For more than three decades, federal, state and local officials have focused attempts to stop sewage-laden flows that contaminate southern San Diego County beaches, poison the Tijuana River Valley and sicken thousands by expanding a treatment plant in San Ysidro.
But that fixation obscures a basic truth embraced by many experts: The Tijuana River sewage crisis can’t be fixed downstream in the United States.
“I don’t think there’s any realistic scenario where downstream investments alone can solve this problem,” said Paul Ganster, a professor and director emeritus of San Diego State University’s Institute for Regional Studies of the Californias. Ganster has worked on transborder issues, including sewage flows, since 1980.
Tijuana was about half its current size when leaders decided to build the South Bay treatment plant to address sewage flows in the Tijuana River. (Photo by Thomas Murphy/Times of San Diego)Congress recently appropriated more than $600 million to repair and expand the South Bay International Wastewater Treatment Plant — and the Environmental Protection Agency signed an agreement last year to “permanently end the Tijuana River sewage crisis.”But the funding and agreement won’t prevent pollution from the rapidly growing Tijuana metropolis that exceeds the capacity of the South Bay plant and another smaller plant on the Mexican side of the border.The crisis requires funding for infrastructure, operations and maintenance that can capture residential and industrial wastewater upstream in Tijuana, Ganster said.
“This funding has never materialized,” he said.
A report earlier this year from the San Diego Regional Chamber of Commerce similarly reframes the debate around the source of the problem: an aging, underfunded wastewater system in Tijuana, with failing pipelines, overtaxed pump stations, limited treatment capacity, weak asset management and no reliable long-term funding.
Its conclusion is unavoidable: As long as the upstream system remains broken, no amount of downstream investment can solve the crisis.
A downstream fix for an upstream problem
The Tijuana River watershed spans about 1,750 square miles, roughly three-quarters in Mexico. Tijuana, home to more than 2 million people, sits on hills and mesas draining north across the border into the Tijuana River Valley in the far southwestern corner of San Diego and out to the Pacific.
The hydrology is simple and unforgiving. Water runs downhill, and sewage is mostly water. Once it escapes the leaky, overburdened sewage system in Tijuana, or from neighborhoods not connected to it, gravity takes over and sends the flow into the United States.
Decades ago, U.S. policymakers chose to respond from the north side of the border by building the South Bay plant, completed in 1997, when Tijuana was about half its current size.
Tijuana River Valley watershed, on both sides of the border. (Image courtesy of Tijuana River National Estuarine Research Reserve)In its design specifications, the plant is defined as a safety net, not a primary solution. It was designed to treat excess sewage flows from Tijuana. When the current expansion is complete, the South Bay plant will be the largest sewage-treatment plant handling Tijuana wastewater — and it still won’t be big enough.
The South Bay plant treats wastewater conveyed through a pipe from Tijuana’s system and receives flows intercepted by a series of border structures built to catch polluted runoff that escapes that system. But when those collectors are overwhelmed by frequent spills from Tijuana system malfunctions, flows from unsewered neighborhoods and heavy winter storms, raw sewage bypasses the South Bay plant and continues north into the Tijuana River and the ocean.
But the chamber’s report — in a chapter bluntly titled “Challenges in Tijuana” — says more than three-quarters of the city’s sewer network requires urgent rehabilitation, and 55 of 72 major pipelines need immediate attention. More than half of the city’s pump stations require short-term repair. Parts of the city have no sewage system at all, with raw sewage flowing directly into the watershed.
The problem will very likely get worse. Tijuana’s population is projected to rise from about 1.8 million in 2020 to 2.4 million by 2050. Wastewater flows are expected to increase from about 67 million gallons a day to about 92 million — far beyond current treatment capacity.
Tijuana has another treatment plant that is smaller than the South Bay plant. That plant can manage 18 million gallons of wastewater per day, and was inoperable until recently due to severe disrepair. Without sustained investment in an adequate sewage system, failures and cross-border sewage discharges will escalate.
“When you look at the problem upstream, we are not yet aligned with the level of investment that’s actually required. We’re still largely reacting when the crisis becomes impossible to ignore.”
Kenia ZamarripaToday, the South Bay plant is being expanded to treat 50 million gallons a day, after years of decay and deferred maintenance. Politicians — from county supervisors to the Trump administration — are promoting the expansion as a final answer to fix the whole problem.
“We are no longer going to talk about the problem,” San Diego County Supervisor Paloma Aguirre said. “We are going to solve it.” An EPA press release described the expansion as a milestone toward a “permanent, 100% solution.” The chamber report supports completing that work. But it also makes clear that the South Bay plant is one piece of a much larger modern system that’s needed.
