How a New US President Could Shake Up Tijuana Sewage Crisis | Voice of San Diego

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San Diegans across the political spectrum worry a changing of the guard at the White House could bring major upheaval to the federal agency on the frontlines of the Tijuana River sewage crisis: The International Boundary and Water Commission or IBWC.

The president of the United States appoints the IBWC leader and a post-election shake up could add uncertainty to the already precarious state of one of San Diego’s largest pollution problems. Treating millions of gallons of sewage spilling from Tijuana into San Diego is just one among myriad IBWC water management responsibilities along 1,255-miles of the U.S.-Mexico border. The grossly underfunded and little-known federal agency under the U.S. Department of State has trouble even doing that.

With little recourse to hold Mexico responsible for the contamination, San Diegans historically pinned blame on the IBWC. But since President Joe Biden appointed Maria-Elena Giner to the top post in August of 2021, most agree she’s done a good job – despite a very low bar – and don’t want to see her go.

“Changing horses in the middle of this particular sewage stream, it would be hard to view it as anything other than a setback because Giner has serious momentum,” said Laura Wilkinson Stinton, a Democrat and candidate for Coronado City Council, a coastal community with beaches often closed by the sewage pollution.

Coronado’s Republican Mayor Richard Bailey agreed, saying the IBWC suffered from a lack of oversight and leadership for many years.

“I hope she would stay on regardless of who is president,” Bailey said.

Giner chuckled at the mention of her ascent of the IBWC’s low bar.

“There may have been a low bar, but (someone) still has to push it up, right?” Giner told me.

The answer was very Giner, full of good-humored and disarming repartee. There aren’t many official requirements to qualify for the commissioner’s job. The IBWC’s founding documents only say it has to be an engineer. So far, that’s produced a long line of elusive and, frankly, stuffy commissioners’ past. Giner’s peppy personality, to which many attribute her success, is something foreign to the IBWC.

Giner is the first Latina to step into the role, taking over for President Donald Trump’s pick, Jayne Harkins, at a critical juncture in the agency’s history. The IBWC had a bad publicity problem. It was fending off multiple lawsuits filed by the state of California, San Diego border communities and local environmental non–profits for violating the national Clean Water Act.

The IBWC manages a treatment plant at the San Diego border built to clean 25 million gallons of Tijuana sewage per day and send the byproduct to the Pacific Ocean. But litigants argued the IBWC wasn’t doing that well and that the feds also allowed sewage to spill through border canyons into a protected estuary on the U.S. side.

Meet Environment Reporter MacKenzie Elmer at IB Espresso on Sunday, Oct. 27th. We'll be chatting about border sewage, dirty beaches and all things environmental. Most importantly, we want to hear from you. RSVP now at vosd.org/meet

The San Diego-Tijuana affair is just one quagmire Giner must navigate. There’s another cross-border sewage crisis between Nogales, Arizona, and Nogales in the state of Sonora, Mexico, aggravated by seasonal monsoons that bring deadly floods south of the border. There’s also a six-mile-long international dam along the Rio Grande that sprang leaks and sinkholes, puts hundreds of thousands of people living downstream at risk of total dam failure. Above it all, the Colorado River basin on which seven U.S. states and northern Mexico depend, is in a near-constant state of overuse and drought. The IBWC serves as the United States’ negotiator with Mexico on dividing the ever-dwindling waters of that river.

“Sometimes we forget the breadth of its jurisdiction,” said Martha Guzman, leader of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency region that covers California, Nevada, Arizona and Hawaii. “Leading the Colorado River negotiations alone is a full-time job in and of itself.”

Giner said she’d been on the short list to take over as commissioner for years, mostly due to her work leading the Border Environment Cooperation Commission which allowed the United States to help fund waste and water infrastructure in Mexico. The role put her in close contact with the IBWC thus she was aware how underfunded and troubled the agency had become.

When Giner arrived at the IBWC to takeover, she found handwritten lists of broken equipment scattered across 12 agency field offices along the border. There was no central system for tracking maintenance or even what equipment the IBWC had. After tallying the total, Giner dropped the figure at a press conference with California Sen. Alex Padilla: The IBWC had $1 billion worth of repairs and only a $50 million annual construction budget from Congress to pay for them. San Diego’s border treatment plant alone needed at least $300 million in fixes.

The news shocked San Diego’s Congressional delegation which scrambled to carve out more dollars for the IBWC during an already fraught, partisanship-fueled budget battle. Giner appeared before Congress to make a case that the little-known agency desperately needed more money.

