BORDER FENCE: Smuggler's Gulch project bleeding dirt into Tijuana River estuary

Land Letter
January 7, 2010
by April Reese

Six months after workers filled a canyon south of San Diego to enhance border security, California environmental officials say the controversial project is damaging a nearby estuary.

Customs and Border Protection officials completed the Smuggler's Gulch project in July.

Contractors filled the gulch, long a conduit of illegal activity, and built a new 15-foot-high fence and an access road across it. Once a deep canyon, the gulch is now bridged by a 100-foot-high earthen berm.

Department of Homeland Security officials say the berm allows agents to drive straight across what used to be a formidable obstacle, providing much quicker response times and a safer route to handle law enforcement and public safety emergencies. But while the berm -- as high as some of the West's towering concrete dams -- and accompanying fence may stem the flow of illegal immigrants and drug smugglers, those benefits have come at a significant environmental cost, critics say.

During peak rain events, barren slopes along the newly filled Smuggler's Gulch erode, sending sediment downstream into the Tijuana River estuary.

Like the other drainages in the rugged "border highlands" region, as the westernmost stretch of the U.S.-Mexico border is called, Smuggler's Gulch and other nearby canyons funnel streams from Mexico northward into the Tijuana River and its estuary (Land Letter, Jan. 15, 2009).

The estuary, which has undergone a multi-decade restoration effort, encompasses a national wildlife refuge and state parklands and is home to a number of endangered bird species, including the light-footed clapper rail, the California least tern, the least Bell's vireo and the American peregrine falcon.

California regulators and environmental groups, who warned DHS of the potential adverse effects of the $58 million project when it began, say their fears of damage to the estuary from an influx of eroded sediment are now proving true.

"The river valley keeps getting more and more sediment in it," said Jim Peugh, conservation chair of the San Diego chapter of the Sierra Club. "It has long-term flooding effects and long-term habitat effects for both the river valley and the estuary it flows into."

CBP was able to undertake the project without adhering to state or federal environmental laws due to waiver provisions both in a 1996 law pertaining just to the Smuggler's Gulch area and the REAL ID Act of 2005, which extended the waiver authority to the entire border region (Land Letter, Sept. 22, 2005).

As a result, regulators had little authority to address environmental problems.

"In some places, erosion control practices were not properly employed, in my opinion, and there's been significant erosion," said David Gibson, executive officer of the San Diego Regional Water Quality Control Board. "Normally I would have issued a violation for failing to meet the [state] standards for construction, but in this case we couldn't do that."

After meeting with CBP and its contractors, however, officials agreed to fix those problems, Gibson added. "Now that they've seen where the weak spots are, they're addressing them," he said.

Most of the sediment choking the estuary is flowing across the border from Mexico, but the fence project has exacerbated the problem, Gibson said.

"This was an extremely large construction project," he noted. "You just can't have that much earthmoving without having major problems."

DHS spokesman Claude Knighten said contractors did employ erosion barriers, such as waddles, and attempted to plant soil-stabilizing vegetation. But some of those efforts did not work as well as officials had expected, he acknowledged.

Some of the seeds that were planted on the newly created slopes, for example, did not take root due to mistimed watering. Contractors have since reseeded those areas and plan to better irrigate the plots to make sure the plantings succeed the second time, Knighten said.

The state is also considering installing trap structures to help keep sediment out of the estuary as part of the larger restoration effort, Gibson added.

Otay Mountain problems

Further east, in the federally protected Otay Mountain Wilderness, another new stretch of fence, along with the new road needed to patrol it, also is causing environmental damage that probably would not have occurred without the waiver.

Construction workers have removed about 100 rare Tecate cypress trees there that survived a 2003 wildfire that wiped out about 68 percent of the tree's habitat. And truck traffic has sent clouds of dust into the air, coating the tree's leaves, which provide food for the equally rare Thorne's hairstreak butterfly.

As the result of a lawsuit from the Center for Biological Diversity, the Fish and Wildlife Service is considering whether to protect the butterfly under the Endangered Species Act.

Knighten of CBP said crews are now wetting the roads to reduce dust. "We'll be monitoring the dust to make sure there aren't any problems," he said.

The Smuggler's Gulch and Otay Mountain projects were part of a far-reaching, congressionally mandated effort to shore up the U.S. southern border with hundreds of miles of new fencing from Texas to California. About 633 miles of new fence have been completed so far, at a cost of $2.4 billion.

Critics say the Smuggler's Gulch project will push illegal border activity further eastward and to the Pacific Ocean, where crossers will take to the water to get around the fence.

Tijuana River Valley Residents Say Border Fence Contributing to Flooding

KPBS San Diego
December 7, 2009
by Amy Isackson

Tijuana River Valley residents say the new border fence is blocking drainage channels. They say rain is washing dirt from the new fence project into flood channels.

The Bush Administration waived all environmental laws to build the fence. Government officials promised to mitigate erosion. However, they didn't water the seeds they planted on the berm in Smuggler's Gulch until late this fall.

Dick Tynan, a rancher in the Tijuana River Valley, spoke with us while peering out his barn door towards the new border fence in Smuggler's Gulch.

Tynan said the bare dirt is creating a major problem.

"The government just dropped the ball on that," Tanyan said. "The water just takes the shortest path and its going to take out more silt as it goes. They've got a backhoe up there now working on it."

