In reading Jim Gogek’s recent article about the Tijuana sewage crisis, one is reminded that the frustration surrounding this issue is real and warranted. Last week’s collapse of a major wastewater line and the resulting closure of several San Diego beaches was another reminder of just how fragile the system has become.
For decades, the Tijuana River watershed has reflected the consequences of inadequate urban planning, deferred investment, fragmented responsibility and aging infrastructure, leaving communities on both sides of the border with unsafe water and polluted air.
For San Diegans, constant beach closures have become routine. But they shouldn’t be.
Frustration on its own will not repair these systems or protect public health. Progress requires sustained investment, collaborative execution and institutional accountability. Today, across the CaliBaja region, we are beginning to see a monumental shift in that direction.
Across Tijuana and the broader watershed, long-delayed infrastructure projects are moving forward with a level of binational coordination that has been absent in the past.
Over the last three years, Mexico has invested $145 million, exceeding its near-term funding commitments for wastewater improvements tied to system rehabilitation and expanded treatment capacity.
Attention is also being given to the underlying vulnerabilities that have driven repeated failures. Rehabilitation of the Parallel Gravity Main is addressing a critical weakness in the collection system, while additional binational projects are replacing more than 35,000 feet of deteriorated pipeline and modernizing key lift stations. These efforts are expected to prevent millions of gallons of untreated sewage from entering the river each day.
For too long, infrastructure challenges in this watershed have been addressed in isolation –one project, one jurisdiction, one funding stream at a time. The integrated approach emerging — where investments are sequenced, coordinated, and reinforced across agencies and borders — is essential in a system where water and consequences do not stop at a line on a map.
This is precisely the role North American Development Bank was created to play.
For more than three decades, NADBank has operated as a binational platform to finance and deliver environmental infrastructure along the U.S.-Mexico border. In addition to funding projects, it connects partners, aligns priorities and ensures that investments translate into measurable outcomes. This collaboration and disciplined financing has become critical as infrastructure needs grow more complex and interdependent.
At the end of April, I joined the Comisión Estatal de Servicios Públicos de Tijuana, the Environmental Protection Agency and officials from the state of Baja California to break ground on a critical rehabilitation project in the Tijuana River area. This initiative will expand wastewater collection and conveyance infrastructure, an essential step toward improving cross-border water quality and strengthening public health in the region.
Even with this progress, it’s important to be clear about what’s ahead.
The Tijuana River watershed remains strained. Addressing these conditions requires not only completing projects already in motion, but sustaining the commitment that brought them forward in the first place.
That responsibility is shared by all partners: California, Baja California, Mexico, the United States and institutions like NADBank. They must sustain the commitment to working as a single system.
Thanks to foresight of the state Assembly, California has a clear opportunity to accelerate this progress through Proposition 4, which provides funding to address water quality challenges in cross-border systems. The impact of that investment will depend on how effectively it is deployed — prioritizing projects that are ready to move, reinforcing binational efforts already underway, and ensuring that new infrastructure is built with long-term operations and maintenance in mind.
Baja California and federal authorities in Mexico must maintain focus on high-impact projects and consistent execution. The United States must do the same, aligning federal resources with binational priorities and ensuring that timelines reflect the urgency communities are experiencing.
This watershed requires an interdependence of factors for water to flow. This interdependence is not a constraint but an opportunity that creates the basis for shared investment, shared accountability and shared success.
Realizing that opportunity requires consistency. It requires staying aligned even when progress is incremental. And it requires resisting the urge to measure outcomes only in moments of crisis, rather than over the full lifecycle of infrastructure that is built to last decades.
The Tijuana River crisis will not be solved by a single project, a single funding cycle or a single governmental entity. It will be solved through sustained investment, disciplined execution and a shared understanding that no jurisdiction can do this alone.
That is the work that we collectively have in front of us.
For the first time in years this work is underway, aligned and within reach, if we continue to move forward together.
John Beckham is managing director of the North American Development Bank, a binational financial institution created by the United States and Mexico to support infrastructure projects.
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