“The effects are what we want and what we want are corrective now,” said Imperial Beach Mayor Paloma Aguirre.
A superfund site identifies a place as contaminated with harmful, toxic chemicals.
In the past- the South Bay didn’t qualify.
Back in October, local officials submitted a petition to the Environment Protection Agency to make part of the Tijuana River Valley a superfund site.
The firm rejected it, none of the contaminants meet the degrees of human fitness detection on residential soils.
10News reported the considerations of leaders such as former County Manager Nora Vargas.
“What is the impact on property value? How does this work if it’s an international issue?” said Vargas.
To which others responded:
“I mean, take a look, we’re already having our property values not just in Imperial Beach and all of South County be affected,” said Mayor Aguirre.
But the ongoing push for a superfund designation now has new data to go off of.
The CDC survey said that 80% of citizens said their life had been negatively affected.
On Thursday, the new selection of President chose Donald Trump to direct the EPA said that he would be the agency’s border water infrastructure program, and read why the designation of past superfund was rejected.
After months of “no”, the mayor of Imperial Beach Paloma Aguirre says that this “yes” brings some hope.
“They’ve been doing a lot of work but around, planning around the expansion of the treatment plant, but we don’t know the exact types of pollutants that are in the river. We do have some empirical data from scientists, but we don’t know the legacy type of pollutants that are present there, to what degree they’re present and what are their effects on public health. So having the EPA being open to design it, I think it’s very promising,” said Mayor Aguirre.
Mayor Aguirre says that if approved, the Superfund site designation would be a 10- to 20-year procedure.