Tynan said the drainage channel that City of San Diego emergency crews have been digging is already half full.

He also said roads in the river valley have flooded. He's moved some of his horses to higher ground and is ready to move the rest.

http://www.kpbs.org/news/2009/dec/07/tijuana-river-valley-residents-say-border-fence-co/?utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter

Bare Dirt Along New Border Fence A Flood Worry

KPBS San Diego
October 13, 2009
by Amy Isackson

State parks officials are worried the federal government's failure to grow plants on slopes where it built new sections of the border fence could mean floods on both sides of the US Mexico border this rainy season. Smuggler's Gulch is a major area of concern.

About four years ago, the US federal government waived all environmental laws along the US Mexico border in order to build the border fence. The head of the Department of Homeland Security promised, even so, the government would control erosion to protect the Tijuana River Valley and estuary.

Clay Phillips is with the California Parks Department and manages the estuary reserve. He says the bare slopes that run the length of the new fence construction are a stark contrast to the promise.

"You wouldn't find a Jack In the Box where they're adding a parking lot that would be left in this condition."

The federal government has tried to grow plants on the slopes to control erosion without success. Phillips says moderate rain will erode the bare dirt. That could clog the Tijuana Estuary and cause floods in Tijuana and San Diego.

http://www.kpbs.org/news/2009/oct/13/bare-dirt-along-new-border-fence-flood-worry/

San Diego officials mark completion of border berm

San Jose Mercury News
July 6, 2009
by Thomas Watkins

SAN DIEGO—A scrub-filled gorge historically used as a staging area for immigrants to gather by the hundred before dashing illegally into the U.S. has been all but sealed off by a massive berm topped with a steel-meshed fence and bright lighting.

The finished Smuggler's Gulch project was unveiled Monday. It involved moving 1.3 million cubic yards of dirt to fill in part of the canyon, which straddles the border just inland from the Pacific Ocean and alongside the Tijuana River estuary.

At a cost of about $59 million, and 12 years of planning, environmental reviews and legal challenges, the project has transformed the look of the westernmost edge of the border, an environmentally sensitive area that is a key stopover for migratory birds.

Gone are the precarious switchback roads that once zigzagged up either side of the canyon. It now is filled in with dirt and spanned by the light-brown berm that has a smooth asphalt road running along its top.

Gone too are the crowds of would-be immigrants and the vendors that catered to them on the Mexican side of the gorge.

"This is night and day compared to what it used to be," U.S. Border Patrol supervisory agent Daryl Reed said, recalling a period in the '90s when an agent could arrest dozens of people in a single shift.

The project is part of an older plan dating back to 1996, when Congress approved a 14-mile stretch of fence inland from the ocean. Filling in the gorge and work on the surrounding area proved highly contentious as environmentalists worried about potential damage to sensitive habitats in the estuary.

The Border Patrol says changes in the area will actually help the environment, because fewer people will be trampling on sensitive habitat and the asphalt roads have reduced the amount of dust in the air.

Border Patrol agents said the fencing means they now have full "operational control" of the area. In 1986, there were 600,000 apprehensions of immigrants along San Diego County's border with Mexico, Border Patrol spokesman Jerry Conlin said. The number has dropped dramatically since then, with 162,000 arrests last year.

But critics say people are simply being forced farther east into more treacherous conditions in the desert.

Conlin said the Smuggler's Gulch project means agents can now safely zip across the rolling terrain in minutes, whereas it would perviously have taken up to an hour.

Local lore says the gulch got its name from bootleggers bringing alcohol into the U.S. during Prohibition.

The project has spelled the end for a transnational park on a bluff overlooking the Pacific. Friendship Park drew crowds from both sides, and people would chat through a chain-link fence separating Imperial Beach and Tijuana. Now it lies abandoned behind a towering new fence.

http://www.mercurynews.com/news/ci_12764623?source=email&nclick_check=1

Beloved parts of border changed almost overnight

February 19, 2009
Associated Press / MSNBC
by Elliot Spagat

IMPERIAL SAND DUNES, Calif. - Every weekend he can, Gene Elwell heads to the desert and races his buggy over the largest sand dunes in the U.S. Nearly 200 miles west, on California's Pacific shores, the Rev. John Fanestil spends every Sunday at Friendship Park, where people on both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border touch hands and talk through holes in a chain-link fence.

For decades, the dunes and Friendship Park were virtually unchanged. But in its final months, as the Bush administration raced to fulfill a pledge to erect 670 miles of fencing and vehicle barriers on the border, they were transformed almost overnight.

A fence now slices through the Imperial Sand Dunes, preventing recreational riders from veering into Mexican sands. Before, drug smugglers easily blended in with riders to reach Interstate 8, less than a half-mile from the border at one point.

Friendship Park, opened in 1971 to promote ties between the U.S. and Mexico, is closing. Crews have torn up a parking lot and removed trees and picnic benches to make way for two tall fences, ending years of cross-border food sales and family reunions.

It's similar elsewhere on the 1,954-mile border. In Eagle Pass, Texas, a golf course is sandwiched between the Rio Grande and a new fence. In Columbus, N.M., visitors see the fence from the high ground at Pancho Villa State Park, named for the Mexican general who led an attack there in 1916.

