Sewage USA: Can Surfing Mayor Clean Up California's Toxic Coast?

IMPERIAL BEACH, Calif. — All Serge Dedina really wants to do is surf. But in his secluded, often overlooked beach town that’s home to one of the world’s classic big-wave surf breaks, he first had to get elected mayor.

“IB” — that’s what the locals call it — is tucked in the last cul-de-sac of the United States’ southwestern-most corner between San Diego Bay and the U.S. border fence at Tijuana. The 4-square-mile seaside village is, on its best days, a surfer’s paradise. Hard-core surfers will tell you that sometimes, when conditions are just right, IB’s surf pumps out barreling waves worthy of a surf film. Locals embrace an old-school surf culture that’s on display everywhere. A longboard is mounted in the City Hall foyer. Street signs are adorned with classic “woody” surf wagons. You get the idea.

For the last 40 years, though, the surf is sometimes too dangerous to paddle out in — but not for the reason you might think. Neighboring Tijuana’s population has grown so fast and has produced so much waste that it’s become an environmental disaster. When heavy rains hit, the Mexican border town’s obsolete sewage system and the concrete-channeled Tijuana River, which crosses into the United States through Border Field State Park, a federally protected wetlands, spews a stream of filth, trash, and toxins into the Pacific Ocean, where currents carry the south-of-the-border sewage north along the town’s shore.

For as bad as it sometimes smells, it often looks worse: diapers, shoes, tires and plastics of every kind rest above the high-tide line, a site you wouldn’t expect to see in America. Imperial Beach's water quality once earned it a spot on Forbes' list of "Death Beaches." It’s not uncommon for IB surfers to suffer from streptococcus, gastrointestinal and sinus infections, even hepatitis or MRSA.

On a recent afternoon at Imperial Beach’s long, scenic pier — the town’s hub — Imperial Beach native and lifelong surfer is asked about the nastiest things he’s seen floating in the ocean while surfing: turds, perhaps?

“How about dead people?” Jeff Knox says immediately, his eyes wide. “Dead animals? All of the above.”

In the past year or two, the Tijuana River reportedly has doubled as an illegal chemical waste dump. U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents working on beaches near the border have suffered chemical burns and rashes. They even reported that pollution disintegrated their work boots. In May, the agency released a report detailing the presence of banned pesticides DDT and Adrin, uranium, industrial compounds like hexavalent chromium — an anti-corrosion agent added to paint, primer and electroplate chromium on metal, among other things — and more than two-dozen other dangerous substances in water and soil samples.

For about a third of the year — and, most recently, Memorial Day weekend, summer’s unofficial start — the beach in this beach town is off-limits to 28,000 folks represented by Mayor Dedina, who says his sinuses got infected by polluted seawater after a surf session last year.

“Every place I loved at some point was threatened by either pollution, development or a breakwater,” Dedina — tall, straight-backed and a fast talker — says from the office of his other day job, as co-founder and executive director of an environmental nonprofit.

A solution to IB’s pollution problem has baffled town leaders for generations. Things haven’t changed all that much. While the Trump White House has invested tremendous amounts of political capital and economic resources on other border issues, pollution in Imperial Beach and neighboring cities continues to be ignored by federal agencies, as it has for decades.

Imperial Beach faces an international pollution problem that’s too huge for a local government with a $35 million budget to tackle on its own.

What’s a surfing mayor from a rough-and-tumble California beach town to do?

Fight to protect the ocean, of course. That’s how he was brought up.

“My entire childhood up through college was spent fighting these things.”

‘OPERATION BEAVER’

Dedina moved to Imperial Beach at age 7, in 1971, from Los Angeles, where his European parents settled after fleeing the Holocaust. Imperial Beach was a tough place back then and it looked nothing like it does now, with the fancy restaurants, craft breweries, and bright snack shops that have popped up along the boardwalk surrounding the pier.

“Some people described it as the wild west. Biker bars here every 10 feet. Bikers on the beach. Fights. When I was a kid you didn’t come to the beach after dark,” said Knox, the mayor's longtime surfing bud. “But it was a great place to grow up. You grew up barefoot and dirty, and you knew everybody in town and everybody knew you.”

