A Sewer Runs Through It

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It’s true the IWTP has never lived up to the mandate of the treaty that established it, which called for it to treat 25 million gallons a day of Mexican sewage to secondary standards. But the plant has efficiently treat ed that 25 million gallons per day to advanced primary levels for 10 years. It hasn’t reached secondary standards because the IBWC’s hands have been bound by lack of funding and successive lawsuits—and more recently by the stalemate caused by the Filner/Bilbray law, which pulled the debacle in yet another direction. Bart Christensen, the civil engineer who’s been designing and reviewing plants for the California Water Resources Control Board for 32 years (and is highly respected by engineers south of the border), says the IWTP in San Ysidro was state-of-the-art when it began operations in 1997, and it was built with a modular design, making it easy to expand in the future, to treat up to 100 million gallons per day.

Libby Tortecini, with the Malcolm Pirnie Company, was the head designer of the plant. He got his master’s degree in environ mental engineering in 1972 and has been implementing public works for more than 30 years. Malcolm Pirnie is a century-old environmental consulting firm with a reputation described as sterling by industry insiders. When construction-industry authority Engineering News-Record ranked the top 500 design companies in the world, Malcolm Pirnie took 39th place overall and eighth in the world in the sewer/waste category. Through the bidding process, some of the most recognized and reputable companies in the world (Malcolm Pirnie and CH2M Hill among them) were enlisted to construct the IWTP.

“I’ve been working as a consultant and design engineer since 1978,” Tortecini says. “This wasn’t the first project I’ve overseen, and I was very satisfied. It was a group of professional engineers and licensed contractors doing the work. The notion that plant is not doing what it’s intended to do, that’s simply erroneous.”

A TOUR OF THE IWTP shows a massive plant working quietly, with little evident odor and minimal staffing—a state-of-the-art facility. Which casts doubt on the rest of Benedetto’s claims. If his assessment of the IWTP at San Ysidro—accurate by way of technicality—can be so at loggerheads with the perspectives of engineers from the state of California and the private sector, how is the public to hold him to account on the complicated scenarios of advanced finances and engineering that have to be digested to comprehend Bajagua?

Perhaps the most questionable Bajagua proposal is that the IWTP eventually be abandoned so its Mexican plant can take over full treatment duties. More than the hard work of scores of dedicated state and federal civil servants would be erased; $127 million of taxpayer-funded engineering would go down the drain.

But Bajagua’s plan is not without merit. Two undeniable factors set it apart from the proposal to upgrade the IWTP. One of the terms of the Bajagua proposal is that after 20 years, ownership of the Mexican facility reverts to Mexico—meaning that American taxpayers will be off the hook. No more paying to treat Tijuana’s wastewater. That’s a favorable objective the IWTP plan can’t match, and it’s evidence of the changing winds of Tijuana’s wastewater capabilities.

Bajagua’s other major potential plus is reclaimed water. Though plans (which are still in the primary stages) don’t officially include provisions for treating water to tertiary standards—a pricey process that would call for complex new systems and an involved conveyance network—the idea is gold en. The prospect of turning free wastewater into a commodity is the equivalent of modern-day alchemy. Bajagua claims it already has a concession from Mexico to sell the reclaimed water—by international agreement, Mexico still owns the sewage pumped out of its country—and insists there is a market for it in Tijuana. Others aren’t so sure.

Baja California water authorities say the two new plants they’ll be putting online in the next two years will clean sewage to near-reclaimed levels (sufficient for use with agriculture), but they anticipate they’ll be forced to dump the treated water back into the Tijuana River. There’s just no current market for reclaimed water, they say. San Diego has two water-reclamation plants of its own but flushes the bulk of their output into the ocean. That water, demonized with the “toilet-to-tap” moniker, has proven a tough sell.

