(KGTV) — EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin visited San Diego to discuss progress on stopping the sewage crisis, a decades-long problem of raw sewage flowing from Mexico into South Bay communities.
Zeldin and other officials met with small business owners, who described the sewage crisis as a major quality-of-life issue.
ABC 10News has reported that local businesses, families, and visitors have had their health and homes hurt: They have told us they just want a solution.
"You want to get rid of all the raw sewage and cut a ribbon and celebrate. But here's the problem,” said Lee Zeldin, EPA Administrator. “If you don't deal with infrastructure on the Mexico side, that maybe during or just after cleaning that up, it's just going to end up filling back up with more raw sewage.”
Zeldin said many projects designed to reduce sewage flows now have shortened timelines and have been stress tested.
He added that Mexico has been holding up its end of the bargain since his last visit in April.
In December, both countries signed an agreement called Minute 333, which outlines major wastewater infrastructure projects in Tijuana and establishes new measures to ensure project completion.
"We are confirming, verifying that this work is progressing. There are projects slated for 2027. There is one project that is slated for 2028. It is our assessment that all of this needs to be completed in order to implement and have a permanent 100% solution," Zeldin said.
Zeldin said he verifies weekly that both countries remain on track to fix the sewage crisis.
I asked him, after the fix, what would be done for people dealing with long-term health effects from living near raw sewage.
“So finding the solution to the sewage crisis, while it's great for this community, it won't undo the years of health battles that these residents have gone through. Will there be any resources or aid to these people who have spent hundreds on hospital bills trying to recover from the health effects of the sewage crisis?” I asked.
"What was necessary was to be able to get a 100% permanent solution done urgently as fast as humanly possible. Fortunately, we're back here today as a group, and we have the ability to talk about the long term environmental remediation," Zeldin said. “If we start talking right now about what happens next when that raw sewage stops coming over, then we are, we could be starting to implement that plan overlapping and be sprinting when that last project is being completed in 2028.”
Zeldin concluded with a bold prediction that beaches would reopen before the end of the Trump administration.
