Opinion: School districts right to demand Biden, Newsom action on sewage nightmare

When it comes to the South Bay sewage emergency, it’s been an interesting — and, as always, aggravating — couple of weeks.

Thankfully, the number of institutions and organizations no longer willing to put up with this nightmare just keeps growing. Nothing gathers their attention like the fact that 100 billion-plus gallons of feces-laced effluent from the Tijuana River have fouled South County coastal areas since 2018 — despite local, state and federal governments all acknowledging how grossly unacceptable this is. Even before that beach-closing, life-warping deluge began, 34,000 illnesses in 2017 were linked to water pollution in the region, according to a a Scripps Institution of Oceanography study. Local urgent care doctors say constant fecal exposure may well prove to be the real cause of many residents’ medical woes.

So it was great to see reports that the Sweetwater Union High School and South Bay Union School Districts have sent letters imploring President Joe Biden and Gov. Gavin Newsom to declare a local sewage state of emergency. The board of the Chula Vista Elementary School District may follow suit in April.

Alas, there are zero signs that Biden or Newsom will listen. The Federal Emergency Management Agency says that at the request of the governor of the affected state, the president can declare a major disaster for any natural or man-made event “regardless of cause” if the disaster meets this threshold: the finding that the disaster “has caused damage of such severity that it is beyond the combined capabilities of state and local governments to respond.”

Biden and Newsom pretend this discretion doesn’t exist. Biden thinks federal emergency declarations are for earthquakes, storms and collapsing bridges in Philadelphia and, this week, Baltimore — not environmental disasters driven by governmental incompetence on both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border. It is not an idle thought experiment to wonder how California’s governor might have reacted to the president’s blitheness if he didn’t have grand national political ambitions that required him to keep mum.

Meanwhile, led by Rep. Scott Peters, D-San Diego, the local House delegation continues to do what it can to fix the broken sewage infrastructure in San Ysidro that exacerbates the problems with the broken sewage infrastructure in Tijuana. The appropriations bill passed last week by the House includes another $156 million that can be used to repair the South Bay International Wastewater Treatment Plant.

For five years, The San Diego Union-Tribune Editorial Board has expressed disbelief that national leaders — starting with Presidents Donald Trump and Barack Obama — have treated the awful, never-ending sewage spills plaguing the South Bay as a minor local issue of no particular federal concern. We’ve repeatedly called for emergency action. But to the credit of Peters, Rep. Juan Vargas, D-San Diego, and other local House members, they’ve pursued conventional solutions to an extreme problem that few in Washington, D.C., care about. In five years time, the result may well be reopened beaches and a healthier community.

But when that happy day arrives, the failure of the federal government to take decisive action to help San Diegans for so long will remain an incontrovertible fact. That the federal government made the sewage crisis much worse with years of terrible management at the San Ysidro treatment plant only adds to the case that it has failed our community — egregiously and unforgivably.