SAN DIEGO -- A good part of the $1.6 million fine the city of San Diego was forced to pay after the Tecolote Canyon sewage spill will end up back in San Diego, 10News reported Wednesday.

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Money Will Go To Mission Bay Projects

More than $1 million will go toward projects in the same body of water most severely affected by the Tecolote spill -- Mission Bay. The projects will examine what kind of pathogens are in the bay that could make people sick, and how those pathogens disperse, 10News reported.

"We have to accept it; we messed up," Councilwoman Donna Frye told 10News. "The good news is that, because of that, we hopefully will be able to get our recreational waters cleaned up."

Last February, millions of gallons of raw sewage dumped into the canyon and then on into Mission Bay. The spill was left undetected for nine days.

The city became aware of the spill Feb. 28, but a Regional Water Quality Control Board member reported leaving a message about it more than a week earlier on Feb. 19. That message was accidentally deleted without being heard.

When the call reporting the spill came in on the Feb. 19 Presidents' Day holiday, city phones were misprogrammed so that the call did not reach the city's emergency dispatch center as it should have. Instead, the call was routed to a message line.

Two days later, employees listened to some of the messages, and then deleted the rest without listening to them because they assumed they were redundant.

Since then, city officials told 10News, the phone system has been changed.

The rest of the money from the city's fine will be put into the state's Environmental Cleanup and Abatement Fund, 10News reported.