Aguirre: County Should Pay To Treat The Whole Tijuana River

By Voice of San Diego

July 13, 2026

We’ve been wondering how the county would spend $80 million per year on the sewage-plagued Tijuana River under a proposed half-cent sales tax measure proposed by the San Diego County Supervisors.

On Friday, Supervisor Paloma Aguirre (the issue’s main champion and former mayor of sewage-blighted Imperial Beach) put out her proposed plan.

Main message? Convert a large chunk of that money into a bond (a big loan governments often take out to finance expensive projects) and have the county build a system that treats the entire Tijuana River. It’s also known as the “river diversion” project and Aguirre’s been pushing for it since she was mayor.

That basically involves running the river on the United States side through a new treatment plant (called advanced primary treatment) so that raw sewage doesn’t make its way to the Pacific Ocean (and Imperial Beach). The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency ranked river diversion as the third priority project (out of three) to do on the United States side, largely because it’s expensive to do, as our MacKenzie Elmer has previously reported. But, at the time of the EPA’s study in 2021, it was the only option that would keep the beaches of Imperial Beach open the longest.

Now with potentially hundreds of millions of dollars from a new sales tax-supported bond (if voters approve it), the county might just have the bones to build it.

However, it could also mean the county would be on the hook for taking care of such a treatment plant. If the federally-owned one at the U.S.-Mexico border that already struggles to clean Tijuana sewage (and sometimes river water) is an example, we know that’s a huge undertaking with many legal battles.

City Hall cuts services to balance the budget. Voters get angry. City Hall asks for new revenue for services. The voters say no.

This is starting to feel like a death spiral, writes our Will Huntsberry. Last month, San Diego City Council had to cut $100 million in spending. The city closed half the public restrooms in Mission Beach to help get there. And now people are complaining.

Any political leader who wants to be truly effective — rather than just hold office — will have to find a way to break the cycle, he writes.

Condos are the cheapest path to homeownership in California, but fewer and fewer are getting built and bought. State lawmakers have been looking at two different ways to fix this by making condo construction less costly and risky for developers.

One made it out of committee, the other one didn’t.

The first bill targets a 20-year-old law that let condo owners sue developers over construction defects which had spiraled into a lawsuit industry driving up building costs. The idea is to loosen that liability by protecting developers from lawsuits one year after they repair a defect.

The second bill came from San Diego Assemblymember Chris Ward, who proposed letting developers keep more of a buyer’s deposit if the buyer backs out of the deal. This bill made Democrats worried it put too much financial risk on everyday buyers.

Ward ended up pulling the bill himself.

Rooftop solar is all the rage, but what if you don’t own the space above your home?

Environment reporter MacKenzie Elmer joins our hosts on the latest episode to discuss a proposed bill that would make it easier for renters and condo owners to get energy from the sun.

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