, which has beset generations of residents along the border. The negotiations center on a novel proposal for piping millions of gallons of sewage back to Mexico for treatment at a privately run plant.

The runaway sewage symbolizes the difficulties of curing cross-border ills, even those that everyone acknowledges. Experts and officials point to many factors, including spotty attention to border problems by both governments and rocketing population growth along the frontier that constantly strains thin resources.

What are mundane local problems elsewhere become complicated at the border by international diplomacy and an alphabet soup of government agencies in two nations. In the case of Tijuana’s sewage, no fewer than a dozen municipal, state and federal agencies have been involved at one time or another.

“Whenever you need all the stakeholders involved in a decision, everyone recognizes how hard that is. Any time you stick a border between them, it doubles the number of people who need to be involved,” said Rick Van Schoik, managing director of the Southwest Center for Environmental Research and Policy, which monitors border issues. “It boils down to: You just need that many more voices at the table.”

Over the years, cross-border sewage has been the focus of binational agreements, public hearings, angry rhetoric and lawsuits, one of which was settled in December. There have been signs of progress, including construction on U.S. soil of a joint treatment plant that captures and partly cleans up to 25 million gallons of the overflow waste each day.

But there also has been a lot of public tussling over treatment methods. Often, it has seemed only the sewage was moving in a unified direction.

The result is that raw and under-treated waste continues to empty into the ocean off Imperial Beach, creating a hazard for surfers and a persistent bother for leaders of the beach city and residents of the Tijuana River Valley nearby.

Some border analysts say policy makers erred in spending $400 million to build the plant and its massive ocean pipe on the U.S. side rather than to repair leaks and constructing smaller facilities in Tijuana. “You end up trying to build infrastructure in the U.S. to solve a problem in Mexico that frankly just doesn’t work,” said Mark J. Spalding, who teaches international environmental law at UC San Diego.

Steps are newly underway to cure the problem at its source in Mexico, where work has begun on more than $140 million in projects to expand Tijuana’s sewer system and plug leaks that send a torrent of waste onto U.S. soil during heavy winter rains. Fast population growth means Tijuana will need all the treatment capacity it can get.

Sending It Back to Mexico

The upcoming negotiations between U.S. officials of the International Boundary and Water Commission and their Mexican counterparts focus on a proposal to send the waste water partly treated at the U.S. plant back to Mexico for final cleaning.

U.S.-based entrepreneurs propose building a plant in Tijuana and charging the American government to run the facility under terms of a 20-year contract, still to be negotiated. The treated effluent could be sold to Tijuana factories for industrial use or piped back to the United States for discharge into the ocean.

Effluent from the existing border plant, which travels to sea through a giant pipe, violates federal clean-water standards for ocean dumping. The proposed Tijuana plant, known as Bajagua, with a capacity of at least 50 million gallons, would further treat that waste water.

The novelty of hiring a private company for the job has made some U.S. officials uneasy--one reason it has taken more than a year to begin binational talks that Congress called for last year. Mexican officials have expressed concerns, but foreign ministry officials say they are eager to begin the negotiations.

The upcoming talks are but the latest turn in a long-running saga. It comes more than a decade after the two countries agreed on a plan that called for the United States to build and run the main plant north of the border, with help from Mexico, and to assume responsibility for treating the waste further so it can be piped into the ocean.

Amid ceremony and optimism, that plant began operating fully in 1998 when the huge pipe, known as an outfall, that ferries waste to the ocean was completed.

But a method for the second level of treatment has remained the topic of ferocious debate. U.S. officials withdrew a proposal for an adjacent plant in the face of a lawsuit by the Sierra Club and Surfrider Foundation, then suggested a series of open-air treatment ponds. That idea stalled in the face of protests by residents who feared foul odors and a proliferation of mosquitoes.

Some Complain of Unknowns

Amid the debate came the Bajagua proposal, offered by a U.S.-based investment partnership called AguaClara. The approach pleased many partisans, including some environmentalists. Congressional representatives and San Diego politicians became big backers, but leaders in Imperial Beach feared more delays by starting from scratch. Some environmentalists say the project includes too many unknowns, including final costs. Congress authorized $156 million over five years.

The upcoming talks could end the squabbling--or add a fresh chapter to the sewage epic.

“We don’t know what Mexico is going to bring to the table. We have a framework in the negotiations, but I can’t tell you what Mexico is going to propose,” said Carlos M. Ramirez, commissioner of the U.S. section of the border commission.

“This is a very unique situation. I don’t think anything like this has ever been done,” Ramirez said. “[The talks] could go quickly if Mexico doesn’t have great concerns. Or if there are concerns, that could slow things down.”

U.S. Rep. Bob Filner (D-San Diego), whose border district includes a swath of the affected area, charged that the border commission and U.S. Environmental Protection Agency have delayed the negotiations. At a congressional hearing on the matter in December, the State Department announced that it was ready to begin the talks.

Filner said the Bajagua idea is good for residents in both countries. But he conceded that details remain to be ironed out before the border’s sewer problems are resolved.

“We thought we were out of it when we got the plant built,” Filner said. “I thought I was out of sewage. But I’m back into it.”