Dedina found a sanctuary within the estuary riding bikes, building driftwood forts with his friends, cooking hot dogs on the beach — a “pretty idyllic” childhood, he says. As a teenager, he worked as a lifeguard under his mentor, the late, legendary IB waterman Allen “Dempsey” Holder. In 1937, Holder became the first to surf — body surf, that is — the Tijuana Sloughs, once considered California’s premier big-wave surf spot. It’s a badge of honor to have been chosen by Holder as a lifeguard. Dedina’s nonprofit, Wildcoast, hosts an annual ocean festival and surf contest in his honor affectionately known as “The Dempsey.”

“Dempsey had a really positive influence on me in terms of respect for the ocean,” Dedina said.

In 1980, Dedina was just 16 years old when he first found himself at odds with Imperial Beach leaders. Then-mayor, Brian Bilbray, who was just 29 years old himself, pushed ahead with a plan he dubbed “Operation Beaver” that called for building a series of dikes that would block the Tijuana River’s sewage flow, which had completely quarantined the town’s beaches that summer.

Before he got elected mayor, Bilbray had a reputation for being a tough guy. He once broke up a fight at a restaurant, dragged two brawling patrons outside and returned to finish his meal. So it wasn’t too shocking to some people that Bilbray, against the advice of city attorneys who warned that Operation Beaver would be “flagrantly illegal,” manned a skip loader to dam the polluted river on June 19, 1980.

At the time, Dedina and a group of protesters — fellow lifeguards — believed Bilbray’s bulldozer stunt was part of a bigger plan to build a marina in the estuary surrounded by luxury homes and condos, but ruin the town’s big-wave surf spot in the process. The controversial marina proposal was the centerpiece of a long-simmering existential argument about what kind of place IB should be, and politics broke along those lines. Dedina and his buddies saw Operation Beaver as a proxy war. They sat down on one of the berms and refused to move, according to published reports.

As the story goes, some harsh words were exchanged between protesters and supporters before things got physical.

“Guys jumped on me ... really beat me up,” Dedina said.

When protesters tried to pull Bilbray from a skip loader, the then-mayor responded in kind. The Chula Vista Star-News reported that Bilbray said, "You wanted polluted water? You got polluted water," before dumping a scoopful of water on protesters, including Dedina. A park ranger eventually showed up and put a halt to the standoff, and within a couple days, high tides washed away the dikes.

The argument over it continues to simmer, though. Bilbray, who went on to become a U.S. representative, insisted that Operation Beaver followed six months of unanswered phone calls and letters to environmental authorities about the sewage problem, and that it had nothing to do with the proposed marina. He thinks Dedina conflates the two to burnish his environmental credentials, and says Dedina “is short-tempered and doesn’t parse his words.”

In any case, Dedina’s protest was his first foray into environmental activism. Four years later, the federal government tried to install a 1.5-mile-long breakwater offshore that many believe would have ruined the surf. Dedina and others fought that, too; a judge blocked the breakwater plan just as the barge showed up to dump the rocks.

Dedina’s life path was set. He went on to earn a PhD in geography, work as an environmental consultant in San Diego and, in 2000, co-founded Wildcoast, an environmental nonprofit that aims to preserve the coastal habitat in the U.S. and Baja California.

SO-CAL’S LAST WORKING-CLASS BEACH

The New York Times once called IB a “rundown surfing community.”

Locals describe it another way: the last working-class beach town in Southern California.

While some folks want Imperial Beach to remain a survivor of a seemingly inevitable encroachment of gentrification and millionaires that, decades ago, claimed every other Southern California oceanfront town as their own — others hope for a posh future as a luxurious tourist destination.

As things stand, 25 percent of Imperial Beach residents here live below the poverty line. Until the latest wave of restaurants and other hospitality-industry additions to the town, the largest employer was the local CVS Pharmacy store. There is a U.S. Navy helicopter base near the Mexican border and other military bases on the north side of town.

By early 2014, city officials began considering moves that some people worried would further the creeping threat of a class divide. Proposals to privatize public amenities — including the town’s Little League field and skateboard park — stood as the latest example of the decades-long ideological conflict that divided the town and inspired Dedina’s 2014 mayoral bid.

“It seemed like the city was focused on things that were good for the city, and was becoming disconnected from the community,” Dedina said.

Dedina ran on a quality-of-life platform that called for paving alleyways, tearing down chain-link fences, installing sidewalks and crosswalks, launching music and art festivals, building a new library, and bringing a supermarket to town.