The Bush administration built 224 miles of barriers during its last 2 1/2 months, bringing the total to 602 miles. The Border Patrol plans to hit 670 miles this year, spokesman Lloyd Easterling said, but what happens after that is anyone's guess.

Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano said at her Senate confirmation hearing that fences can help in border cities but that it makes little sense to fence the entire border.

Whatever happens, the border landscape already has indelibly changed.

___

The southern tip of the Imperial Sand Dunes Recreation Area, a film location for "Star Wars: Return of the Jedi," resembles the Sahara. Its slopes draw families because they are lower and more gradual than the desert playground's northern reaches, which attract rowdier crowds.

Elwell, 54, a San Diego-area native who sells office equipment, belongs to a close-knit but fast-growing group of families from Southern California and Arizona.

They ride the dunes day and night, sleeping in trailers parked around a campfire. They liken the thrill to a never-ending roller coaster.

"There's no particular trail, like you would up in the mountains or some places even out here in the desert," Elwell said. "Out here you find your own way, you find your own world."

___

Border Field State Park separates San Diego and Tijuana, Mexico, which together make up the largest metropolitan area along the border. It has a beautiful beach and abundant trails, but one of its biggest draws is Friendship Park, a half-acre cement plaza on a bluff overlooking the Pacific.

When then-first lady Pat Nixon opened the plaza 38 years ago, she declared, "I hate to see a fence anywhere."

On the beach, the countries are separated by steel poles spaced far enough apart at one point for an adult to squeeze through. Vendors in Mexico hawk corn-on-the-cob and tamales to customers on the U.S. side as Border Patrol agents keep watch.

Fanestil, 47, visited Friendship Park every Christmas to sing with revelers. The United Methodist minister was incensed in June when a Border Patrol agent said he no longer could pass food across the border. Fanestil responded by holding cross-border services every Sunday.

"People have been passing things through the fence here for generations — tamales, candies, bracelets," the San Diego native said.

___

In California's southeast corner, the dunes are about 40 miles long and an average of five miles wide. Trailers crowd campgrounds on holiday weekends. The sand buggies range from lightweight speedsters with V-8 engines to lumbering vehicles that could pass for golf carts.

The sands extend about five miles into Mexico. Until last year, the border was almost invisible, marked by 15-foot concrete obelisks spaced far apart.

In the 1980s Elwell drove his buggy straight into the town of Algodones for tacos, and even in recent years he regularly drifted into Mexico. Agents chased wayward riders and ordered them back to the U.S.

Smugglers decorated their marijuana-laden vehicles with decals and flags to mix in. Last year, a suspected smuggler killed a Border Patrol agent by running over him in a Hummer, then fled to Mexico.

Border Patrol officials say private contractors were initially stumped when asked to design a 13-mile fence for the shifting sands. The answer was what the agency calls a "floating fence."

The $6 million-a-mile barrier completed in December consists of 16-foot-tall steel tubes filled with concrete and spaced tightly together. Triangular mounts aren't bolted to the ground, allowing them to rock back and forth with the wind. Small panels are chained together, twisting in different directions.

The Border Patrol says arrests of suspected smugglers plummeted after construction began last summer.

Elwell and his friends marveled as they stood on a ridge one recent Saturday and stared at the fence, stretching like a dark ribbon over the sand.

As the number of riders grows — the dunes records about 1.2 million visits from October to March — their playground is shrinking. In 2000, the U.S. Bureau of Land Management made about half the park off-limits to vehicles to protect the endangered Peirson's milk-vetch, a tiny perennial with purple blooms.

Some visitors feel the dunes are dangerously crowded, with up to 200,000 people some weekends. Steve Razo, a BLM spokesman, said seven to 10 people die each year in traffic accidents.

Elwell and his friends bemoan the tighter quarters but generally agree the fence will make the dunes safer.

"It makes you feel a little crammed in, like 'This is your playground, and you can't go over there,'" said Tom Holdenried, 59, a woodworker from Ramona.

___

At Friendship Park, the Border Patrol is building 3 1/2 miles of fence to the ocean, a project delayed for 12 years by lawsuits and environmental reviews. In 2005, the Bush administration exercised new authority to override those challenges; it later used the same powers on vast swaths of the border.

Work began in August and is expected to finish by May at a cost of about $16 million a mile.

The area is much quieter than it was in the 1990s, when the Border Patrol was badly overmatched by illegal immigrants who swarmed across the porous border. But Mike Fisher, the San Diego sector chief, said people still make holes in the fence and slip children between poles on the beach.

"I want people to be able to go to the park with their kids and not worry about smugglers operating in that area," he said.

Hilda Olivares drove from Los Angeles on one recent Sunday to talk through the fence with her mother, sister and brother-in-law. She could have seen them in Tijuana but wanted to avoid the long lines at the border. Her husband, Paul, passed them a wad of cash wrapped in a $20 bill.

Carlos Perez, who lives in Tijuana, cried when he saw his 5-year-old daughter, Caszandra, for the first time in three years. She slipped through the fence and embraced him, also in tears.

"A fence makes things more difficult," Perez said. "It divides us even further."

Added Sandra Castillo Vasquez, the girl's mother and a U.S. citizen who lives in San Diego: "At least we had this connection. We could touch each other."

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/29284412/

Border fence averaged $3.9 million per mile

Arizona Daily Star
January 30, 2009
by Brady McCombs

The flurry of fencing erected along the U.S.-Mexico border in the past three years by the Department of Homeland Security has cost more than expected, a government report shows.

