Look, I want to walk you through something important that CalMatters Housing is reporting on down in San Diego County, because it affects our whole region and the border communities we're connected to. Basically, the Tijuana River has been a major pollution problem for decades, causing real health issues like asthma and stomach illness for people living nearby, plus repeated beach closures from raw sewage. Now San Diego County supervisors are trying to tackle this head-on with an ambitious solution.
According to CalMatters, the county supervisors are proposing a new local plan to build a treatment facility that would capture and clean the contaminated water before it reaches San Diego communities. The board is looking at designing a system to divert the river and treat it directly, with the goal of stopping the pollution before it affects schools, beaches, and neighborhoods. They're proposing an initial investment of about $1.8 million just to design the system, plus another $4 million to fix an immediate pollution hotspot on Saturn Boulevard where the river pollution becomes airborne.
The funding mechanism is clever. CalMatters reports that San Diego voters will decide in November on a proposed half-cent sales tax that could bring in significant annual revenue, with a portion specifically dedicated to Tijuana River improvements. The supervisors believe this tax revenue could support between $700 million and $1 billion in bonds needed to actually build the treatment facilities. They're comparing it to how the county has financed other major infrastructure projects like the airport and roads.
The pollution problem is serious and comes from multiple sources. Raw sewage flows north from Tijuana, and while treatment plants on both sides of the border filter some contaminants, those facilities have failed repeatedly over the past decade. Beyond the sewage itself, the river carries industrial chemicals, pesticides, pharmaceuticals, and emits airborne toxins like hydrogen sulfide gas that make people sick. The federal government has already dedicated resources to help, but local leaders say they can't wait any longer.
What I'm seeing locally here in the Bay Area is that our friends and colleagues down south are taking real ownership of a cross-border problem instead of just passing the buck. San Diego supervisors are saying they'll keep pressuring Washington and Mexico, but they're not waiting around anymore. The county wants to pursue a permanent solution and control what they can control on their side of the border. That kind of decisive, locally-driven approach to infrastructure is something we need to think about as we address our own regional challenges.
