A Sewer Runs Through It

(page 2 of 3)

Clinton-appointed IBWC Commissioner John Bernal (who was later relieved of his post under Bush and now heads the Pima County Public Works Department in Arizona) remembers the situation as being dismal. The commission had just finished the $127 million, state-of-the-art San Ysidro sewage plant to fulfill a previous agreement with Mexico and now found itself being forced to enter yet another agreement—one it thought was misguided—instead of finishing its current facility. Carlos Ramirez, a civil engineer and former mayor of El Paso (home to IBWC headquarters), took over from Bernal and began a contentious relationship with Bajagua. Bajagua says the IBWC stalled plans and was generally uncooperative, forcing it to miss several deadlines.

In 2002 and 2003, Bajagua principals managed two visits with Dick Cheney. E-mails from IBWC officials (intercepted and turned over to the National Security Whistleblowers Coalition) show concern and even distress among agency staffers that Bajagua, a private company, had fostered upper-level liaisons with both the White House and the State Department. The commission, meanwhile, was gradually losing hope of finding funding to finish the second phase of the plant on the U.S. side of the border, and began moving—however lethargically—in the direction of building the mandated plant in Mexico.

A new treaty was drafted, and Bajagua began obtaining land rights, permits and concessions in Mexico. The federal court pressing the IBWC to meet Clean Water Act standards was aware of the two alternatives—upgrading the existing U.S. facility or building the Tijuana plant—but didn’t weigh in on either side. Ramirez, meanwhile, was diagnosed with Pike’s disease (a brain disorder) and resigned in 2004.

Debra Little, IBWC’s principal engineer at the time, stepped in as acting commissioner. She says Bajagua was the most aggressive company she’s seen in 20 years of government contracting work, and that as commissioner, she felt dealing directly with a company that was vying for a government contract through her office was a clear conflict of interest. She tried to distance herself from the company’s persistent representatives. She didn’t apply to permanently fill the commissioner’s position, and in January 2004, President Bush appointed engineer Arturo Duran, who had done a brief and tumultuous stint with the IBWC in the mid-1990s, to the top post. That appointment brought upheaval and rapid change to the commission. Duran became one of the most divisive leaders in the history of the agency, insiders say, and he removed or demoted a number of longtime employees.

Considered the first pro-Bajagua commissioner, Duran signed the new treaty facilitating the Bajagua plan a month after assuming his new post. Later, after he abruptly stepped down, the IBWC and Bajagua entered a nonbinding development agreement to guide both parties to the eventual signing of the fee-for-services contract. The agreement sorted out financial arrangements, gave Bajagua its $39-million-a-year cap and established a series of deadlines for the company. From the point of view of headquarters in El Paso, the once-struggling Bajagua concept looked like a go for a 2008 launch date.

A COALITION of environmentalists in San Diego, however, vociferously continued opposition to the project. The group was composed of many of the same players who brought suit against the IBWC in the 1990s for its secondary plans at the San Ysidro plant. (Ironically, those adamantly anti-Bajagua activists were peripherally and inadvertently responsible for opening the window that had allowed Bajagua to become an alternative in the first place.) A figurehead in that movement was Lori Saldaña, former chair of San Diego’s Sierra Club and a Clinton appointee to a border environmental council.

Saldaña, who was elected to the California Assembly in 2004, says Bajagua’s plan—to convey water across the border three times—doesn’t make sense. She also questions the company’s tight relationship with local politicians and insists the Bajagua plan will do nothing to address the pollution of south San Diego County beaches. The activist-turned-politician teamed with advocacy group Wild Coast and a gaggle of other environmentalists to fight the plan.

In 2006, the opposition camp was joined by the city of Imperial Beach, which passed a resolution opposing Bajagua. Senator Dianne Feinstein’s office is opposed to the plan and is pushing for Congressional funding to finish the second phase of the San Ysidro plant. Representative Susan Davis, meanwhile, is on the fence, saying her office wants whatever is the most expedient method to get that 25 million gallons a day of effluent from the IWTP to secondary standards.

The EPA-funded Potable Water and Wastewater Master Plan for Tijuana and Playas de Rosarito says only 79 percent of houses in Tijuana are connected to the city’s sewerage system—meaning the dwellings of up to 400,000 individuals are discharging sewage directly into their surrounding environments. Scientists and engineers agree that the cause behind beach closings in Imperial Beach and pollution in the Tijuana Estuary on the U.S. side of the border is wet-weather flows—rain.