The 140 miles of pedestrian fencing put up under the Secure Border Initiative prior to Oct. 31 of last year cost an average of $3.9 million per mile with costs ranging from $400,000 to $15.1 million a mile, a Government Accountability Office report released Thursday found.

That per-mile average is more than the $3 million estimated by the Congressional Budget Office in August 2006 and much more than the $2.2 million estimated by the Senate used during the immigration reform debate that same year. Even the highest estimate at the time, $3.2 million per mile from U.S. Rep. Duncan Hunter, R-Calif., ended up being too low.

Pedestrian fences, sometimes called primary fences, are 10-foot-or-higher steel barriers designed to stop or slow down people on foot.

Richard Stana, director of homeland security issues at the Government Accountability Office, said the GAO carried out the report to answer an intriguing question: If Homeland Security would have used the $393 million appropriated to the SBInet virtual fence project in fiscal years 2007-08, how many more miles of physical barriers could have been built?

The answer: 73 miles of pedestrian fencing or 232 miles of vehicle barriers; or 36 miles of pedestrian fences and 116 miles of vehicle barriers, the report says.

Project 28, the Boeing Co.-led virtual-fence test project anchored by nine camera and radar towers along a 28-mile stretch of border flanking Sasabe, Ariz., was delayed eight months by glitches and plagued with problems, a previous GAO report found. The second generation of virtual fences was scheduled to go up in late 2008, but the work was abruptly halted in August.

In reviewing Customs and Border Protection estimates of total contracts for fencing segments — the GAO did not independently verify or validate the information — the report offers a preliminary analysis of the actual costs of the biggest and fastest buildup of border barriers in U.S. history.

"It gives you an idea of what the fence is going to cost," Stana said of the report.

Final costs are still pending.

The report only calculates the cost of the miles finished before Oct. 31 of last year.

Earlier this week, Homeland Security officials said the agency has brought the total miles of primary fencing and vehicle barriers along the Southwest border to 601 miles, 69 miles short of the goal of 670 miles set during the Bush administration. That means there are more than 200 miles of fencing put up whose costs have not been calculated.

The price tag of the fencing won't be available until all the segments are completed and contracts with private companies are closed out, Stana said.

Prior to the Secure Border Initiative, which was launched in November 2005, the federal government had constructed 78 miles of pedestrian fencing and 57 miles of vehicle barriers, the GAO report shows.

The most expensive miles came in San Diego, where construction teams had to fill in a canyon known as "Smuggler's Gulch" with 35,000 truckloads of dirt. That 3.5-mile project, which is scheduled to be completed this year, could end up costing as much $16.5 million per mile, the report shows.

Vehicle barriers, the report found, came in slightly less expensive. The 75 miles of vehicle barriers put up — under chest-high steel barriers designed to stop cars and trucks but not people — cost an average of $1 million per mile, with costs ranging from $200,000 to $1.8 million, the report said.

The Congressional Budget Office estimated it would cost $1.3 million per mile in the August 2006 document.

Of Arizona's 350 miles of U.S.-Mexico border, there are 128 miles of pedestrian fencing and 151.6 miles of vehicle barriers, according to a Dec. 19 Customs and Border Protection release.

On StarNet: Find a multimedia presentation on the history of the border at azstarnet.com/bordertimeline

http://www.azstarnet.com/altsn/default/newsletterclickthru/278112

To read the GAO's full report on the cost of border wall construction, go to:
http://www.gao.gov/new.items/d09244r.pdf

Aide: Border Patrol to build border fence at park

Associated Press / Mercury News
January 7, 2008

SAN DIEGO—The Border Patrol will close a popular park on a bluff overlooking the Pacific Ocean to make way for a triple fence along the Mexican border, a legislative aide and activists said Wednesday.

The Border Patrol had been mum on whether Friendship Park would be affected by plans to erect more than 670 miles of barriers along the southern U.S. border. The park draws big crowds from both sides, where people chat through a chain-link fence separating Imperial Beach, Calif., and Tijuana, Mexico. They exchange kisses, tamales, even communion wafers.

By May, the half-acre plaza inside Border Field State Park is expected to be gone, replaced by three fences separated by about 125 feet, according to Jonathan Hardy, an aide to state Sen. Denise Ducheny, D-San Diego.

Hardy said he attended a meeting on Tuesday in which Border Patrol agents, led by the San Diego sector chief Mike Fisher, told legislative aides and community activists that the agency will build the fence at the plaza, which was dedicated in 1971 by then-first lady Patricia Nixon.

He said officials showed them backhoes that had already begun breaking up the cement plaza to make way for a dirt patrol road that will be sandwiched between the fences.

A Border Patrol spokesman, Mark Endicott, said he was unaware of any decision on the park's fate. He said Fisher was unavailable to comment.

The fence will extend to the beach, where the border is now marked by tall poles with spaces big enough for adults to slip their arms through, said the Rev. John Fanestil, a United Methodist pastor who was also at the meeting.

"There will be no public access, it could not have been more absolute," said Fanestil, who has offered weekly communion through the chain-link fence. "Their language was that they were demolishing the plaza and then they'll reconstruct it with a road."

