House members Tuesday angrily accused federal officials of blocking a $700 million sewage plant being developed in Mexico under a no-bid U.S. contract.
Congressional supporters of the project - whose backers have spent heavily on campaign donations and lobbying - vowed to block money the Bush administration wants for an alternate plan on the U.S. side.
"You ain't gonna get it," Rep. Bob Filner, D-San Diego, told officials from the EPA and the International Boundary and Water Commission at a hearing.
But the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the IBWC, the binational agency overseeing the project, say that Bajagua LLC has missed a series of deadlines in its plans for a plant that would treat sewage that flows north from Tijuana, Mexico, into the United States.
The IBWC is under federal court order to ensure the water flowing from Mexico meets U.S. standards by Sept. 30, 2008, but Bajagua has acknowledged it can't meet that deadline.
As an alternate plan, President Bush requested $66 million in his 2008 budget proposal for upgrades to an existing sewage treatment plant in San Diego. Lawmakers derided that idea. The existing plant, which IBWC oversaw, is the subject of a lawsuit by the California Regional Water Quality Control Board alleging it failed to meet Clean Water Act standards.
House members said they were blindsided by the president's budget request and demanded to know where it came from.
"All of a sudden $66 million appears in the president's budget. Money doesn't appear like that out of nowhere. How did that money get in there?" Filner asked Carlos Marin, U.S. commissioner of the IBWC.
Marin denied requesting the money and described it as "basically a consensus of federal agencies that this would be the best approach to take."
"Fortunately the administration began to consider a contingency plan," Marin said.
Filner and Rep. Brian Bilbray, R-Carlsbad, accused Marin and EPA of slow-walking the Bajagua plan from the moment it was approved in 2000 because they were reluctant to relinquish control to a private company.
