By Jose E. Navarro | The Navarro Report | Investigative Report
Every summer for the past several years, the same warning signs have gone up on the sand from the Tijuana Slough to Coronado’s Glorietta Bay: elevated bacteria, unsafe for swimming, stay out of the water. In June 2026, another rupture in a Mexican wastewater pipeline sent millions of gallons of sewage-tainted flow toward the Pacific, forcing closures from Imperial Beach through the Silver Strand and into Coronado. A month later, Glorietta Bay closed again. By July, panelists gathered in Coronado to ask a question South Bay residents have been asking for three decades: why is this still happening?
The scale is no longer in dispute. Since October 2023 alone, an estimated 31 billion gallons of raw sewage, polluted stormwater and trash have poured down the Tijuana River into the Tijuana River Valley and the Pacific Ocean, according to San Diego Coastkeeper. On bad days, as much as 30 to 50 million gallons of contaminated flow crosses the border daily. Hydrogen sulfide gas bubbles up from the river and drifts into South Bay neighborhoods, where residents report headaches and breathing trouble just from stepping outside. Children at YMCA Camp Surf in Imperial Beach have had their home beach off-limits for most of the summer since 2023, and this year campers are bused as far as Mission Beach just to get in the water.
What makes this an investigation into leadership, and not simply an environmental story, is how avoidable much of the last three years has been. The physical cause of the crisis is well understood: Tijuana’s wastewater system, including the Punta Bandera and San Antonio de los Buenos treatment plants, has been outpaced by the city’s growth and left in disrepair, while the U.S.-run South Bay International Wastewater Treatment Plant (SBIWTP) has operated for years below the capacity the region actually needs. Neither failure happened overnight. Both were allowed to happen by officials on both sides of the border who had the authority, and often the money, to act sooner.
A revolving door in Tijuana
On the Mexican side, the utility responsible for Tijuana’s wastewater system has churned through 15 directors in 12 years, according to Hernando Durán Cabrera, a former official at the agency who now leads Tijuana Verde. That kind of turnover makes sustained investment nearly impossible; every new director inherits a crumbling system and rarely stays long enough to fix it. Meanwhile, the Punta Bandera plant routinely discharges effluent beyond its treatment capacity directly onto the beach roughly five miles south of the border, a practice that continued through 2026 even as officials on both sides held press conferences pledging solutions.
Washington’s slow-motion neglect
On the U.S. side, the SBIWTP’s Junction Box 1 sat broken from 2021 until federal officials finally broke ground on repairs in late 2024, three years after it failed. The plant’s full rehabilitation and expansion, needed to push treatment capacity from 25 million gallons a day to 50, was not fully funded until February 2025, after years of piecemeal appropriations and a $600 million price tag that kept climbing as officials discovered the extent of the damage. Imperial Beach Mayor Paloma Aguirre, who has become the most visible local voice demanding accountability, put the failure bluntly to federal regulators in 2023: how did the water board and the EPA let the plant’s failures reach this point. Construction on the expansion is not expected to finish for years, meaning the region’s chief physical defense against Tijuana’s sewage will remain undersized through the rest of this decade.
The county’s own delay
Local leadership has its own record to answer for. In October 2024, San Diego County Supervisor Terra Lawson-Remer proposed pursuing a federal Superfund designation for the Tijuana River Valley, a step that could have compelled intensive EPA testing and unlocked cleanup dollars from responsible parties. Board Chair Nora Vargas, whose district includes the valley, moved to delay the vote 90 days for further legal and property-value analysis. The board split 3-2 along those lines, with Vargas and her Republican colleagues prevailing over Lawson-Remer and Supervisor Monica Montgomery Steppe. Lawson-Remer went around the board anyway, collecting more than 2,500 resident signatures and petitioning the EPA directly. The agency ultimately notified regional leaders it would not further assess the valley for Superfund status at all, a dead end that critics argue might have been avoided, or at least tested sooner, had the board not stalled its own supervisor’s motion for three months during an active public health emergency.
Money without a finish line
State leadership has moved money toward the problem, including $46 million Governor Gavin Newsom announced in June 2026 for cross-border contamination efforts, on top of nine new state insurance and infrastructure laws. But San Diego’s Congressional delegation has spent years asking Washington for supplemental funding it did not receive on the first, second or third request, and state officials continue to say the federal government must do more even as they add their own dollars. The result is a pattern familiar to South Bay residents: every layer of government points to another layer of government, funding arrives late and partial, and the deadlines slip. A 2024 target for the Punta Bandera plant to be fully operational came and went; beaches were still closing in Coronado, well north of the historic hot spots, in June and July of this year.
“Everybody talks, nobody solves”
That was how Durán Cabrera summarized the crisis at July’s Coronado panel, and it is hard to argue with him. Former Imperial Beach Mayor Serge Dedina, who grew up in the South Bay, teared up describing what his hometown has lost. San Diego State University professor emeritus Paul Ganster has spent more than four decades on transborder water issues and says plainly that no amount of downstream investment in San Diego can fix a problem whose source is upstream, in Tijuana. Every expert who has studied this crisis agrees a lasting fix requires sustained binational cooperation that survives elections on both sides of the border. Every layer of leadership involved, Mexican, federal, state and county, has instead treated the crisis as something to manage in press releases between changes of administration.
What accountability would look like
None of this means solutions are out of reach. The SBIWTP expansion is now fully funded and under construction, dry-weather flows into the Tijuana River have already dropped from roughly 35-40 million gallons a day to about 15 through recent diversion projects, and the trash boom installed in the Tijuana River Estuary captured more than 1,500 tons of debris this past wet season. Those are real, measurable gains. What is missing is not engineering, it is political durability: a director in Tijuana who stays long enough to finish a project, a county board willing to move at the speed of a public health emergency rather than the speed of a re-election calendar, and a binational structure that does not reset every time leadership changes in Mexico City, Washington or San Diego. Until that changes, the warning signs on South Bay beaches will keep going up, and the people who grew up swimming there will keep waiting for leaders who treated their water as an emergency instead of an agenda item.
Human-Directed AI Journalism: This article’s research and drafting were assisted by AI tools, directed, fact-checked and edited by a human journalist.