In November, U.S. Reps. Susan Davis and Bob Filner, both San Diego Democrats, and seven state and local elected officials wrote President-elect Barack Obama's transition team to urge that the park be kept open, calling it a powerful symbol of goodwill between the U.S. and Mexico. They are awaiting a response.

A spokesman for Davis, Aaron Hunter, said the Border Patrol's decision to close the park was disappointing.

"We have a new administration. This decision was made by an administration that's on its way out," he said.

On the park's Mexican side, there is also a cement plaza, which sits next to a bullring. One group holds cross-border yoga classes.

Parts of the 800-acre Border Field State Park will remain open, including equestrian trails, according to those who attended the meeting.

The park is next to "Smuggler's Gulch," a gorge that is being filled with nearly 1.9 million tons of dirt to make way for fencing. The area was overrun by illegal immigrants until U.S. authorities launched a crackdown in the 1990s that pushed people to remote mountains and deserts.

Border Patrol officials told the group Tuesday that drugs have been passed through the fence at Friendship Park and that the agency lacked resources to patrol the crowds, said Hardy, the legislative aide.

"In their mind, it's supposed to be a controlled, secure area," Hardy said. "They feel they don't have the manpower to allow large groups."

http://www.mercurynews.com/news/ci_11401124

Flooded with questions

San Diego Union-Tribune
December 2, 2008

SOUTH COUNTY – In the Tijuana River Valley, horses are standing in mud up to their ankles and fields of watermelons are submerged under muck. Local farmers and ranchers blame the federal government – which is moving massive amounts of earth to accommodate a second border fence – for the mess.

But Border Patrol Agent Mark Endicott said the flooding at Monument Road and Hollister Street near the U.S.-Mexico border is not unusual after large storms.

“Every time we get heavy rain in that area, it floods, even before the construction project,” Endicott said.

The water flows from the high mesas that line the border toward about five large properties that sit in the valley below. A number of those properties host multiple families, individual ranches and numerous horse stables. Those who live there say last week's rains – about 1.14 inches over three days – brought more flooding and trouble than normal.

And they don't just blame the federal government. They say local agencies have failed to clean up debris-filled channels that carry the runoff.

After spending the long holiday weekend raking and clearing mud and debris from their land, property and business owners want answers.

Some locals, as well as environmentalists, are blaming the heavy flooding on an earth-moving project that began in August at a canyon known as Smuggler's Gulch. The canyon is being filled in with dirt cut from surrounding hills to create a 150-foot-tall earthen berm that will eventually allow a second border fence and patrol roads.

“You always get sediment coming off the hills, but this was different,” said Dick Tynan, who owns about 20 acres on Monument Road and Hollister Street. He said a lot more flooding occurred this time with just a small amount of rain.

The fill project is near complete, with more than 1.2 million cubic yards of earth in the canyon. Another half-million cubic yards will soon be added to finish the berm.

The $48.6 million project is due for completion in May, and though erosion-control measures have been taken near the top of the canyon, the sides of the berm have yet to be reseeded with vegetation to prevent sediment runoff.

Oscar Romo, a professor of urban studies and planning at the University of California San Diego, is tracking the construction's environmental effects on both sides of the border. He visited the site Wednesday and Thursday after the heavy rainfall. Already, Romo said, substantial erosion had occurred along the sides of the berm.

Some river valley residents also blame the flooding on San Diego officials for not cleaning out a flood-control channel coming out of Smuggler's Gulch. It is designed to carry runoff but is filled in some areas with at least 10 feet of plastic bottles, as well as debris and trash, including a refrigerator.

Darren Pudgil, a spokesman for the Mayor's Office, could not confirm yesterday whether the problem was the city's.

Tynan's neighbor Jesse Garcia, who owns J&K Earthworks off Monument Road, said Wednesday's rain flooded many of his fields that run along the flood-control channel. Runoff up to 15-feet high breached one side of the channel when three openings under a dirt bridge were clogged.

“I had the bulldozer out here, and I was trying to build up the wall of the channel with topsoil,” Garcia said. “This is the first time this has happened.”

Garcia, who has been farming there 11 years, estimated he lost $10,000 of watermelons because of the flooding.

Romo said he also noticed mud at the bottom of a sediment basin near Goat Canyon, a smaller fence-construction site nearby.

“It was designed to catch only sediment from Mexico,” Romo said. “It is now experiencing a lot more sediment than it used to.”

Environmental advocate Mike McCoy of the Southwest Wetlands Interpretive Association, who was part of a 2004 lawsuit to stop the Smuggler's Gulch project, said he was alarmed by the reports of flooding.

“It's coming down off that bare construction area. Wait for another rain or so, and it could really become a problem,” he said. “We'll just have to track it closely.”

Tynan, who has owned his property since 1978, had to pump water off his property, where horses and goats in rented stables stood in wall-to-wall mud.

“I haven't seen it like this since 2005,” Tynan said.

Yesterday, Monument Road was still muddy, especially near Smuggler's Gulch and other canyons. Forecasters say they are 90 percent certain San Diego County will stay dry for the next week or so. However, National Weather Service forecaster Mark Moede said a 10 percent chance exists that rain expected to develop far off the coast might head toward land by Sunday.

http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/metro/20081202-9999-1m2smuggle.html

U.S.-MEXICO: Fence to Carve Up Fragile Border Preserve

Inter Press Service
November 19, 2008

SAN DIEGO, California, Nov 19 (IPS) - Another chapter in U.S.-Mexico border relations is about to close. In the waning days of the George W. Bush administration, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security is completing construction of a 22-kilometre triple fence along the San Diego-Tijuana border.

