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 Travel & Outdoors | May 2007 
New Border Crossing Called Necessary
 Sandra Dibble - San Diego Union-Tribune
As Baja California's west coast has boomed with tourism development, Tijuana Mayor Kurt Honold says it's time to start thinking about another international border crossing, this one connecting Imperial Beach and the western Tijuana suburb of Playas de Tijuana.
“It would help us to promote Baja California,” Honold said this week following a meeting at the San Diego Chamber of Commerce's Mexico Business Center. With such a crossing, “for a lot of people that live on the coast, it will be a lot faster to come south and go north.”
At this point, there is no formal proposal, and the likelihood of a crossing at the western end of the 2,000-mile border is slim. While the Mexican side is densely populated, the U.S. side is a protected wildlife refuge, the Tijuana River National Estuarine Research Reserve.
“Right now, it's just me speaking, saying there's a need,” Honold said.
Whatever the chances, the mayor's proposal underscores the frustration many border residents and businesses feel with the congested border crossings at San Ysidro and Otay Mesa. Baja California Gov. Eugenio Elorduy Walther has repeatedly called for measures to ease bottlenecks at the northbound crossing lanes.
“It's so urgent that we need it by tomorrow,” said Luis Bustamante, head of the Tijuana Developers Association and a champion of the Playas de Tijuana crossing. “We know it's not easy, but we have to find a way.
“The ones who are going to be asking for it are the Americans who live in Baja. They're going to be our biggest supporters in front of U.S. authorities.”
Honold brought up the issue at least twice this week – at Wednesday's chamber breakfast meeting in downtown San Diego, and Monday in Imperial Beach following a visit to the Tijuana estuary.
“The reserve cannot be crossed by any kind of infrastructure,” said Oscar Romo, coastal training program coordinator for the reserve. “The California Coastal Commission would never issue a permit to do something like that.”
With the crossings at San Ysidro and Otay Mesa saturated, efforts on both sides of the border to ease congestion have focused on building an additional crossing near the existing Otay port of entry.
“The third crossing east of Otay is definitely the most important at the moment for the region,” said Imperial Beach Mayor Jim Janney, who is also president of the South County Economic Development Council.
The Mexican and U.S. federal governments have formally expressed interest in the second Otay crossing, said Hector Vanegas, of the San Diego Association of Governments. Agencies on both sides are conducting feasibility studies, he said.
The Playas proposal has been studied. The U.S. General Service Administration examined sites in the Playas area and rejected all of them in a 1990 report. At the time, Tijuana tourism officials heavily promoted the proposal, but the GSA recommended against it because “there are serious geotechnical and/or environmental problems associated with each site.”
Sandra Dibble: (619) 293-1716; sandra.dibble@uniontrib.com |
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