South County Report: Big Changes Coming (Finally) to National City Waterfront

For generations, National City residents have dreamed of having what other waterfront cities have: Actual access to the water.

This week, that dream took a huge step toward coming true.

The California Coastal Commission on Wednesday unanimously approved a years-in-the-making plan that will dramatically alter the National City waterfront by expanding residents’ access to San Diego Bay and consolidating port operations to reduce their impact on the city.

The commission’s approval was the final regulatory hurdle for the National City Balanced Plan, a cooperative blueprint for the 77-acre bayfront first proposed by the city more than a decade ago.

The plan seeks to balance the needs of city residents, Port of San Diego tenants and local businesses and community groups.

The plan includes an expanded waterfront park, new hotels, an RV and tent campground and an expanded recreational boat marina. The plan also calls for realigning roads and port facilities to keep industrial operations separate from recreational areas.

The commission meeting room erupted in cheers after the vote.

“This is historic for our community,” said JoAnn Fields, government relations director for the Asian Pacific Islander Initiative, one of numerous local community groups that showed up for the meeting or sent letters supporting the plan.

“This is inclusive of the community’s voice, which we didn’t have in years past,” Fields said.

Perhaps fittingly, the vote came late in the evening at the tail end of a marathon day of commission hearings. The 7:45 p.m. vote was just one more delay in a drawn-out process that National City Mayor Ron Morrison said started in 2014.

“This is my 34th year in office,” Morrison said. “A lot of that time has been consumed with this project.”

Morrison said negotiations dragged on for years as officials wrangled over competing interests and fought bureaucratic inertia.

The result, he said, “will create economic opportunity, strengthen maritime operations and strengthen our community.”

Gil Anthony Ungab, National City’s representative on the Port of San Diego’s Board of Port Commissioners, called the plan’s approval a major victory for environmental justice.

“For half a century, the National City waterfront was entirely maritime and there was no access to the bay for residents,” Ungab said. “National City did not share the same economic vitality and economic development of other cities in our bay.”

National City’s entire waterfront is occupied by one of the Port of San Diego’s two major industrial port facilities. For years, city residents have watched with envy as neighboring Chula Vista and San Diego built waterfront parks and fancy hotels with bay views.

The Balance Plan seeks to rectify that disparity by concentrating industrial operations in one area of the waterfront and freeing up space for the city to use for expanded recreational uses.

“It allows kids to have a playground, bikes, lawns, picnic tables, something I never had growing up in National City,” Ungab said.

Not everyone was happy. Cynthia Quinones, a longtime National City resident who attended Wednesday’s meeting, said she supports the overall goal of the plan but felt it didn’t go far enough.

Quinones said the plan’s inclusion of a waterfront RV and tent campground would block bay views. And she said the plan does nothing to shrink the vast expanse of heat-generating parking lots currently used by a major port tenant to store automobiles after unloading them from ships.

“While all other California waterfront communities sit at the Pacific [Ocean] table and feast,” Quinones said, “National City remains the dog underneath, thrilled to finally get more crumbs.”

The first phase of the plan, renovation of the city’s waterfront Pepper Park, is expected to be completed by next year. Future phases will include further expansion of the park, construction of two hotels, development of an RV and tent campground and consolidation of port operations in the northern part of the waterfront area.

Residents and city officials planned to celebrate passage of the plan this evening at an event at the Pier 32 Marina, which itself will undergo expansion as part of the plan.

“National City has spent decades waiting for a real chance to shape its own waterfront,” said City Councilmember Luz Molina, who represents the port area. “Now it can reflect the priorities of the people who actually live here.”

All Tijuana River, All the Time

Another long-held South County dream also took a step toward coming true this week. A much, much smaller step.

State and local officials held a flurry of hearings and events intended to draw attention to the never-ending saga of cross-border sewage pollution in the much-abused Tijuana River.

Supervisor Paloma Aguirre handed out air purifiers to local residents on Monday in partnership with the county’s Air Pollution Control District.

Aguirre also joined other local officials in attending a State Senate hearing today on the issue. And she planned to lobby the APCD to expand its air purifier effort to cover more households and provide residents with enough filters to cover their entire house.

Even the Coastal Commission, which has no authority whatsoever over cross-border pollution, got in on the act.

The main reason National City officials had to wait until after dinner for approval of their port plan was an hours-long informational hearing the commission held earlier in the day with the ostensible goal of updating commissioners on what everyone else is doing to solve the sewage problem.

Thirty-seven speakers, including a group of students from Coronado High School’s Stop the Sewage Club, lined up to tell commissioners that the problem is indeed bad. (Unfortunate sign of the times: Several of the students could be observed smirking in the back of the room as they confessed to one another they’d used ChatGPT to write their public comments.)

The commission agreed to hold periodic updates about the issue. Baby steps.

In Other News

In an emerging local Christmas tradition, National City’s American Legion Riders Post 255 will host their fourth annual K-ristmas Ride on Friday. The Ride is a motorcycle parade accompanied by local police and firefighters to deliver Christmas gifts to special needs students at Granger Junior High School. The ride commemorates Kevin “Big K” Finn, an American Legion Rider who started the gift-giving event and died last year.

Also in National City, nonprofit Giving Love and More (G.L.A.M.) will give away toys, food, drinks and crafts at a Blessing the Block toy drive at 12 p.m. Saturday at the National City campus of Southwestern College. Southwestern Trustee Robert Moreno helped coordinate the event.

State Assemblymember David Alvarez will co-host a legislative hearing on Friday to provide updates and solicit public comment on the upcoming renegotiation of the United States-Mexico Trade Agreement. The hearing, co-hosted with Assemblymember Jose Luis Solache, Jr. of Lynwood, will feature expert panelists discussing the agreement’s impact on the local economy. The hearing takes place at 2:30 p.m. Friday at Chula Vista City Hall.

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