It is being done over the objections of environmental activists living near the border, who are worried both about the toll on wildlife and those seeking entry into the United States.

A patch of green encircled by two cities, the Tijuana estuary lacks the grandeur of a mountain range but to biologists and conservationists it's an invaluable piece of real estate.

Created in 1981, the Tijuana River Research Reserve is an island of relative calm at the centre of a political maelstrom that pits conservations against advocates that promote tighter border controls. Nesting amid coastal sage and tall grass, 400 species of birds inhabit the wetlands. Thousands more birds return each year to one of the last vestiges of salt marsh existing in Southern California, where 90 percent have been lost to development.

"The estuary is one of the few remaining in Southern California without heavy human intrusion," said Mike McCoy, president of the South West Wetlands Interpretive Association.

However, the estuary has been part of contested territory for generations. The land was granted to the United States after the Treaty of Hidalgo in 1848, which ceded much of what is now southwest Arizona, Texas, New Mexico and California to the United States in the aftermath of the U.S-Mexican War.

The estuary has also been labeled a haven for drug-running and illegal border crossings, according to border officials, making it a flash point for U.S. immigration policy and government agencies entrusted with protecting rare and endangered species living in the estuary. The nearby Otay Mesa border crossing is the most active border crossing in the world.

On average, more than 31 billion dollars worth of products cross through the checkpoint each day, nearly all of it related to the regional maquiladora/manufacturing and agricultural industries. Others seek entry through different methods. "The immigration problem is overblown," remarked a docent on a recent trip to the Tijuana River Research Reserve.

The border, however, does have a dark side. According to U.S. border officials, the region is a magnet for illegal activity -- 162,000 arrests have been made, and 49,000 pounds of marijuana and 699 pounds of cocaine intercepted since November 2007. Drug cartels waging war on the streets of Tijuana also add an element of fear and apprehension. Here the border is tangible.

After 3,200 kilometres, the line tumbles into the Pacific Ocean, and a steel fence divides the United States from Mexico.

During the 1980s, the estuary was in danger of being overrun. Social trails scarred the land. Migrants seeking entry into the United States used the estuary as a crossing point, prompting local politicos to take action.

Also known as Operation Gatekeeper, the 60-million-dollar construction project comprises the western portion of the San Diego Border Infrastructure System. A federally funded programme put in place by Rep. Duncan Hunter of California, it dates back to 1996.

In the coming weeks, two fences will flank the existing one, leaving a gap wide enough to provide access to patrol vehicles, along the westernmost 5.6 kilometres of the U.S.-Mexico border. It will enable agents to monitor a border that marches across the edge of Tijuana's city limits, stretching into the arroyos and mesas beyond.

The plan calls for infilling Smugglers Gulch, a steep canyon through which contraband and people pass. It requires the movement of 2 million cubic yards of earth and calls for building a culvert to divert rainfall that flows down denuded hillsides during storms.

According to local legend, Smugglers Gulch earned its reputation during the Prohibition era of the 1920s and early 1930s, when Tijuana became a destination for U.S. servicemen and thrill seekers. In Mexico, it is known as Canon de Matador, or Slaughter House Canyon, supposedly because goats were slaughtered in the area.

The tops of mesas will be graded down and sections of canyons filled to accommodate an extensive defensive infrastructure that in all likelihood will add to the menace that pervades the border.

According to environmentalists, 100 acres of existing habitat will be compromised within the estuary, placing additional stress on the remaining habitat. "The long-term consequences are unknown," said David Massey, director of education at the San Diego Natural History, when speaking of the triple border fence.

The initial plan met with fierce opposition from environmental groups, who cite concerns that fill from Smugglers Gulch would ultimately choke the wetlands with sedimentation. This would violate federal laws that set aside the estuary as a wildlife refuge and water quality standards. The coastal commission agreed that the project would cause environmental harm and blocked construction.

In September 2005, Michael Chertoff, secretary of Homeland Security, trumped all legal challengers by citing the National ID Act, giving him the authority to waive any regulation that impeded construction of the fence in the name of national security.

A local federal district court judge then dismissed all cases that impeded the construction of the fence on the grounds that the intent of Congress was clear in terms of completing its construction.

Construction will move along as the DHS attempts to meet its stated goal of building 225 miles of pedestrian fencing and 362 kilometres of vehicle barriers along the U.S.-Mexico border -- plans likely to meet with additional legal challenges in the months and years to come as advocates on both sides of the fence continue to debate border policy over a landscape where cowboys and coyotes fear to go.

http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=44774

Estuary advocate, once a collaborator, now at odds with Hunter

San Diego Union-Tribune

August 25, 2008

SOUTH COUNTY – In the fall of 1990, an environmental activist from Imperial Beach received a presidential award at the behest of his congressman.

Mike McCoy was being honored with a Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Award, at the time presented by Republicans for stewardship of the environment. The congressman who nominated him was Duncan Hunter.

The Democratic veterinarian and the Republican congressman, who at the time represented Imperial Beach, didn't see eye to eye on everything, but they agreed on a surprising number of issues. There was sewage entering the Tijuana River estuary, and McCoy was working with Hunter's staff to clean it up.