Onstage at Voice of San Diego’s Politifest, none of the IBWC’s likely critics on stage – the mayor of Imperial Beach and the chair of the County Board of Supervisors – offered a bad word.

“Maria-Elena Giner has been such a big addition,” said Congressman Scott Peters. “We would have fought for (more money) if we’d known it was on the precipice of failure. And we didn’t know until she called us and said, you know what, it’s broken.”

Within nine months of her appointment, the IBWC settled the three lawsuits against it.

Serge Dedina, former mayor of Imperial Beach, who committed his city to suing the agency during his tenure, applauded Giner for “improving the transparency of the agency.”

At her year anniversary, Giner signed a new international agreement with Mexico, called Minute 328, a set of promises from both nations to spend $470 million on projects that curb Tijuana sewage spills into San Diego. On a hot August day at the Tijuana River estuary in 2022, Giner, kitted in horn-rimmed glasses framed by wind-tossed, curly black hair, bounded to the podium for a speech. Gesturing to her Mexican counterpart, Adriana Reséndez Maldonado, commissioner of CILA, who was also present, Giner explained this was the first time two women led the twin border agencies in its 176-year history.

They connected over raising children as career women, Giner said, working jobs that tore them away from family and school events. When it came time for parents to volunteer for school activities, they both signed up to bring plastic forks and knives because, “we didn’t have time to bake,” Giner said.

She vowed to revive the “sleepy IBWC” by increasing collaboration with the public by sharing information. And awaken, the IBWC did.

Before Giner, one could only guess what happened behind the locked gates of the International Wastewater Treatment Plant handling Tijuana’s sewage. The IBWC didn’t grant requests for tours. Once Giner arrived, the gates seemed to fly open at any request from the press or politicians. Her new plant operations manager, Morgan Rogers, a former U.S. Navy engineer, freely handed out his cellphone number and began regular updates on the state of the spills.

Giner agreed to speaking engagements from hotel rooms in between flights to various border locations with local San Diego groups like the League of Women Voters to personally explain the IBWC’s plight.

“That’s the biggest gift she’s given us is that transparency. She wasn’t the typical bureaucrat that said, it’s all rosy, and everything stays behind the curtain,” Guzman from EPA said.

The IBWC isn’t totally off the hook or forgiven by San Diego’s southern communities for border spills. The Air Pollution Control District, the local air pollution cops, blamed the IBWC’s broken-down treatment infrastructure for dozens of odor complaints at the height of summer.

Citizens of South Bay filed a fresh round of lawsuits targeting the IBWC’s private contractor, Veolia, which operates the international treatment plant in San Diego.

And it’s still going to take seven years from now until the IBWC fully fixes its plant (according to the latest estimate) and expands it with the money Congress designated toward expanding the plant’s capacity to treat more sewage. That’s four years longer than the IBWC anticipated it would take them two years ago. At first the IBWC wouldn’t tell the public what was wrong with San Diego’s broken down international treatment plant. It took a lawsuit filed by the Voice of San Diego to recover even a heavily-redacted report on the state of the plant.

People Ramon Chairez, a leader at the environmental and climate justice organization Mar de Colores, said the fact that there won’t be a resolution soon to this crisis anytime soon “is the hardest pill to swallow.”

“This wouldn’t stand in a different community,” Chairez said, but still acknowledged. “But personally I would not like to see (Giner) removed if the White House switches hands. I don’t think that would be a good thing for the (Tijuana River) Valley or the IBWC.”

Multiple times during our interview, Giner wanted to talk about how she worked hard to improve the low IBWC employee morale she inherited. Thirty percent of the IBWC’s staff positions were vacant upon her appointment, she said. Workers didn’t have the right tools or equipment to do their job. The field offices looked “like junk yards,” she said. Yet, with all these needs, Giner said she discovered $200 million just sitting in the agency’s bank account.

“Nobody asked me for more money or higher salaries. They asked for boots,” Giner told me, who said she instituted a new policy that employees could get reimbursed for two pairs instead of one – not a small reform for an agency that deals mostly in sewage management.

Giner said she’d love to continue as commissioner, but that she serves at the pleasure of the president – whoever that may be after Nov. 5. Whether she stays or goes, Giner said she’s proud of her legacy thus far.

“If anything ever happens to me, I grew this agency not only in impact but efficiencies. And I grew it responsibly with taxpayer dollars,” Giner said.

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