South County Report: A Plea from the Crowd: ‘Listen to Us.’

This week’s big news in our part of San Diego County was the swearing-in on Tuesday of newly elected Supervisor Paloma Aguirre. 

Aguirre, previously mayor of Imperial Beach, took her seat on the powerful San Diego County Board of Supervisors following an outdoor ceremony at the County Administration Center in downtown San Diego. The ceremony was a loud and colorful departure from the usual staid proceedings of county government. 

There was food under white tents, a mariachi band, chants of “Si, se puede” and copious schmoozing from a who’s who of San Diego power brokers, union leaders and campaign supporters. 

One group was less in evidence: Ordinary voters. 

They were left to address the assembled Board of Supervisors on the third floor of the County Administration Center after festivities ended. 

San Diegans wishing to share their concerns with their elected leaders sat in the audience and waited for the foul-mouthed speakers who lambaste supervisors at every meeting to finish their customary tirades. Then they stepped to the podium to ask supervisors for what, I suspect, most voters want from their government. 

Basic competence. Responsiveness. Honesty. Equal treatment of all people. 

Because I cover South County, I happened to know two of the South County residents who drove downtown, found a place to park (most spots near the Administration Center were taken by attendees of Aguirre’s swearing-in) and waited for their turn at the meeting podium. 

If you’re a reader of this newsletter, you’ve met these people before, because I’ve quoted them in other stories. 

I’m sharing their remarks because they represent a side of politics that gets far less attention than it should: The hopes, fears and needs of the ordinary voters who undergird our democracy. 

One of the speakers was Silvia Irigoyen-Adame, a mom-turned-activist who lost her daughter, Elizabeth, to a fentanyl overdose on the streets of Chula Vista last year. Since then, Irigoyen-Adame has educated herself about the drug treatment system in San Diego County and helped other families navigate the system to get help. 

She came to the meeting to tell the Board that the system they help pay for doesn’t work. Nonprofit providers funded by the county are not fulfilling their responsibilities, and no one is holding them accountable, Irigoyen-Adame said. (I’ll be looking into this issue in the future.) 

“I’m just asking you to help with these programs,” Irigoyen-Adame said to the supervisors while some of them looked at their computers or scrolled on their phones. “What they put on paper is not what they’re doing in the facilities.” 

Outside the meeting chamber, Irigoyen-Adame told me Tuesday happened to be her daughter’s birthday. Elizabeth would have been 35, she said. 

“I pray Paloma Aguirre will make the changes [to the county’s homelessness and behavioral health programs] she says she wants,” Irigoyen-Adame said. “I voted for her, and I hope it was the right choice. [Politicians] say things and then they don’t do it.” 

The other speaker was Alisha Morrison, a resident of Lincoln Acres near National City who recently became a reluctant attendee of public meetings after her neighborhood banded together to oppose a controversial development project. 

Morrison told me she attended Tuesday’s Board meeting to urge her new supervisor, Aguirre, and other board members to earn voters’ trust at a time when, as Morrison sees it, public officials increasingly disregard the needs of people they’re supposed to represent. 

“As a voter, I want my elected officials to be leaders,” Morrison told the Board. “Leaders are people who want to work hard to make changes for the better of all people.” 

She went on: “I have written to my elected officials, sometimes only getting a pre-scripted response from some aide that does not even offer a hint of effort to help. Oh, but I do receive their requests to contribute to their campaigns all the time. Politicians do a really good job asking me for money so they can continue to ‘fight’ for my rights.” 

She concluded: “Connect with your constituents and form a strong bond. Show them you care. Help them when they reach out to you for help. Together, let’s work to restore faith in the phrase ‘We the People.’” 

“I hope they heard me,” Morrison said after the meeting. “I want to trust my elected leaders again.” 

ICYMI: I profiled Aguirre earlier this week, charting her rise from what she called “just a surfer girl who wanted clean water in my town” to becoming one of San Diego County’s most powerful elected leaders. 

Sewage News All Over 

More on Aguirre: She’s off to a fast start fulfilling her campaign pledge to accelerate progress on resolving the ongoing sewage crisis in the Tijuana River that has damaged South County’s health and economy for years. 

On Thursday, she convened a meeting of county staff employees and gave them firm instructions to, as she put it in a statement, “push past red tape and prioritize immediate, on-the-ground solutions.” 

Later in the day, she announced three new steps the county would take to address the crisis in the next 30 days. 

The steps include hiring a UC Berkeley scientist to design a comprehensive public health monitoring program to understand the full health impacts of sewage pollution; installing new health warning signs near the river; and broadening the scope of air quality monitoring to include toxic pollutants from industrial waste dumped in the river. 

“We must rebuild trust with the community,” Aguirre said. “And that means we need more than just plans. We need immediate, tangible action.” 

Also on Thursday: Officials from the United States and Mexico signed a memorandum of understanding in Mexico City that sets timelines and priorities for completing a series of sewage construction and repair projects that, officials said, would greatly reduce pollution flowing into the Tijuana River. 

Most of the projects included in the agreement are not new. They were negotiated under the administration of former President Joe Biden. 

U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Secretary Lee Zeldin said Thursday’s agreement speeds up work on some of those projects and includes additional steps that would enable the city of Tijuana to treat sewage generated by the city’s economic and population growth. 

Once completed, the projects outlined Thursday would represent “a permanent, 100-percent solution to the decades-old Tijuana River sewage crisis,” Zeldin said. 

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