By Jose E. Navarro, MBA | San Diego County | September 18, 2026
SAN DIEGO — On September 1, county supervisors voted to build a locally funded treatment system for the Tijuana River, a project officials say could ultimately run close to $1 billion. Before evaluating whether that number is wise, it’s worth examining a smaller one first: $2.5 million, the no-bid federal contract awarded to an Ohio company to test an experimental “bubble curtain” treatment technology on the river. A single October 2025 storm swept the equipment away. No public accounting of what taxpayers got for the money has followed. That is the track record the county’s new billion-dollar commitment now has to overcome.
The first tranche of the new plan is smaller and more concrete: $1.8 million for preliminary engineering, plus $4 million earmarked for the Saturn Boulevard hotspot, where sewage-tainted water turns airborne and drifts into nearby homes. Multiply that pace by the full buildout Board Chair Terra Lawson-Remer says the region needs, and the billion-dollar estimate stops looking like a ceiling and starts looking like a floor.
This publication has tracked the money already sunk into this crisis: more than $600 million appropriated to rebuild the South Bay International Wastewater Treatment Plant after the U.S. side let it run on roughly $4 million in maintenance funding across an entire decade, a binational Minute 328 accord committing $474 million more, and a state grant of $46 million this June. None of it has stopped the beach closures, now past 1,300 consecutive days. The pattern here is not a shortage of money. It is a shortage of anyone visibly accountable for how the money already spent was tracked, and the no-bid bubble-curtain contract is the clearest recent example: an untested technology, a vendor with no apparent local track record, and a storm that ended the experiment before anyone had to explain the results. None of that changes the upstream math, either: Tijuana’s own utility, CESPT, is funded almost entirely by user fees that do not cover basic maintenance, which is why the region keeps reacting to collapsed pipelines instead of preventing them. A billion dollars spent entirely on San Diego’s side of the border does not fix a funding structure broken on the other side of it.
The county’s own governance record on this crisis doesn’t inspire confidence either. In October 2024, Supervisor Lawson-Remer moved to pursue a federal Superfund designation for the Tijuana River Valley, a step that could have compelled intensive EPA testing and unlocked cleanup dollars from the parties actually responsible for the pollution. Board Chair Nora Vargas, whose own district includes the valley, delayed the vote 90 days for further analysis. By the time the board acted, EPA had already notified regional leaders it would not pursue Superfund status at all. Lawson-Remer collected 2,500 resident signatures and petitioned EPA directly; it didn’t matter. That is the same Board of Supervisors now overseeing a locally funded, near-billion-dollar construction project, without the public having seen a detailed cost breakdown, a competitive-bidding framework, or an oversight mechanism distinct from the one that let $2.5 million vanish into a storm drain.
None of this means the county’s new plan is the wrong call. Beach closures, hydrogen sulfide exposure, and disrupted Navy SEAL training are not problems San Diego can simply wait out while Washington and Mexico City negotiate. But “we have to do something” is not the same standard as “we have to do this specific thing, at this specific cost, with this specific oversight” — and on that second question, the county has not yet made its case. Before supervisors authorize the next tranche of what could become a billion-dollar local commitment, residents are owed a public accounting of who reviews the contracts, what happens when a vendor’s technology fails, and why the same board that stalled a federal cleanup designation for 90 days should be trusted to move faster, and more transparently, with its own money than it did with everyone else’s.
Human-Directed AI Journalism — reporting and analysis produced under human editorial direction with AI research and drafting assistance.