The sprawling estuary of the Tijuana River was the setting State Sen. Steve Padilla chose to announce his proposal. The wetland in Imperial Beach is home to wildlife but it also bears the impact of a constant stream of sewage and industrial pollution the river carries to the ocean.
His bill, SB 10, would amend existing law to try to solve the problem.
It would allow revenues from a toll on vehicles that will use a new border crossing to be spent not just on transportation but also on environmental clean up.
“So many of the issues in the Tijuana River watershed that are not just degrading an incredible resource but are having tremendous public health impacts on our community,” Padilla said. “That should be unacceptable not only here but around the state of California and around this nation.”
The pollution of the Tijuana River is addressed, with limited success, by numerous public agencies. But Padilla argues there is no dedicated source of revenue to fix the problem. It relies on annual allocations that may or may not be forthcoming.
His bill would create an environmental mitigation fund, taken from a toll that will be charged to traffic that will use the Otay Mesa East border crossing. That crossing is still under construction and will be designed mainly for commercial traffic.
The toll was authorized by the state two years ago, and it’s meant to pay for projects related to transportation and border crossing.
But Padilla says you can’t enable a huge movement of people and goods across the international border, and not address environmental impacts.
“The fact that you have one of the worst environmental disasters occurring in North America occurring and we don’t have, in some respects, permanent funding,” he said.
Paloma Aguirre is the mayor of Imperial Beach, which is on the receiving end of a lot of that pollution. Her city has backed the creation of an environmental mitigation fund, and she said taking a portion of the toll would easily fund it.
“By allocating 1% of annual toll revenues or roughly $25 million (a year) to help South Bay communities eliminate pollution impacting our health,” Aguirre said.
And what could you do with $25 million a year to stop pollution? Aguirre said mitigation can’t be just sewage treatment, which only treats residential wastewater.
“They do not treat industrial wastewater, which is our most concerning source of pollution, which is going completely untreated into the river and into our communities, into the ocean,” she said.
So far, it’s hard to know how much political support Padilla's bill has garnered.
The San Dieago Association of Governments (SANDAG) San Diego’s regional planning agency, will collect and manage the toll revenue and the mitigation fund, and officials there have no comment on SB 10. They said, in a statement, that they are still studying the proposal.
