Sticking with it                           

Bajagua has had a long haul on water project

Monday, June 24, 2004
By Kevin Christensen

SAN DIEGO ,— After spending 10 years on the $20 million on the Bajagua project, Jim Simmons is close to ensuring every drop of water pouring out of the Tijuana River is clean.

Currently, 60 million gallons of untreated sewage flows from Tijuana daily. But just 25 million gallons re subsequently treated to levels that meet stage one U.S. Environmental Protection Agency standards, not allowing it to be used even for toilet water. The remainder flows to the ocean.

The sewage issue has been a contentious one between Americans and Mexicans for a number of years, as the sewage flows north to pollute San Diego beaches and neither government showed interest in committing funds to fix it.

Simmons is a managing partner of Bajagua, a private firm that has initiated a cross-border project that includes the Mexican and United States governments to help treat sewage that flows into the Tijuana River and out into the Pacific Ocean.

The idea behind Bajagua’s project is relatively simple: Build a treatment facility to capture all the sewage, and clean it to secondary and later tertiary standards - both, cleaner current results. Some water would then be sent out to the ocean and some sent back to Mexico for industrial uses.

However, progress on the project can easily be considered a massive logistical nightmare.

“None of this has happened very easily,” Simmons said. ‘When you are dealing with two federal governments, two state governments, two county governments, two city governments, in two different countries – it’s quite a trick.”

But the dream may finally come to fruition shortly – a relative time span, when discussing water and international projects.

Going though a lengthy and often exhausting bureaucratic process is nothing new to Simmons, a 25 year veteran of the land use and entitlement business in San Diego. He first came to San Diego with the Navy in 1967. After finishing his commission, Simmons went back to school and got a degree in urban planning.

Following a stint in the plastic manufacturing business, he started a land use consulting firm called Jim Simmons and Associates. The company handled residential, commercial and industrial design jobs specializing in planning landfills and water treatment facilities in Riverside and San Bernardino counties.

Simmons became quite familiar with working with municipalities as well as community members.

“Nobody likes to have a landfill or a wastewater treatment plant built next to their house;” he said. “We worked on a half dozen and only two have ever been built.”

Another experience that helped cultivate his knowledge of the inner workings of municipalities was sewing on the San Marcos City Council as the vice mayor from 1982 to 1986.

The work, on the Bajagua project began in 1992.

Simmons came into contact with his current partner, Enrique Landa, through a business encounter and both wanted to do something about the sewage problems.

A treatment plant was completed in April 1997, located about 2 miles west of the San Ysidro border crossing. The plant treats about 25 million gallons per day. The water is taken from Tijuana, piped to the treatment plant in the United States, cleaned and discharged out to sea from an outfall pipe off Imperial Beach.

The project was completed through a partnership between the International Boundary and Water Commission and the Mexican government.

A secondary facility was .to be built to increase the amount of water and improve the treatment level. However, the cost of the project, originally estimated to be about $100 million, ballooned to $400 million. As a result, the second part of the project was scrapped.

Simmons and Landa believed this was not enough to properly handle the sewage problem.

Bajagua proposed building another treatment facility on the Mexican side of the border, to clean 57 million gallons of sewage per day to cleaner standards.

That proposal was made and rejected in 1996 because federal legislation was needed.

Part of the problem was that neither government was accustomed to entering a public— private partnership of this nature, where Bajagua pays for the construction and is paid back later, Simmons said.

“It was a total different approach, which required changing the thinking on how these projects are done,” he said.

Finally, in 2000, former- President Clinton signed a law allowing for the facility to be built and privately funded. The State Department was directed to begin negotiations with Mexico for an agreement.

However, the plans fell back into a malaise of bureaucratic stalling for the next couple of years.

“The holdup is that there had to be some shift in thinking at International Boundary and Water Commission from government project to private project,” Simmons said.

Progress began again when with the appointment of Arturo Duran to the commissioner of the IBWC.

‘Arturo, the new commissioner, is changing at the leadership level and we seem to be moving in the right direction,” Simmons said.

The project is moving forward, and a substantial team working toward completion includes lawyers, environmental and public relations specialists, and engineers, Simmons said.

“The process has been pretty well orchestrated over the years and we think it will succeed,” he said. ‘We arc quite certain that there are few, if any, companies that have stuck with it as long as we have.”