Treating water is an expensive proposition, and the more the water is treated, the higher the cost. There’s no doubt fouled toilet water can be purified to levels that would match anything in an Evian bottle; the question is money. In the current picture, the potable-water demands of San Diego and Tijuana are met by the Colorado River. Anybody wanting to sell reclaimed water has to produce it at a price less than companies and municipalities pay for river water. And so far, given the exorbitant cost of treating water to tertiary standards, that hasn’t been a reality.

THE DEBATE surrounding reclaimed water has been the least of Bajagua’s worries since the scathing Project on Government Oversight report came out in spring 2006. The document details a history of campaign contributions by Bajagua principals that coincided with important votes and actions by Southern California politicians. The report says, “The story of the Bajagua Wastewater Treatment Plant is illustrative, not because it is unusual, but indeed because it represents business-as-usual in government contracting.” Representatives Filner and Bilbray—the public face of Bajagua’s congressional push—are singled out for the most egregious ethical lapses and apparent conflicts of interest. Representative Duncan Hunter and former representative Duke Cunningham are also taken to task.

Debra Little, who has a master’s degree in public administration and a master’s certificate in government contracting from George Washington University, was the chief of procurements for the IBWC for years before being promoted to principal engineer in 1997. She recalls attending an El Paso meeting with the Southern California delegation of Congress members and IBWC Commissioner Ramirez (who was already ailing from his brain disorder).

“At one point, Duke Cunningham had had enough talk, and he stood up and said, ‘God damn it, they’re [Bajagua] waiting right outside; why can’t we just get together with them and push this thing forward,’ ” Little says. “Duncan Hunter stood up and basically apologized for Cunningham’s language, and Silvestre Reyes [congressman from Texas] stood up and said, ‘If Commissioner Ramirez is not comfortable meeting with these people, then I’m not willing to support it.’ ”

Even more disturbing than imputed ethical lapses by Southern California politicians, Little says, is the no-bid nature of the law they drafted for Bajagua. A Bajagua spokesman says the IBWC put out “sources sought” notices early in the process but that no firms expressed interest in taking on the cross-border project, and so the decision was made to forgo bidding.

“It’s simple,” Benedetto says. “Nobody else wanted the job.”

The IBWC can’t say whether it did or didn’t publicize sources-sought notices, calling that part of the process “proprietary information.” But whether those notices were or weren’t publicized, federal acquisition regulations are very specific about reasons the bidding process can be suspended— and none of them applies to the Bajagua case.

“I had never met up with this before,” Little says. “I worked with the Army Corps of Engineers before the IBWC, and I worked on two international wastewater treatment plants with the commission, which we had bids for, and I’ve never experienced this.

“Is that what we’re about? We’ll spend millions and millions to do [the Bajagua plant] when the same thing could be accomplished with less money? That, to me, is the sadness of the whole sole-source argument; the reason you have full and open competition is to get the best value. [Soul source] goes against the whole backbone of the federal procurement system.”

WILLIAM WEAVER, a 10-year Army veteran and former National Security Agency asset, is a professor at the Institute for Policy and Economic Development at the University of Texas at El Paso and head of the National Security Whistleblowers Coalition. The coalition has documented the upheaval created at the IBWC by former commissioner Arturo Duran and intercepted a number of inter-agency e-mails that show officials there growing weary of the ethically questionable connections Bajagua had fostered in the White House and State Department.

“If you’re representing a relatively small, regional issue, how do you get two audiences with the vice president?” Weaver asks. “There’s only one answer: Duncan Hunter.”

As chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, Hunter would have had open access and regular contact with the White House, Weaver says. A 2003 e-mail from an IBWC employee to Mary Brandt, IBWC liaison with the State Department, says, “Note the coincidence—Bajagua met with VP Cheney yesterday and White House met with Hunter. Any readout from that meeting?”

