[Water_news] 4. DWR'S CALIFORNIA WATER NEWS: WATER QUALITY - 4/25/08

Department of Water Resources

California Water News

A daily compilation of significant news articles and comment

 

April 25, 2008

 

4. Water Quality –

 

 

Conservationists struggle to save rare Calif. Wetland -

Associated Press

 

Agency picks neither of 2 sewage projects -

San Diego Union Tribune

 

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Conservationists struggle to save rare Calif. Wetland

Associated Press -4/24/08

By ALICIA CHANG, AP

 

IMPERIAL BEACH, Calif. (AP) — Along the U.S.-Mexico border, the fragile salt marshes at the mouth of the Tijuana River are clinging to life as one of the last vestiges of undeveloped California coast, where tall grasses sway gently in the breeze and rare birds stop to nest.

 

Just across the border is another landscape: old tires, plastic bottles, raw sewage and vast amounts of filthy sediment, all of it threatening to wash across the divide and spoil one of California's few surviving coastal wetlands.

 

Conservationists are struggling to protect the teeming nature preserve south of San Diego from the loose soil, trash and pollutants that have sometimes spilled into the river from shantytowns upstream in rapidly growing Tijuana.

 

With more than 90 percent of California's wetlands already lost to urban encroachment, "we're desperate to save every little scrap of coastal salt marsh we can," said Jeff Crooks, a research coordinator at the preserve.

 

At 2,500 acres, the Tijuana Estuary is three times the size of New York's Central Park, and for years it has remained largely undisturbed despite being encircled by development on both sides of the border.

 

This year, flash floods have washed silt and garbage from Tijuana into three catch basins on the American side built to trap debris before it seeps into the federally protected preserve.

 

The basins can store 60,000 cubic yards of debris — enough to fill 6,000 dump trucks. But the pits are nearly full, and any more rain could cause the debris to overflow into the estuary.

 

"This area is under constant threat," said Oscar Romo, a coastal coordinator with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. "It's essential to keep it alive, to keep it in good shape."

 

The estuary, largely managed by the California and U.S. governments, was designated a "wetland of international importance" in 2005.

The pollution problem has grown more urgent in recent years with the rapid growth of Tijuana, a city of at least 1.3 million people that draws an average of 80,000 new residents each year.

 

Romo leads a cross-border effort to clean up a section of Tijuana's Los Laureles Canyon, a dirt-road community of 800 shanties built on steep slopes using scrap metal and used tires. When it rains, sediment and other debris flow across the border into the catch basins.

 

The sediment poses the most serious threat. During the winter of 2004-2005, silt and sand from the canyon burst through the basins and buried 18 acres of salt marsh.

"The sediment problem is something we battle with every rainstorm," estuary manager Clay Phillips said. "I used to love the rain, but now I cringe and think, 'Are we going to lose marshland?'"

 

Romo's work is one of several conservation projects targeting the estuary. Other efforts are focused on restoring 250 acres of sediment-filled marshland and removing the invasive tamarisk shrub that competes with native plants.

 

Last month, Romo and a team of students from the University of California, San Diego, where he teaches urban planning, helped residents build roads that trap water in the ground instead of creating runoff that ends up in the estuary. It's a slow process. Only about a third of the 100,000 concrete blocks needed for the new pavement have been installed so far.

 

Many Tijuana residents were skeptical about the cross-border cleanup, which is funded by the U.S. and Mexican governments and a private foundation. To ease distrust, Romo holds workshops to teach residents about their environmental footprint.

 

"The people are part of this transformation," said Delia Castellanos, an environmental planner with Tijuana's Municipal Planning Institute.

Some scientists say the cleanup addresses only a small part of the problem because most of the polluted water infiltrating the preserve comes from the area's main watershed, three-quarters of which is in Mexico.

 

But if it is not protected, experts worry about the potential loss of plant and wildlife diversity. Sand dollars and steelhead trout that were once abundant in the estuary have now all but disappeared.

 

Joy Zedler, a botanist at the University of Wisconsin who has done research in the preserve since the 1970s, found last year that exotic plants were crowding out native ones, changing the ecosystem and altering the food chain.

 

Other researchers such as John Callaway of the University of San Francisco, who has studied the estuary for a decade, worry that important species could be lost if pollution isn't curbed.

