Gas was 32 cents a gallon. The median home cost about $14,000. The Beatles were touring. America was racing to the moon. The year was 1966 — and here in San Diego, the Tijuana River pollution crisis was starting to make San Diego beaches unswimmable.

Sixty years later, homes and gas cost a whole lot more, and the Beatles and moon landings have faded way to Taylor Swift and billionaires launching themselves into orbit.

But the sewage crisis? Still here, and getting worse.

What would it REALLY take?

When leaders from D.C. or Sacramento come to San Diego, they are often surprised to hear that the Tijuana River crisis is a top issue for constituents everywhere I go — in North County, East County, even miles from the coast.

I’m not surprised.

San Diegans understand something pretty fundamental:

Our coastline belongs to all of us. Clean air and clean water belong to all of us. And it is a huge part of why people work so hard to make a life here.

So what would it really take to solve it?

We have to keep protecting people from the pollution today with air purifiers, monitoring, and work to fix toxic-air hotspots like Saturn Boulevard.

But managing the crisis is not the same as solving it.

For decades, most of our strategy has been to stop sewage before it gets into the Tijuana River. And there has been real progress to expand the South Bay treatment plant to do just that. But that plant can only treat pollution that gets captured and sent to it.

A lot of polluted water is never caught and crosses the border on its own — and once it reaches the river, we are the ones living with the consequences.

So Supervisor Paloma Aguirre and I are proposing something big:

Get moving on a plan to create new infrastructure on this side of the border to treat and clean the water in the Tijuana River directly, intervening before the river washes onto our shoreline. 

E-COMMENT: SUPPORT THE TJRV CAPTURE & CLEANUP INITIATIVE

The EPA has already studied a serious option for doing this. Now we want to take that work, identify the right solution specific to San Diego, and turn it into a real project we can deliver.

And yes, a solution at this scale could require a very big investment. But San Diego already knows how to finance big infrastructure.

Think about Terminal 2 at the San Diego airport. It was nearly a $900 million expansion. The Airport Authority used reliable future revenue to issue bonds and make that investment upfront.

We can use the same basic approach here.

With roughly $80 million a year in reliable, dedicated revenue, we could potentially bond against it and put $1 billion to work upfront.

We don’t have that dedicated funding yet. That’s why we need to get ready now.

We want the right project identified, the costs understood, and the financing plan ready — so when the resources are there, San Diego can move without wasting years.

Capture it. Clean it. Take more control over our future.

On Tuesday, the Board votes on whether to launch that work.

If you want San Diego to pursue the kind of big, long-term solution this crisis demands, send the Board an E-Comment today.

[E-COMMENT: SUPPORT CAPTURE & CLEANUP →]

Our ocean and coastline are too important — and this crisis has gone on for far too long — for us to think small.