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Border protections imperil environment
Last wilderness area south of San Diego could be damaged
- Eilene Zimmerman, Special to The Chronicle
Monday, February 27, 2006



Imperial Beach, San Diego County -- One of the last stops before you hit the Pacific Ocean on the American side of the U.S.-Mexico border is the Tijuana River National Estuarine Research Reserve.

Here, amid watery grasslands bordered by bright yellow bush sunflowers and pale, feathery deerweed, snowy egrets dash their beaks into the shallow waters -- just one of more than 350 species of birds that use the estuary as a nesting and breeding ground. Twenty kinds of fish also live in these waters, as do a plethora of endangered species.

The reserve, a short drive from the grit of Tijuana to the south and the growing sprawl of San Diego to the north, is all that remains of wilderness in the area, a last refuge for many endangered birds, insects, reptiles and plants.

But in the name of national security, the Department of Homeland Security wants to build 3.5 miles of fencing just south of this federally protected land -- a project environmentalists say could spell disaster for the sensitive ecology of the region.

And despite laws and regulations that could usually prevent such a project from going ahead, the department has new powers to sweep such protections aside.

Last year, environmental groups, including the Sierra Club and the San Diego Audubon Society, sued the federal government, charging that it had not fully disclosed the environmental impact of the project and had failed to adequately analyze alternatives that could accomplish the same goals without destroying rare habitat and endangered species.

The California Coastal Management Program, a state agency that reviews federal activities affecting the coast, said the project, which envisages construction of three 15-foot-high steel fences, new roads and stadium-style lighting, violates California's federally approved coastal management program.

But the Department of Homeland Security, under powers given to it by Congress in May, has the authority to waive any law -- including environmental protections -- in order to build barriers and roads at the border.

"Congress got tired of waiting for the environmental community (to approve the plan)," Rep. Duncan Hunter, R-Alpine (San Diego County), said in an interview.

In December, two months after Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff applied the waiver, a federal district court dismissed the environmentalists' lawsuit. The groups will either file an appeal or an entirely new lawsuit challenging the legality of the waiver, said their attorney Cory Briggs.

"The government is obligated to fully disclose all impact before it undertakes a project, and it didn't do that," said Briggs. "They covered up the (likely) impacts and when ... the public called them on the carpet for it, they went to Congress to waive the laws, rather than explain themselves to a federal judge."

Of particular concern to environmentalists is a 300-foot gulley in the reserve known as Smuggler's Gulch. An unattractive piece of land, the gulch is strewn with plastic cups, soda cans, discarded clothes and tires, and skinny dogs from the Mexican side of the border nosing around in the trash.

It is also a pathway for people and drugs being smuggled across the border.

Under the government's plan, the tops of two nearby mesas would be carved off, filling the gulch with more than 2 million cubic yards of dirt to make way for a new road. That would cut by half the amount of space available to catch eroding sediment that runs down the canyons during rainstorms into the estuary below, said Tijuana estuary manager Clay Phillips.

Such erosion, environmentalists warn, could wipe out acres of sensitive habitat. Even now, before construction has begun, sediment running down the canyon destroys acres of rare saltwater marsh every time it rains.

A new sediment basin -- a man-made depression designed to catch runoff during storms before it hits the estuary -- was quickly overwhelmed last year and the area lost 15 acres of salt marsh, adding more losses to an already disappearing feature of the American environment.

"Over 90 percent of this kind of land is gone in the U.S.," Phillips said.

The increased erosion, say opponents, will also increase the amount of sewage and toxic waste -- runoff from Tijuana -- that is transported to the ocean by a green, foul-smelling Tijuana River tributary flowing through the gulch. A diversion pipe already gets clogged up regularly, allowing the tributary's polluted water to end up in the Pacific Ocean untreated.

Ironically, one of the components of American security -- the U.S. Navy -- is already being affected by the problem.

One of the Navy's two amphibious training bases in the country is in nearby Coronado. And Naval Special Warfare Center spokesman Lt. Brian Ko, said training exercises were canceled or rescheduled on 25 days last year, because of high levels of pollution in the ocean there.