In an unrelated e-mail, Brandt wrote to another IBWC staffer, “As to the traditional IBWC approach of planning, designing and constructing a project, feasibility studies that would examine sites and treatment technologies, etc., I got the impression that you can forget all of that and adapt to the new approach of the Public Law [106-457] . . . They [Bajagua] have the money from Solomon Bros. or some other investment firm and want to move forward. Money talks, and when I leave I think I’ll write a book about this experience. For now, I feel drained and in need of a shower.” (Brandt declined to discuss the e-mail.)

Earlier this year, Arturo Duran was identified as the “bag man” in a federal indictment (unrelated to Bajagua) charging an El Paso official with taking bribes for contract procurements. Duran, it says, representing a consulting firm and a construction company, was recorded on wire taps promising various campaign contributions (of $1,000 to $2,000) to political officials for the procurement of favorable contracts. He had been forced to resign as commissioner of the IBWC a year and a half before the indictment was opened, but his involvement with the case raises questions.

Asked about the appearance that Duran might have been appointed to the IBWC’s top spot to push through the Bajagua deal, the White House didn’t respond. When asked if Cheney interceded on behalf of Bajagua, White House spokesperson Megan Mitchell said contracts aren’t awarded through the vice president’s office and referred questions to the State Department. Weaver says it appears the White House has tried to put distance between itself and the Bajagua debacle, and he believes that process began after the critical Wall Street Journal article appeared in January.

“That was front-page news,” he says. “And now $66 million mysteriously shows up in the budget to finish the IWTP—the White House wants this to be over.”

ANSWERING CHARGES that Bajagua has no experience in wastewater construction, the company has said one of Enrique Landa’s companies built a treatment plant in Ciudad Obregon, Sonora, Mexico. Alberto Torres, an industrial engineer who runs the Sonora plant and several others for a private company called Solaqua, points out that many cities in Mexico contract with private companies, just as Bajagua is proposing. Privatization, he says, has been widely successful.

However, contrary to Bajagua’s claims, Torres says, Landa’s company liquidated and extricated itself from the Obregon project as a result of the peso devaluation in 1994 and had little if any involvement with the construction of the facilities there. Asked about the sole-source nature of Bajagua’s proposed deal, Torres responds, “Where is this project? My company wants to bid on it.”

As a private company, Bajagua isn’t subject to public ethics statutes, and because of proprietary restrictions, it’s not saddled with governmental transparency requirements. Its chief obligation is profit, and its only mandated duty is a return to shareholders. The Southern California congressional delegation, however, is charged with protecting the public trust.

For Lori Saldaña, the question is not one of privatization but honesty. The owners of the Mexican facility will be working without U.S. government oversight, she points out, despite the fact taxpayers will be paying them handsomely.

The Wall Street Journal called its article about Bajagua the “Smell Test,” and UTEP’s Professor Weaver says the odor goes all the way to the Washington, D.C. He questions the White House’s “privatized view of the public function” and wonders what happens to the tenets of open government when private-sector proprietary interests trump transparency rules. Furthermore, he says, because of the public-private nature of the Bajagua plan, the company isn’t subjected to the traditional factors of risk and profit that Americans have come to expect of the open market.

“Building a wastewater treatment plant is not rocket science, that’s for sure,” Weaver says. “But you definitely have to have experience, and you have to have a range of capacities, which Bajagua does not have. So are they just a front to get $600 million? They’re just investors that are going to contract out the building of the plant to actual professionals, and then the return over the next 20 years goes to them? What the hell do we need Bajagua for?

“One lawyer calls these ‘defraud-and-fleece contracts,’ ” he says. “If you strip away the stuff about the treatment plant and just look at what you have, the money flow, it is just a straight corruption gig. That’s it. You’re guaranteeing that these guys, who are well-connected with the [U.S. politicians], are going to get $30 million to $40 million a year for the next 20 years—that’s a nice retirement. If you strip away all the B.S., and look at what’s going on with the money and the organization of this plan, this program, I think it’s clear to anybody what’s happening.”

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