Still water in the Tijuana River Valley reflects the chirping birds who live there, giving the impression it is as nature made it — until you see the floating trash and smell the stagnant, polluted water.
For decades, activists tried to clean up the Tijuana River’s watershed as it flowed from Tijuana into San Diego's coastal waters, which are contaminated with both human and industrial waste.
A recent study from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography found that coastal pollution is also transferring to the air.
“This is nothing short of an environmental and public health crisis, and it has been made worse by the fact that California companies are part of the problem," said State Senator Steve Padilla Monday, while announcing SB 1178, a bill to address cross-border pollution.
“Our bill would require California companies and businesses licensed to do business and sell products in California that have more than 2,500 employees to publicly disclose their wastewater discharges that can result in contamination to California watersheds,” Padilla said.
Then those companies would be required to either clean up the mess themselves — or pay a fee for the state to do it for them.
“This is the way that we hold them accountable, and we are able to create and fund a resource so that we can begin to mitigate all of these impacts,” said Imperial Beach Mayor Paloma Aguirre.
Those impacts include hundreds of days of beach closures in her city.
Padilla also introduced a bill to halt the development of a landfill in the area. Text of SB 1208 said, "This bill would additionally prohibit a regional water board from issuing a waste discharge permit for a new landfill that is used for the disposal of nonhazardous solid waste if the land is located within the Tijuana River National Estuarine Research Reserve or within an area that is tributary to the Tijuana River."
Both bills are slated to be heard in the legislature this year, and the state senate is also considering a joint bill urging Congress to support Pres. Biden’s $310 million supplemental funding request to fix and expand the South Bay International Wastewater Plant.
In the meantime, the pollution still flows north.
