CORONADO, Calif. (KGTV) — San Diego County Supervisor Terra Lawson-Remer is teaming up with several local officials in an attempt to get the Environmental Protection Agency to take action against the sewage crisis in the South Bay.
On Thursday morning in Coronado, Lawson-Remer is slated to speak alongside those officials and some South Bay residents, submitting a petition to the EPA to designate parts of the Tijuana River Valley as a “superfund site.”
A superfund site is part of a 1980 law that the EPA can use to free up federal funding to clean up hazardous waste sites around the country.
Those sites are meant to target toxic waste, not raw sewage — which normally falls under the Clean Water Act.
But Lawson-Remer wants the EPA to designate a six-mile stretch of the Lower Tijuana River Valley as a superfund site after decades of exposure to toxic chemicals, heavy metals, and pesticides.
In an agenda item from the County Board of Supervisors, Lawson-Remer said several other areas have been designated as superfund sites as a result of sewage in places like Washington and New York.