 

"As we lose salt marsh," he said, "it's not just the vegetation that we lose, but all the animals that go with it."#

http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5jYSwPcXoWWDBKt6wtzE82J5ialrwD908F3880

 

No clear solution to border pollution

Agency picks neither of 2 sewage projects

San Diego Union Tribune – 4/25/08

By Mike Lee, staff writer

A much-anticipated report about reducing sewage pollution in southern San Diego County failed to deliver a clear recommendation yesterday and led to calls for more study of a problem that has plagued the region for decades.

 

The Government Accountability Office, the investigative arm of Congress, spent about four months reviewing two options for cleaning up wastewater that's treated only partially at a federal plant in San Ysidro.

 

The report the GAO released yesterday did not thoroughly assess the projects' benefits or choose one proposal over the other.

 

“It left me with more questions than any useful answers. It begs additional research,” said Lani Lutar, CEO of the San Diego County Taxpayers Association.

The U.S. section of the International Boundary and Water Commission is under court order to improve sewage treatment at its San Ysidro plant by Sept. 30, a deadline that it cannot meet.

 

Proposed upgrades for the San Ysidro plant would cost far less over 20 years than a competing proposal to build a treatment plant in Tijuana, the GAO said.

The agency's investigators also said plans for expanding the San Ysidro facility were subject to fewer “unresolved issues” than the Tijuana project, which has been pushed by a company called Bajagua LLC for the past decade.

 

But the report said Bajagua could build a functional plant by March 2010, about 10 months sooner than the projected completion of the San Ysidro project. Another potential upside for the Bajagua facility is that its backers have said they can provide treated water for residents and businesses in Tijuana.

 

The GAO's split review allowed most everyone involved in the protracted sewage debate to find support for their favored project.

 

“This report shows that Bajagua has less certainty and more cost,” Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., said yesterday. Her views are important because she sits on the Senate Appropriations Committee, which helps determine funding for whichever sewage project is chosen.

 

“This has been put off for years. The time has come to move forward with expanding the (San Ysidro) plant,” Feinstein said.

 

Bajagua executives said GAO investigators did not adequately scrutinize issues such as the per-gallon cost of sewage treatment. They want to treat 59 million gallons a day, compared with 25 million gallons a day at the San Ysidro plant.

Bajagua executives also plan to sell highly treated wastewater and use some of that revenue to offset the costs of their facility.

“(GAO investigators) didn't do any qualitative analysis whatsoever of the situation or the projects themselves. What is the point?” said Bajagua spokesman Craig Benedetto.

 

“We hope that the decision-makers in Washington, D.C., will allow for a realistic, fair and qualitative assessment of the two projects,” Benedetto said.

Others didn't know which way to lean.

 

“It would be impossible to use this report to justify moving ahead with any particular project,” said Bruce Reznik, head of the environmental group San Diego Coastkeeper, which has not endorsed either project.

 

Boundary commission spokeswoman Sally Spener said agency officials would announce their strategy “in the near future.” An April 16 letter from the agency's chief to the GAO said the San Ysidro option is “viewed as a more efficient and less expensive solution.”

 

The two sewage-treatment proposals are under review because the boundary commission's treatment plant in San Ysidro hasn't met U.S. Clean Water Act standards since it started operating in the late 1990s. The facility treats wastewater from Tijuana and deposits it offshore.

 

In December, Congress agreed to spend up to $66 million on improving treatment of sewage flowing from Tijuana to the South Bay, but it didn't settle the question of how to do so. The two main proposals would both need hundreds of millions of dollars more for construction and ongoing operations.

 

The 20-year cost for the San Ysidro upgrade plan is $331 million, while the corresponding expense for the Bajagua plan is $539 million, the GAO found.

 

It emphasized that cost estimates for both projects met few or none of the GAO criteria for credibility because neither had been verified independently.

 

The agency's officials acknowledged several limitations of their work and said they didn't have time to answer every question. A comprehensive review could take 16 months, according to a recent letter from Feinstein to Rep. Duncan Hunter, R-Alpine. She said more study would further delay efforts to meet the court order. #

http://www.signonsandiego.com/uniontrib/20080425/news_1m25bajagua.html