A friendship of sorts emerged from their unlikely alliance. Once upon returning from Washington, Hunter gave McCoy, who chaired his environmental committee, a copy of a sketch drawn by Ronald Reagan of one of Hunter's sons.

“Thanks, McCoy,” he dedicated it.

Fast-forward almost two decades, and the one-time collaborators are at opposite ends of a long-running controversy over a new border fence and the eventual fate of the estuary.

Their disagreement is in a sense a conflict of life legacies. McCoy, 66, has dedicated the bulk of his life's work to preserving the estuary. Along with other environmentalists, he led the losing legal battle against a plan to build a double fence across a deep canyon known as Smuggler's Gulch.

The massive project, already under way, requires filling the canyon with so much dirt that the California Coastal Commission ruled four years ago that it could damage the estuary, increasing silt erosion and destroying sensitive wildlife habitat.
Hunter, 60, the former chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, is best known for promoting border security as an antidote to illegal immigration. He has been the project's strongest proponent, introducing legislation three years ago that waived all laws hampering fence construction.

“Mike McCoy is a good guy,” said Hunter, who retires in January. “People of good will can look at exactly the same set of facts and come to opposite conclusions.”

The two maintain a mutual respect from afar, but they haven't spoken in years. McCoy blames their parting of ways chiefly on the fence.

“I think he saw me as an obstacle,” he said recently.

McCoy is familiar with being in this position. In the early 1970s, the then-recent transplant from Colorado got wind that Imperial Beach city leaders planned to develop the wetlands south of town into a marina.

The estuary was by no means pristine, its northern end used as a dumping ground. The City Council argued that a marina would help the cash-poor city.

It was the only sizable estuary on the Southern California coast still untouched by development, and McCoy felt strongly that developing it would cause greater harm than proponents understood.

“The fisheries of the world rely on estuaries,” he said. “In my mind, it was criminal to destroy it.”

For close to a decade, he and others campaigned to block the marina, and in late 1980, the estuary was protected. It is now known as the Tijuana River National Estuarine Research Reserve.

Also that year, Hunter won the congressional district seat that included Imperial Beach. Though not what one would call a tree-hugger, Hunter had concerns about raw sewage from Tijuana spilling into the ocean, as did constituents.

“In rainy weather, sewage from Tijuana was getting into the Tijuana River,” he said recently. “It was going into the estuary.”

McCoy was an advocate for cleaning it up, and though he hadn't voted for Hunter, he volunteered to work with him on the sewage issue.

“He was definitely helpful to me,” McCoy said of his association with Hunter. “Until we got into this border fence thing.”


Common ground
At first, the two agreed on the idea of a border fence to stem illegal immigration traffic through Imperial Beach. From Hunter's point of view, the fence would keep undocumented migrants and drug smugglers out of the country. From McCoy's, it would keep the estuary from being hammered by foot traffic.
Starting in the late 1980s, Hunter's staff set about locating used military landing mat for Army welders to fashion into a metal fence.

McCoy said he has since had second thoughts, especially after tighter enforcement policies in 1994 drove migrants east to the desert.

“People died out there,” he said. But at the time, “from our little point of view, it shifted the traffic.”

His support for Hunter's plans had begun to wane by the mid-1990s, after Hunter became a proponent for legislation calling for layers of fence extending 14 miles inland.

Under the new plan, Smugglers' Gulch would be filled with more than 2 million cubic yards of dirt to build a half-mile, 165-foot-tall earthen bridge supporting fencing and roads.

A series of revisions came and went over several years as advocates pushed for a more environmentally sensitive plan, but nothing was agreed upon.

In early 2004, McCoy's organization, Southwest Wetlands Interpretive Association and other groups sued the federal government.

Getting the waiver

For Hunter, the process had been an exercise in frustration.
“It became clear that we would never get permission,” he said. “So we wrote the waiver language into the Real ID Act.”

The purpose of the Real ID Act of 2005 was to impose federal security standards on state identification cards. Hunter added language that would allow the Homeland Security secretary to supersede laws stopping fence construction.

In September 2005, Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff set a precedent by waiving the laws on which the San Diego lawsuit was based; the lawsuit later was thrown out of court.

A $48.6 million contract for the project was awarded this year.

For Hunter, who lives in Alpine and leaves Congress after an unsuccessful bid last year for the Republican presidential nomination, it's the achievement of a goal that became a personal crusade.

“The security of the country is the primary interest,” he said. “In carrying out that interest, the environment can be accommodated.”

Hunter said ponds and structures can arrest silt that results from the operation. McCoy hopes there will be such protections but isn't confident.

His best hope, McCoy said, is that if the fence comes down some day, what damage occurs can be repaired. He also has given quite a bit of thought to the fences he once thought were a good idea.

“If people want to come here, they are going to come,” he said. “I see it as a barrier that needs to lead to a solution. That's the only way I can face it.”

http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/mexico/tijuana/20080825-9999-1m25fence.html

$57 million border fence is going up near San Diego

Associated Press / Kansas City Star
August 16, 2008

SAN DIEGO Scrapers and bulldozers began filling a deep canyon Friday to make way for a border fence after 12 years of planning, environmental reviews and legal challenges.

