Republican Supervisor Jim Desmond — who’s running for a critical U.S. House seat that could be key to flipping Congress — has been a little hard to follow when it comes to the sewage-plagued, cross-border Tijuana River.
Earlier this month, he supported his Democratic colleagues, Supervisors Paloma Aguirre and Terra Lawson-Remer, in spending $1.8 million of county reserve money to study the feasibility of capturing and cleaning the entire river, as it flows out of Mexico. This plan would also make the county, as opposed to the state or feds, responsible for cleaning the river.
That plan would ultimately be very costly. And it could only happen if voters approve a half-cent sales tax slated for the November ballot. The Aguirre/Lawson-Remer team is banking on the potential tax money (as much as $80 million a year) to secure a billion-dollar bond (essentially, a loan) for the county to build a river diversion system, which captures and treats the whole river.
Supervisors say that, if the county doesn’t clean the river, no one will. It’s the river that delivers millions of gallons of contaminated water daily to the Pacific Ocean and sloshes against the shores of Imperial Beach and Coronado.
“We’re not going to wait for Mexico,” Aguirre has said.
Desmond supported the feasibility study, but he is against the sales tax — the very thing that could fund the project for certain. (Again, if voters agree.)
Desmond has spent more time reminding voters that our fingers should be pointed at Mexico and the city of Tijuana. With its broken pipes and unconnected toilets, that city is the source of all the contamination.
“Putting money toward exploring constructing a new treatment plant to capture untreated river flows is a good source of reserve dollars,” Desmond said before the Sept. 1 Board of Supervisors vote on the reserve dollars. “But we cannot let up the pressure on Mexico.”
I asked Desmond’s team how he can support the river diversion project when he’s opposed to the source of the funding. And because he is, how does he propose paying for that river treatment if not through the sales tax?
Miles Himmel, Desmond’s spokesperson, didn’t answer that specifically.
Instead, Himmel said Desmond has supported “air filters for families living with this everyday and exploring a treatment plant for the untreated river flows.”
“What he has said consistently is that those are relief, not a fix, and the fix runs through Mexico,” Himmel wrote Monday. “Until Mexico is held accountable, nothing built on this side of the border solves it. That is why this problem has gone unsolved for decades.”
President Donald Trump endorsed Desmond’s run for the 48th Congressional District seat back in April. He’s running against San Diego City Councilmember Marni Von Wilpert, a Democrat who could flip a seat long held by Republicans.
Desmond has applauded the Trump Administration’s efforts to put more pressure on Mexico as it relates to the Tijuana River sewage problem. The administration signed a new international agreement that essentially continued work begun under the Biden Administration to commit Mexico and the U.S. to fixing pipes, pumps and other broken, aging infrastructure that allows sewage to spill across the border.
It’s not like Mexico hasn’t done anything.
The country put its military in charge of reconstructing a large sewage treatment plant on the Baja California coast where Tijuana sends some of its sewage so it doesn’t cross the border. The new plant, completed in May of 2025, treats 18 million gallons of wastewater from central Tijuana per day and discharges it into the ocean, according to this website created by the International Boundary and Water Commission, the federal agency that negotiates between the U.S. and Mexico on water projects.
Mexico has also rebuilt 13,225 feet of new parallel gravity lines between the border and that plant, which is good because those lines snapped years ago and sent a bunch of sewage into the U.S. Mexico has also built a new pipe that helps take water out of the river and sends it to a treatment plant on the U.S. side. That was also reportedly completed in May of 2025.
There’s still a lot of work to be done. And Tijuana has a lot of things on its plate. For instance, thousands of Tijuanenses lost both their access to power and water for a full afternoon and through the night during the heat wave last week. Think about that.