Ko said no Navy trainees had bacterial infections diagnosed that were attributed to ocean water contamination, but he conceded there is "no way to know if a SEAL is sick because of the water or because of something else."

Responding to such concerns, the Department of Homeland Security has said it will follow "best management practices" throughout construction. Customs and Border Patrol spokesman Salvador Zamora said that means as construction moves forward his agency will be "mindful of the environmental impacts" that might occur and "strongly considers them when making decisions."

A 2003 Immigration and Naturalization Service report to the California Coastal Commission concluded the fencing project would decrease eroding sediment, an assertion called into question by a State Parks & Recreation Department report, which said it found flaws in the agency's analysis. The California Coastal Commission, after looking at both reports, concluded that the fence would damage native habitat and erosion would probably increase.

The dispute over the Tijuana estuary reserve could be just the opening shot in a broader environmental war. In addition to the 14 miles of fencing near San Diego, Hunter, citing national security concerns, added an amendment in December to the House-passed Border Protection, Antiterrorism, and Illegal Control Act, requiring 700 miles of double fencing to be built at five additional locations along the border -- in California, Arizona, New Mexico and Texas. The Senate is expected to take up the bill next month.

Such fencing could wreak havoc on the rich swath of parks, forests, wilderness areas and habitats for migratory wildlife, animals and plants, say environmentalists.

One of the potentially imperiled species they point to is the Sonoran desert pronghorn -- a type of antelope -- that lives on both sides of the Arizona-Mexico border. Another potentially endangered animal, the jaguar, has just begun to return to the border area after being killed off in the United States about 50 years ago.

"There's no question fencing will end efforts to allow jaguars to recolonize in their native region," said Kim Vacariu, Southwest director for the Wildlands Project, a conservation organization.

Vacariu and other conservationists also worry about how the fences would impact Sky Islands -- a region containing 40 mountains in southeastern Arizona and northern Mexico separated by a sea of grasslands and desert -- which is critical to native plants and to the cross-border movement of animals, reptiles and birds.

Stephen Mumme, a political science professor at Colorado State University who is an expert on environmental issues affecting the border, said the fences' effect on the small arroyos and mountain streams strung across the border also could be devastating.

"We're talking about a very fragile part of the North America continent where the percolation of just inches of water is vital for the maintenance of grasses and plants and different types of cacti. It's essential for their survival," said Mumme.

Zamora, the Border Patrol spokesman, said when it comes to balancing national security concerns with environmental concerns "these are very hard decisions to make," but that the department was sensitive to environmental concerns. He also pointed to one successful outcome of stepped-up border control measures: decreased illegal migrant crossings in high-traffic areas like San Diego has reduced damage to sensitive habitat from migrants trampling and littering the land.

Chertoff's office did not return phone calls requesting comment for this story, but last fall Chertoff met with Vacariu and other conservationists to discuss their concerns. Vacariu said the environmentalists received less time than they would have liked to state their case, and that Chertoff barely spoke during the meeting, but that, "We were grateful to be invited to speak at all."

For environmentalists, however, serious concerns persist, particularly about the Department of Homeland Security's power to exempt itself from environmental regulations.

"There could be a total lack of ability on the part of the public to comment and assist in the planning process," said Vacariu. "Right now it's a game of wait and see, and we really hope the work we've done to elevate recognition of ecological concerns will pay off," he said.

Phillips, the Tijuana estuary manager, pointed to a Homeland Security press release in September in which Chertoff, referring to the San Diego fence project, stated the department would not "compromise its commitment to responsible environment stewardship in the area."

"We're counting on that," Phillips said.

Fencing the border
A proposal to fence 700 miles of the United States-Mexico border, seen by supporters as the essential first step in controlling terrorism and illegal immigration, is the focus of two days of stories in The Chronicle.

Sunday's story examined how the fence would be built and what border residents, the Mexican president, immigration and terrorism experts, and some in Congress have said about the plan. You can read it at SFGate.com.

Today's story addresses the environmental impact of 14 miles of heavily fortified fencing already under construction in southern San Diego County.