I'm supposed to talk about something that people are probably still wondering
what it means, as I am, and it's... it's about governance and I will get to that
in a second but I would—I'm gonna try to profile what the Tijuana River watershed
is in my mind, the important aspect of the Tijuana River watershed. First of all,
the Tijuana River is a trans-boundary watershed and in the United States
that's not a big deal. About 90% of your territory in the United States
is in an international watershed, but in Mexico, it doesn't pan out the same way.
In Mexico, it's probably about 10%. Within Mexico, there are more than 1,400
watersheds and only three of them on the U.S.-Mexico border are international
and three of them in the South border. But the Tijuana River watershed in
comparison with the other two are it it's very very small. The 1944 treaty had
several articles and only one—article16—deals with the Tijuana River watershed.
I'll get to that in a second. That's my map, Paul—that's all I got and
by the way, that blue spot right in the middle—that blue spot is the El Carrizo
Dam and just talking about why there's no water in Tijuana right now,
this spot is bluer than El Carrizo is right now. It's really really low as we
monitor the Colorado River Basin and Lake Mead in Tijuana, people on a daily
basis are looking to see how much water there is in El Carrizo Dam and you can
see also that there's kind of a sub—let me see if I can
use a pointer here...
See there's kind of a sub-basin division and El
Carrizo is not a basin that will capture water. It's just there to regulate the
flow from the... from the Colorado River aqueduct. Anyway, the Tijuana
River watershed has, in my mind, three features that make it unique. First of
all, within the U.S.-Mexico border, the geopolitical importance of the San Diego/Tijuana
region is far beyond what you'll see in other cross-border communities
and that has become very apparent in terms of social political terms when you
talk about migration and in other elements that begin to really weigh on
how the quality of life is in Tijuana. The second feature is that, being
relatively small in contrast with the Colorado River in the Rio Bravo,
it really makes it very manageable. It doesn't have the complications in terms
of the structure of several jurisdictions as other watersheds—this
is just California and Baja California... three municipios on the south
side of the border into San Diego County. So we should be able to manage this yet
we're stuck here 50 years after we started noticing problems and we still
can't really seem to solve them. The third one, which might be seen as bad
news in the past, is probably good news now. There's an absence of water conflict.
Why is there an absence of water conflict? Because there is an absence of
water, and so if we don't have water, we don't fight about it—we fight about
sewage of course, but given that there is no dispute about water, we should
probably be thinking along the lines of "We have common objectives here." We don't
really have a zero sum type of situation. There's also another
feature which I didn't write in here—it's a biological hot spot there are so
many endemic species and species that are endangered in the coastal
sage scrub that we really ought to be paying more attention about
environmental management along the watershed. Now for many years we've been
really wondering about "How can we get Conagua to pay attention on the U.S. side"
in terms of governance and "How can we get US members to go and be at the
Canseco de Cuenca on the south side of the border" and then we start talking
about now about governance and in many ways, there's a definition
of governor's—just very fast, it relates to the processes, the interactions and
decision-making among the actors involved in a collective problem that
lead to the creation reinforcement or reproduction of social norms and
institutions. Said quickly in another way, in the absence of a government there's
got to be some sort of governance that we really ought to be paying attention
to, hence the importance of the international boundary Water Commission,
because the International Boundary and Water Commission is the authority in an
international watershed. This is the history for all of the complications of
the U.S.-Mexico border in terms of how we manage this international relationship.
It's been close to 150 years and we've only had one unilateral dispute that was
not solved in terms of water. Water has been really a good news element or a
theme or a topic in the U.S.-Mexico border. The International Boundary and Water
Commission is an international organization—it is the international
organization that comes to life when the two sections come together. Both
sections are a branch of their Foreign Affairs Agency Department of
State and (speaking Spanish) and over the course of history there
have been 23 minutes that have been signed for the Tijuana River watershed.
However, minutes—usually in the International Boundary and Water
Commission—are signed to resolve issues rather than to prevent problems
occurring, and over the course of history since the 1944 treaty there have been 23
minutes—4 of them for sanitation and then 15 of them for water delivery... just
extending the the possibility of water being delivered to Tijuana through the
Otay emergency connection. Only four of them are really what I would consider to
be acknowledging water governance or bi-national water governance. In 1967, there
was a channelization of the river—a minute, it was Minute 225. In three
years later, Minute 236 started talking about construction and there was
actually an agreement that there would be 400 meters of concrete channel lining
along 400 meters to the north and 400 meters to the south of the
international boundary and then from that point on, both governments—both
federal governments—would channelize the river. In 1977, there was a minute signed
to address modifications of a U.S. portion. That minute, Minute 258
actually began talking about "How are we going to prevent from additional
flooding happening in Tijuana if there's anything that is occurring on the U.S.
side of the border" and history really played a trick on us in terms of trying
to deal with the border because in 1970, there was the National
Environmental Policy Act and then in 1972 the Clean Water Act. Suddenly you
guys in the U.S. had discovered the environmental movement which
took 15 years before it really happened in Mexico in 1987 and 1988 when we
actually began doing environmental issues on the Mexican side. Already in
the U.S. it was far, you know, along in that path. And then in 2015—so what is
it like 40-something years or close to 40 years—there came in at 3:20. Getting
back to the the bi-national governance in the early years, the channelization of
the Tijuana River, it was actually recommended that two governments
approved the construction of maintenance—for maintenance of the river. As I
said, in 1970 the construction called for 400 meters
on both sides of the border, but then in 1980, the U.S. federal government said, "You
know what, we're not gonna... we're not gonna line the river—we're not gonna
channel it" and so this is a copy of a telegram, remember those? A telegram that
we found in the offices of the International Boundary and Water
Commission in Ciudad Juarez, and since you have—I will read it because I don't
think you can read it, it says "This is addressed to Governor Roberto de la
Madrid" and it said "Por esta Marlowe de interés en el proyecto de la
canalization del rio Tiguan alum bo los presentes documentos y de parte de la
división de ingenieros del ejército americano en el Kim Foreman al diputado
Lionel vanderlin Casselton convenient la construcción del canal in Estados Unidos."