The 3.5-mile stretch extends from a state park on an oceanfront cliff through a canyon known as Smuggler’s Gulch. The gorge was overrun by illegal immigrants until U.S. authorities launched a crackdown in the 1990s that pushed traffic to the remote mountains and deserts of California and Arizona.

At a cost of about $16 million a mile, the fence will be far more expensive than fences the U.S. government is building elsewhere along the country’s 1,952-mile border with Mexico. U.S. Customs and Border Protection said the average cost along the entire border is $2 million to $3 million a mile.

The stretch near San Diego will cost about $57 million under a contract awarded to Kiewit Corp. of Omaha, Neb., said James Swanson, a Border Patrol special operations supervisor. The lion’s share will pay for filling Smuggler’s Gulch with nearly 1.9 million tons of dirt and for building a concrete culvert to handle rainfall flowing downhill from Tijuana, Mexico, Swanson said.

The border is marked by a decaying fence made of surplus Navy landing mats. Border Patrol agents swarm the area in jeeps and pickups as they wait for migrants in Tijuana to dash about two miles through trees to the closest patch of stores and homes.

It’s a far cry from the early ’90s, when large groups blitzed across the border and overwhelmed the Border Patrol.

U.S. authorities insist new fencing is needed, despite an increase in patrols and objections from environmental groups who say the dirt shift threatens the Tijuana River estuary, home to more than 370 migratory and native birds.

“We’re not seeing the thousands, the hundreds who streamed through in the past,” said Mike Fisher, chief of the Border Patrol’s San Diego sector. “However, it’s still a vulnerability that’s being exploited today.”

Arrests along the stretch have doubled in the past year as the Border Patrol has added agents, said spokesman Alex Renteria.

Arrests totaled 16,738 in the area from October through July, or about 60 a day, up from 7,944 the same period last year.

The project calls for a dirt access road and 15-foot-high steel mesh fence just north of the existing fence. Crews will build a third fence about 10 feet high farther north and install lights.

“It’s crazy,” said Victor Clark Alfaro, director of the Binational Center for Human Rights in Tijuana. “I don’t see the justification to spend $60 million on an area that’s no longer an important crossing.”

He predicted the new fence will reduce crossings to “almost zero” but inflict serious environmental damage.

According to local legend, Smuggler’s Gulch got its name from alcohol smuggled into the U.S. during Prohibition. In Mexico, it is known as “Canon del Matadero” — “Slaughterhouse Canyon” — supposedly because there was once a goat slaughterhouse nearby.

http://www.kansascity.com/news/nation/story/753267.html

Fill work in canyon may start this week: Border fence project had faced opposition

San Diego Union Tribune
July 29, 2008

By Leslie Berestein
UNION-TRIBUNE STAFF WRITER

Crews could begin filling in Smuggler's Gulch as early as this week for the border-fence construction project that environmentalists had opposed for years.

The gulch is a deep canyon west of the San Ysidro port of entry. Yesterday, Reps. Duncan Hunter, R-Alpine, and Brian Bilbray, R-Carlsbad, held a news conference there to announce the expected start of the cut-and-fill phase.

“This is the last hole in the border fence,” Hunter said. “It's important to get this done.”

Earth-scraping equipment was scheduled to arrive yesterday, he said. A Border Patrol spokesman later confirmed that the contractor handling the fence project is obtaining more equipment.

The federal government plans to build an earthen berm across the canyon to support a 15-foot, secondary steel-mesh fence as well as patrol and access roads. The government will need to fill the canyon with more than 2 million cubic yards of dirt.

Hunter's aides said the cut-and-fill operation would be in full swing by Aug. 11, with about 22,000 cubic yards of earth moved per day.

This year, the government awarded a $48.6 million contract for the fence work to Kiewit Corp., a construction and mining company based in Omaha, Neb. The corporation has been preparing the site in recent months.

Government officials expect to finish the fence project by May 1.

The scale of the work has drawn widespread criticism from environmentalists, who fear that sediment from the earth-moving operation will harm the Tijuana River estuary. The estuary is an internationally recognized wetlands area that has cost millions of dollars to restore.

“This massive project is going to have some long-term impact, and nobody knows what that long-term impact will be,” said John Fanestil, executive director of the Foundation for Change, a grant-making organization that funds grass-roots, social-justice groups in the San Diego-Tijuana region.

Fanestil, a minister, was one of several people from environmental, religious and other groups who asked elected officials in recent months to propose plans with less environmental damage.
“We failed,” Fanestil said yesterday.

In February 2004, environmental organizations such as the Sierra Club and the San Diego Audubon Society sued in federal court to halt the fence project. The California Coastal Commission also stalled the project that same month, concluding that it would degrade the environment.

The next year, Congress passed a federal waiver authority championed by Hunter. The legislation enabled the Department of Homeland Security to waive all laws and litigation standing in the way of building the fence.

Michael Chertoff, secretary of Homeland Security, set a precedent in September 2005 when he exercised the waiver authority in San Diego. In December of that year, the courts dismissed the environmental groups' lawsuit.

Since then, Homeland Security has waived environmental and other restrictions that impeded construction elsewhere along the U.S.-Mexico border. This has prompted more legal challenges as the federal government tries to build 670 miles of pedestrian and vehicle fencing by year's end.

Last month, the U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear a case stemming from an Arizona lawsuit that challenged the constitutionality of the waiver authority.

http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/metro/20080729-9999-1m29gulch.html#