| Public-private funding is seen for
sewage plant
Subtitle
By Leslie Wolf Branscomb
UNION-TRIBUNE STAFF WRITER
March 19, 2005
The U.S. International Boundary and Water Commission
is under a federal court order to begin building a secondary
sewage treatment plant at the border in 2006. However, the
federal government has allotted the agency only $1 million
for 2006, for construction of a plant that is estimated to
cost more than $120 million to build.
So how is this going to happen?
Officials of Bajagua LLC, the project which has the greatest
likelihood of winning the contract, say it’s no problem.
‘The cost of the project itself is going to be paid
upfront through private sources,” said Bajagua spokesman
Craig Benedetto. Bajagua is a private project, backed by a
group of U.S. and Mexican investors, which has been lobbying
for years for the contract to build the secondary treatment
plant.
The $1 million will go toward continuing negotiations, environmental
studies and preparations for awarding a construction contract,
Benedetto said.
Benedetto said Bajagua expects Congress to begin appropriating
larger amounts of money for the project beginning in 2007
or 2008, once the treatment plant is up and running.
Under the private-public partnership that Bajagua is hoping
to work out with the IBWC, the federal government would appropriate
the annual cost of operations and maintenance for the plant,
and the amortized cost of construction, with which the investors
would be repaid, Benedetto said.
But Mayda Winter, an Imperial Beach City Councilwoman who
has been involved in the border sewage debate for years, thinks
investors may not be willing to put up the capital without
some kind of assurance that the federal government will pay.
Imperial Beach bears the brunt of the raw sewage that flows
from Mexico into the ocean via that Tijuana River, particularly
during the rainy season. The city’s beaches have been
closed due to pollution intermittently since October.
The existing International Wastewater Treatment Plant on the
U.S. side of the border, built in 1997, treats up to 25 million
gallons a day of sewage to the advanced primary level before
discharging it into the ocean off of Imperial Beach.
However, environmental laws require cleaner secondary treatment,
and the state sued the federal government in 2001 to force
compliance.
A legal settlement reached in December calls for construction
of the secondary plant to begin no later than Sept. 15, 2006.
The plant is to be in operation by Sept. 30, 2008.
The Bajagua project, which is currently favored by the JBWC,
would be built in Tijuana on the Rio Alomar, not far from
the existing treatment plant on the U.S. side. Sewage would
be treated there, then piped back to the existing plant in
the U.S. and discharged through the outfall off of Imperial
Beach.
Winter said that even when the secondary treatment plant is
completed, the border sewage problem will not be solved because
it can only treat sewage that is pumped to the plant.
Some raw sewage flows come directly down canyons into the
river, particularly from Los Laureles Canyon in Mexico, where
hundreds of homes have been built without sewers and other
infrastructure.
“It basically percolates during the dry weather into
the soil,” Winter said. “The rain just lifts everything
out of the soil and flushes it, and that will continue as
long as we have a lack of infrastructure.”
The Bajagua project, Winter said, “does not represent
a comprehensive plan. We will still, the day that opens, continue
to have beach closures.”
Leslie Branscomb:
(619) 498-6630; Leslie.branscomb@uniontrib.com
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