The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers said "We're not gonna line that" hence, the
incompatibility that we are seeing now was created in the 1970s.
Hence, it began what I call "a tale of frustration..." lessons in cause
and effect, and you see that recurrent spills of wastewater that were at some
point thought to be addressed by the Border Environment
Infrastructure Fund from the EPA. That in the citizen corner created what
is, in my mind—it articulates the frustration when you talk about the
Tijuana River Valley Recovery Team. When you start saying, because the border is
there, "To hell with what's going on on the Mexican side" we just want to stem
the effects. We just want to control the effects and there's... that's something
very hard to do. Because that mean that I'm... (okay)
...it means I'm bored he says—okay. And then the North American Development Bank
obviously is another element but in many ways, I think that the tale of frustration
needs to get to the fact that "Is this a tale of two rivers?" What is this thing—
What is the Tijuana River? Is it a river or is it a drainage channel, and I really
think that San Diego and Tijuana need to to look at that question up front and
answer the question. "Do we—are we all okay
with it being a drainage channel because it is a drainage channel or do we
actually want a river" because at the end of the day, having a pristine, natural
estuary and research reserve on the north side of the border just downstream from
a channel —a concrete channel—that actually gushes everything that happens,
be it storm sewer drainage, sanitary
drainage, or solid waste sediment. It's just incompatible. So, Minute 320 created
the Binational Core Group and it actually says that the Bi-national Core
Group is to identify measures of cooperation, it's supposed to define the
institutions and the participants in each of the projects. It should promote
the realization of studies and research that are necessary, it should define
projects to be built, define elements of cooperation
and in monitoring programs and so forth. In other words, the Binational Core Group
is the core group that needs to begin to work on the binational.
And for a while, the Binational Core Group actually began to meet by virtue
of the commissioners inviting what the minute calls for in terms of
representation from federal state and local as well as NGOs but nothing really
happened until we began to realize that what was happening was that there wasn't
really a formal structure for. So, a citizen group got together and said, "What
you really need is a group with local regional membership to be active in
water management and to actually have a proactive approach to analysis and
decision making—it has to be fixed membership subject to internal bylaws"
and so forth and those are the attributes or the
jurisdiction... the competencies of the Binational Core Group as I read them off,
and this is what came out. The Commissioner's Chair—the Binational
Core Group, but there's also the Director del Organismo, the Cuenca
Conagua Regional Director, the Secretary of Urban Development in Baja California,
the representative for the local government in Tijuana, an NGO
representative, a private sector representative, and one from academia on
the U.S. side, Region 9 Director of Office of Water, Cal EPA, and then also a local
representative and here's some of the twinning that Trent was talking about...
hopefully this will probably anchor some twinning so that research and other
collaboration can begin to take place. We really think that the Binational
Core Group needs to have three features—it has to have stature and prestige. It's
not for friends to be sitting there... friends of the Commissioner, I
mean. Has to be formal and be consistent and it
has to have a lot of transparency, and in order for that to actually work, we think
that there needs to be a Technical Secretariat to actually run data
documentation, to do a lot of running around between universities, to compile
an agenda, to maintain communication between the the core group members, to
coordinate logistics—become the official archive for the watershed...
capitalise on the technical binational workgroups that are already
formed and coordinate that with the Binational Core Group agenda and then
obviously compile points of interest from from the public. That diagram which
you probably cannot read are just all nine activities for the Binational
Core Group. The four that are in yellow probably pertain to off-meeting
responsibilities for the Secretariat. The rest will be decision making and
there's a format that we're considering and that would entail a private session
and a public session, probably the public session being first where the public
sets the agenda and then the Binational Core Group meets in private
and tries to air out and resolve these issues. My closing remarks as I'm
feeling a little antsy here... first of all the Tijuana River watershed is the only
U.S.-Mexico watershed that doesn't have any conflict in terms of objectives.
Again it's hard to avoid the effects without addressing the causes and so it
would really be important for the watershed to be managed as a whole. You
should know that throughout the world, there are about 300+, let's say,
international rivers at last count from Oregon State University, Aaron Wolf has
310 international rivers and they keep growing because of more research but
also because of segmentation of countries and
so forth. Out of the 310 international rivers, they comprise about 47% of the
land area in continents so it's huge. 60% of freshwater flows are in
international watersheds. 157 countries are—have some sort of an international
watershed. 52 countries have about 100% of their territory in
international watersheds. So I said U.S. is about 90%, Mexico is about 10%.
Transport boundary management is really hard. Trans... trans-boundary
water management really needs a model and so we're hoping that we can really
create a model that actually allows us to best accomplish what Trent said we
need to accomplish. Thank you very much.
[ Applause ]