A billion-dollar strategy that still falls short
More than $1 billion has been spent, appropriated or allocated to the downstream solution, centered on the South Bay plant. Beginning in the 1990s, the United States and Mexico — mostly the United States — poured roughly $600 million into building, operating and maintaining the plant, its ocean outfall and the border collection infrastructure. Since 2020, Congress first provided another $300 million, and later federal funding brought the South Bay plant expansion package to roughly $650 million.
The report also warns that chronic underfunding of operations and maintenance will perpetuate failures even after major capital investments — including at the expanded South Bay plant.
Tijuana’s unresolved financing gap
A structural reality undermines progress: Tijuana’s sewage system is run not by the city, but by the state of Baja California through CESPT, the state-owned utility. It is a bit like if San Diego’s system was run out of Sacramento.
That helps explain the persistent dysfunction. Planning and funding decisions are distant, responsibility is fragmented, and CESPT is under severe financial strain. About 96% of its revenue comes from service fees, yet those revenues fall short of maintaining the system or moving toward proactive management. Federal funding from Mexico is limited, difficult to access and tied to short cycles that hinder long-term planning.
The result is a utility forced into a reactive posture, waiting for catastrophic failures instead of systematically replacing failing assets.
Kenia Zamarripa, vice president of international and public affairs for the chamber, oversees international relations, public policy and binational initiatives. She puts it plainly: “There’s been a lot of commitment in principle — MOUs, conversations,” she said. “But the real question is: Where is the actual appropriation of funds going to come from, and on what timeline?”
Ducks search for food in the severely polluted water of the Tijuana River at the Saturn Boulevard hotspot. (Photo by Thomas Murphy/Times of San Diego)On the Mexican side, she said, the system’s financing has never matched the scale of the problem.
“The commission — CESPT — charges very little per household,” Zamarripa said. “So you have to ask: Does Mexico need to charge more? Does the federal government step in? It’s still not clear where that funding will come from.”
In a 2022 binational agreement, Mexico pledged roughly $144 million toward sanitation projects, but only about $51 million has been secured. The same shortfall exists in operations and maintenance. On the U.S. side, only $4 million was spent on maintenance at the South Bay plant between 2010 and 2021, even as assets deteriorated. A 2022 assessment found 36% of the South Bay plant’s assets in critical condition.
“They can’t succeed without adequate operations and maintenance funding,” Zamarripa said. “If you don’t maintain what you already have, you’re just scaling up a problem.”
Ganster said operations and maintenance are always the Achilles’ heel for wastewater treatment systems.
“Construction gets attention,” he said. “Maintenance doesn’t. This is not unique to Mexico. San Diego had a lot of problems with sewage spills for years. We finally got that straightened out when we adequately funded upgrades, operations and maintenance.”
Politicians in Mexico are no different from those in the United States, Ganster said. They like publicity opportunities such as groundbreaking ceremonies or passing funding bills for new projects. But securing long-range spending for operations and maintenance is not politically sexy.
A system trapped by politics
With sewage flows likely to increase as Tijuana grows, the usual political script feels increasingly absurd. U.S. federal officials hail “permanent” solutions. State leaders point to “real progress.” County supervisors declare emergencies — and now propose sewage crisis spending as a priority of a local tax measure. Lawmakers clear regulatory hurdles to speed spending on the latest project.
Most of that work is necessary. But today’s focus on building solutions at the border ignores the imperative to address upstream problems and develop long-range funding, particularly for operations and maintenance.
Zamarripa suggests the region is still not acting at that scale.
“When you look at the problem upstream, we are not yet aligned with the level of investment that’s actually required,” she said. “We’re still largely reacting when the crisis becomes impossible to ignore.”
Ganster and others believe only a local binational border wastewater agency can build, operate and maintain a collection and treatment system for sewage flows that don’t respect the international boundary.Such an agency — with dedicated, long-term funding — could transcend political cycles in state and national capitals. While the International Boundary and Water Commission, which operates the South Bay plant, was once envisioned as such an agency, it’s constrained by its uncertain place within the U.S. State Department, a bureaucratic pileup of rival priorities and political crosscurrents 3,000 miles away in Washington.
“This requires sustained decision-making over decades among all parties involved,” Ganster said. “It’s not just about one agreement or one project. You don’t fix a wastewater system in a year or two, and certainly not in our binational border region.”
Jeff Crooks, a professor and research director since 2002 for the Tijuana River National Estuarine Research Reserve — a 2,500 acre area of protected coastal wetland where river, marsh and ocean meet —works at the epicenter of the transborder pollution crisis.
The persistent failures in Tijuana’s sewage infrastructure demand an approach that is not focused on infrastructure investments on the U.S. side of the border, he said.
“I can’t imagine this would be a viable long-term solution,” Crooks said.
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