New mayor vows to tackle the Tijuana sewage crisis
Imperial Beach’s Paloma Aguirre steps up the fight for clean South Bay beaches.
The newly minted mayor says her top priority next year will be working with officials in Baja California, Mexico, to stem the pollution that routinely spills over the border and floats up the coastline.
“It’s not just about speaking the language,” she told the San Diego Union-Tribune. “It’s about understanding the culture. I can navigate that.”
Aguirre was born to immigrant parents who waited tables in San Francisco. When she was 8, the family moved back to their hometown of Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, where she graduated from high school.
In her early 20s, she traveled to Imperial Beach for a body-boarding competition; within two years she was a full-time resident taking psychology classes at the University of San Diego. She went on to become the first person in her family to graduate from college.
“I was surfing IB without a wetsuit in the middle of October,” Aguirre, 45, recalled. “I just fell in love with it. I was like, ‘I want to live here,’ and I never went back.”
Eventually, she met clean-water crusader Serge Dedina — who preceded Aguirre as Imperial Beach mayor, holding the role for eight years — and got involved with his binational nonprofit, Wildcoast. The two worked together for years on issues aimed at conserving coastal ecosystems.
“Paloma’s a tenacious environment advocate,” said Dedina. “She never hesitated in calling out people for not doing their jobs. That’s the kind of attitude that will help to fix this problem.”
Aguirre, who was elected to the City Council in 2018 and previously worked for Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.) in Washington, D.C., has a master’s degree in marine biodiversity and conservation from UC San Diego’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography.
As the city’s leader, her challenge remains stopping the flow of sewage from Tijuana that routinely fouls South Bay beaches.
Her main objective next year will be to get the governor of Baja California, Marina del Pilar Ávila, to overhaul or replace an aging wastewater facility about six miles south of the border at Punta Bandera.
The San Antonio de los Buenos treatment plant discharges up to 35 million gallons of raw sewage into the Pacific Ocean each day, according to estimates from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
“I’m calling on her to schedule a meeting in January,” Aguirre said of the Baja California governor. “We need to sit down, and she needs to explain to me what the timeline to fix Punta Bandera is. Period.”
For years, environmental regulators thought sewage pouring over the border from Mexico was largely the result of heavy winter rains that flushed polluted runoff and wastewater through the Tijuana River channel into the estuary in Imperial Beach.
In late 2021, researchers confirmed what lifeguards and surfers had long suspected: Imperial Beach is polluted even in summer, when ocean currents carry plumes of feces and pathogens from the plant as far north as Coronado.
Mexico has reportedly approved funding of $140 million through 2027 to upgrade sewage pipes and other facilities in Tijuana as part of a cross-border deal with the U.S.
Aguirre has argued that spending at least some of that on fixing the treatment plant would be in both countries’ best interest.
“Let’s not forget the people who constantly get sick in Tijuana and Rosarito,” she said. “I work with [nongovernmental organizations] in Tijuana, and that’s something I hear from them constantly. Their situation is even worse, because they don’t have a beach monitoring system.”
The South Bay has made strides toward stemming the pollution since a massive sewage spill in 2017 triggered a public outcry and a Clean Water Act lawsuit against the federal government.
In response, the EPA has drafted a plan to address the situation, focusing largely on rerouting some of the wastewater pumped to Punta Bandera to an expanded South Bay International Wastewater Treatment Plant along the border in San Diego.
The agency has secured roughly $300 million through the 2019 trade agreement with Mexico and Canada. That money needs a legislative fix before it can be spent, but federal officials aim to have shovels in the ground by 2024.
The largely bipartisan effort to attract federal funding has included everyone from former San Diego Mayor Kevin Faulconer, a Republican, to Rep. Scott Peters (D-San Diego).
Coronado Mayor Richard Bailey said he feels confident relief is within reach.
“I look forward to continuing the positive working relationship that Mayor Dedina and I had with Mayor Aguirre,” said Bailey. “I’m confident we can see this project to completion.”
Still, Aguirre is not taking anything for granted. She said she plans to make regular trips to Washington to lobby personally on behalf of her constituents.
“I get it. I’ve lived there,” she said of her time in the capital. “You have to be constant and consistent and relentless. The squeaky wheel gets the grease.”
The EPA plan also envisions building pumps in the Tijuana River’s concrete-lined channel to suck out polluted flows during rain. Mexico has such a system on its side of the border, but the intake is frequently broken or clogged. By the end of her first term as mayor, Aguirre said, she hopes to have the funding to complete the EPA’s plan.
“That’s going to be my lift over the next four years,” she said. “I’m going to go up to D.C. and knock on all the doors that matter. You’ve got to be strategic about it. You’ve got to meet with the budget subcommittee on the House side and the same on the Senate side and also with EPA administration and other agencies that manage funding.”
Meanwhile, Aguirre said, she supports the county’s new DNA-based water-quality testing, rolled out May 5, which has repeatedly found high levels of bacteria along South Bay shorelines, even when Tijuana’s rivers and creeks are dry.
The new approach has triggered a string of beach closures. Leaders in Imperial Beach and Coronado initially expressed frustration, calling to put the testing back on the shelf rather than close off shorelines. They argued that their beaches weren’t any more polluted than in years past and that the county test was overly sensitive.
The county declined to change course on its new approach to ocean monitoring, which took nearly a decade to develop and was approved by state and federal officials. Rather, public health officials started posting blue warning signs that give beachgoers discretion about getting in the water.
Aguirre said she welcomes more information about water quality if it means keeping residents safe.
“We’re all terrified that our kids are going to acquire some rare illness,” she said. “We can’t change the systems that are in place to protect our health. We need to eliminate the source that’s causing our health issues.”