It was a brutal campaign that led to pretty intense conflicts, Dedina said. Some of his campaign supporters reported getting threatened and being victims of other “typical small-town” political shenanigans.

“I had people follow me. … I’m like, ‘Dude, what are you doing?’” Dedina says. “When I was growing up it was a pretty rough-and-tumble town, so it wasn’t anything I’m not used to.”

The election ended in a recount with Dedina besting incumbent Jim Janney by just 43 votes.

That was nothing compared to the battle that the rookie politician would face three years into his first term. In 2017, fierce storms overwhelmed a cracked sewer pipe in Mexico that dumped 200 million gallons of sewage into the ocean, unleashing an epic contamination that led to 70 beach closings and about 800,000 fewer beach visitors than the previous year.

For Dedina, that was the final straw. After years — decades — of getting nowhere with authorities on either side of the border, Imperial Beach joined neighboring towns in a lawsuit alleging the Trump Administration violated the Clean Water Act by allowing American soil to be polluted. California’s attorney general and the Surfrider Foundation, an international clean-water advocacy group, each filed separate lawsuits that aimed to force the federal government to do the expensive work to protect California’s coast from Mexican pollution illegally crossing the border.

“It had gotten to such a point that we had no other option,” Dedina says. “The response on both sides always was, ‘It’s too expensive and we can’t do anything,’ or ‘It’s your fault’ — literally we were told that. ‘If kids are getting sick, it’s their fault.’ We were calling Mexico and no one was answering the phone. That’s when we realized infrastructure in Tijuana is collapsing, and it’s only gonna get worse. It’s clear that lawsuits are the only things getting them to the table to address both sides of the border fixing the problem.”

The federal government quickly pushed to kill the Imperial Beach case, but a judge dismissed the motion as “moot” in May 2018. Now, the legal rivals are involved in court-mandated negotiations designed to hash out a settlement ahead of the trial’s October 2020 start date.

Last week, the Environmental Protection Agency, which isn’t party to the federal lawsuit, offered up a potential solution to fix the problem, well, most of it, and recommended that the beach towns petition state lawmakers and Congress to split the bill with Mexico. As for the lawsuit, the best-case scenario for Imperial Beach, whether through settlement or trial, is for the federal government to step in and help pay around $100 million of the expected $372 million it will cost to fix the pollution problem.

Dedina remains hopeful, but won’t be satisfied until a deal’s done.

“I’m not pleased with the way anything’s going,” he said in a phone interview from Los Cabos, Mexico, where he was attending a North American mayors’ conference. “We’ve had a record number of beach closures this year, more than a hundred million gallons of sewage spilled in the Tijuana River over the last two months. Things are getting worse. The irony is I have to come to this pristine beach in Mexico to ask them to stop dumping toxic waste on us.”

THE ‘WET’ MAYOR

In 2018, Dedina won reelection in a landslide with 70 percent of the vote. On land, things seem to be looking up in Imperial Beach. So far, the mayor says, it’s working. Dedina claims that 2018 brought a record number of new businesses to town. Craft breweries and restaurants beloved by local foodies continue to pop up. Old biker bars are becoming a distant memory.

But Dedina has plenty of critics. Ask his enemies for their take on Dedina’s impact on Imperial Beach and brickbats start flying: “I wish the city council and mayor would not throw the sewage issue out there so much, because we’re supposed to be a tourist town.” “He won’t consider other ideas just because he doesn’t have control over them.” “Serge is famous around here for being quick to accuse and slow to apologize.” “The water’s actually gotten worse since he’s been mayor.”

Some lines drawn in the sand in IB never wash away.

Still, Dedina’s war to clean up his favorite surf spot wages on. In the summer, Dedina works out of an office inside the beach’s lifeguard tower — his surfboard and wetsuit nearby — to keep close tabs on this often forgotten corner of coastline. And, let’s be honest, the oceanfront office allows him to catch waves with his constituents. At least when the water is clean enough, that is.

“Everyone knows not to schedule anything early in the morning for me,” Dedina says, smiling. “I need to be wet.”

From the lifeguard tower, Dedina has a pristine view of his town’s cursed beach, too often a dirty and dangerous place, that he’s determined to clean up so one day other surfers won’t have to paddle into politics just to catch waves.

Adam Elder is a writer in San Diego who's written for Esquire, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, NewYorker.com, VICE, The Guardian, WIRED.com and elsewhere.