The California Legislature has unanimously approved a resolution urging President Joe Biden and Congress to expedite solutions to the Tijuana sewage crisis.
Assembly Joint Resolution 12 urges federal lawmakers to fully fund a multimillion-dollar plan to capture and treat sewage-polluted water that frequently spills over the border from Tijuana into the ocean near South San Diego shorelines. In future budgets, the resolution adds, the federal government must include sufficient ongoing operation and maintenance funding for a San Ysidro-based wastewater plant that treats Tijuana sewage.
Additionally, the measure asks that Biden declare a national emergency.
Assemblymember David Alvarez, whose District 80 includes the affected South County communities, authored the bill. More than 70 legislators co-sponsored it.
“Pollution in the Tijuana River is an urgent environmental and public health crisis that demands immediate federal action,” Alvarez said Tuesday, the 1,000th consecutive day that ocean shorelines from the border to the south end of Seacoast Drive in Imperial Beach have been shuttered due to sewage contamination. “With the passage of AJR 12, we are sending a clear message to our federal leaders that the time to act is now.”
AJR 12 calls for complete funding of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Comprehensive Infrastructure Solution plan.
The EPA’s plan involves a slate of public projects, including doubling the capacity of the San Ysidro-based South Bay International Wastewater Treatment Plant, which treats wastewater from Tijuana, as well as installing a pumping system in the Tijuana River north of the U.S.-Mexico border to suck polluted flows out of the channel before they can reach San Diego beaches. Trash booms would be installed directly upstream of the intake.
The $630 million blueprint secured $300 million from Congress in 2020 to expand the South Bay plant’s capacity. But last year, the federal agency managing the facility said it would need at least $150 million to bring the aging plant up to working condition due to deferred maintenance.
Earlier this year, Congress approved giving the U.S. International Boundary and Water Commission, which manages the San Ysidro plant, a $103 million increase to its annual construction budget used for projects across the border.
The agency said it would put most of its new budget toward the South Bay plant. Officials also announced late last month that they had secured contractors to start repairing and expanding the facility, but about $200 million would still be needed to finish the work.
AJR 12 will be sent to Congress and the White House, officials said.
As with state joint resolutions, it did not require Gov. Gavin Newsom’s signature. Though many officials and advocates have pushed Newsom to declare the crisis an emergency, his administration has repeatedly made the case that the issue is a federal one and that a state proclamation is unnecessary to trigger a federal emergency declaration.
“We followed that guidance and, therefore, AJR 12 calls on the federal government to declare an emergency because transboundary waterways are ultimately within their jurisdiction,” Alvarez’s Office said in an emailed statement. “By all intents and purposes, in approving AJR 12, the State Legislature considers this issue to be an emergency and with the expectation that the federal government will too.”
Last week during a visit to the South Bay plant, U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Richard Verma said a federal emergency declaration has not been issued because federal emergency assistance laws do not apply to the South Bay plant.
However, he added, “we are operating with a degree of emergency in our efforts.”
The resolution is the first in several years since the Legislature issued a statewide call for action on the sewage crisis. In 2018, the Legislature approved Senate Joint Resolution 22, which urged the federal government “to take immediate action.”
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