Professor Rick Gersberg, an environmental microbiologist and professor in the Graduate School of Public Health at San Diego State University, has been in the microbiology and limnology (the study of inland waters) fields for more than 30 years. He’s worked extensively with water-quality issues at the border and on projects ranging from Venice, Italy, to Victoria, Canada. He says the clear threat to South Bay beaches stems from houses in Tijuana that aren’t connected to that city’s sewer system—their sewage flows out of the estuary and into the ocean when it rains. Scientists from the San Diego County Department of Environmental Health, the EPA and the National Oceanographic Institute, as well as civil engineers with San Diego and the state of California, agree with him.

“Until those houses are hooked up to a sewage system, we’re never going to solve the wet-weather problem, which is the major problem,” Gersberg says. “The estuary doesn’t mind that much. I’m not saying that sewage is good for it, but the perceived crisis is not because of the estuary, it’s because of the bacteria—coliforms—and bacteria don’t harm the estuary, per se. Birds and fish don’t mind swimming in coliforms. People do, but people don’t swim in the estuary.

“It’s a bad situation, no doubt. Who thinks it’s good that when it rains, sewage is contaminating the beach? I don’t agree it’s a crisis. But if I owned a surf shop in I.B., I’d say it was.”

Gersberg says neither option on the table—an upgrade at San Ysidro’s IWTP or a new Bajagua plant at Rio Alamar—is going to affect beach closures at Imperial Beach. In fact, scientists agree that I.B. can count on wintertime beach contamination and closures for the foreseeable future. There is simply no way to catch and treat all of the contaminated storm water coming out of Tijuana when it rains—and that’s why the city of Imperial Beach passed a resolution against the Bajagua plan.

Imperial Beach City Councilmember Mayda Winter says the city has adopted its own seven-point plan to comprehensively address beach closures. She worries that if the Bajagua project goes through—with its (up to) $39-million-a-year price tag—the federal government will be loathe to spend money on other projects, and it’s those other projects that have any real chance of improving the area’s pollution problem.

Congressman Filner readily acknowledges that neither the Bajagua plan nor an upgrade at the IWTP in San Ysidro will address those untreatable wet-weather flows or the threat they pose to the beaches of Imperial Beach. When asked why he supports Bajagua, then, he says it’s the better of the two options on the table.

Filner’s rationale seems confusing, at best. The congressman aggressively lobbied to pass a bill that would comprehensively address the Tijuana sewage problem, yet he openly admits the plan he supports will have no effect where the problem is most pronounced. He’s also pledged to block any Congressional attempt to appropriate funds to finish the IWTP (since upgrading the existing facility would obviate the necessity of Bajagua’s Mexico plant).

THOUGH BAJAGUA touted itself from its earliest days as a comprehensive fix to the border sewage problem, spokesperson Craig Benedetto has backed off that claim. Instead, he calls the plan a first step, one part of a comprehensive solution. Which gives validity to Mayda Winter’s fear: Given congressional reluctance to appropriate money to finish work at the San Ysidro plant, Washington would be unlikely to appropriate any more than the $30 million to $39 million per year the Bajagua plant will cost taxpayers.

The apparent change in Bajagua’s tune is illustrative. The company’s PR machine—as one observer says—is as slick as a greased melon. Benedetto touts Public Law 106-457 as a piece of universally popular legislation endorsed by two presidents and unanimously passed by the House and Senate, adding for emphasis that it was supported by all 535 members of Congress.

Former IBWC commissioner Little balks at that. She points out the Bajagua proposal was originally rejected by the Clinton administration and the EPA, and that the IBWC was opposed to it from the outset. Furthermore, she says, the bill was pushed through late in the congressional cycle; it was slipped into a larger and more popular bill; and it was put to a voice vote. Few—if any—of those congressmen were likely aware of it, she says.

Little may be right. But Benedetto may be, too. And the chasm between their points of view is evidence of the enormous breadth of wiggle room existing between perception and reality in the rarefied air of Washington. It’s in that space that the magic of spin is cultured and reaped by politicians and PR wizards. Benedetto, for example, lambastes the IWTP at San Ysidro as an inadequate facility, lacking capacity for Tijuana’s needs, which has never done its job—a multimillion-dollar albatross for U.S. taxpayers.

Do you like what you read? Subscribe to San Diego Magazine »