Ocotillo border project prompts concerns
OCOTILLO – As a resident of Ocotillo for more than 40 years, Edie Harmon has on multiple occasions called the U.S. Border Patrol, at their request, to report suspicious activity near her home, located about four miles north of the U.S.-Mexico border.
On two successive nights in early May she did just that, to report the presence of bright stationary lights in the nearby Jacumba Wilderness, and was told by an El Centro Sector camera room operator that agency personnel would investigate and get back to her soon with information.
After a few days passed without any response, Harmon decided to investigate the activity herself. She soon noticed numerous construction vehicles and water trucks entering and exiting some of the unpaved roads south of Highway 98, just a few miles east of her home.
Following one unpaved road to where it turns in the direction of the border, Harmon soon discovered a 12-inch water pipe extending across miles of the desert. The pipeline ultimately connected to a large motorized pump sitting atop a well drilled near the border in the area of the Ocotillo-Coyote Wells Groundwater Basin, a federally-designated sole-source aquifer.
The suspicious activity that initially caught Harmon’s attention? It turned out to be related to the ongoing construction of a 30-foot tall border barrier in the Jacumba Wilderness by the U.S. Border Patrol, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and a Montana-based subcontractor.
Since then, Harmon’s initial curiosity has grown to outright concern.
The retired biologist-geographer has spent much of her time in Ocotillo voluntarily researching groundwater-related issues. As a result, she has compiled various reports that have been published in California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) and National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) local project reviews, and has been called to testify in numerous court cases related to groundwater issues in the Ocotillo region.
“Impacts to this groundwater basin have been one of the main focuses of my life since I moved to Ocotillo in 1977,” Harmon said. “When the water’s gone, the community’s gone.”
Federal law trumps local laws
Since her initial discovery in May, Harmon has been on a months-long quest for answers related to the border project’s groundwater extraction and environmental stewardship.
Her initial inquiries were directed at the U.S. Border Patrol (USBP) and the county of Imperial, which was unaware of the project’s groundwater wells until Harmon notified its Planning and Development Services Department.
The department is responsible for approving conditional use permits for temporary and permanent wells anywhere in the county as required by its ordinances regulating groundwater.
Despite federal officials’ previous assurances, they have yet to submit any permit applications to the county to operate several groundwater wells that were drilled on federal property in connection to the two border barrier construction projects near Ocotillo.
Those assurances had come in response to concerns by county officials and others that the unpermitted wells were operating in violation of the county’s groundwater maintenance laws and could negatively impact the Ocotillo-Coyote Wells Groundwater Basin.
The first to offer such an assurance was the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (ACE), which on or about June 10, told county officials to provide the Corps with copies of the applicable permit applications so that its project contractor could subsequently submit them, according to a July 13 letter the county’s counsel sent to a Border Patrol representative.
Another assurance came from the Border Patrol during a July 14 conference call with Harmon, a few Sierra Club members and the U.S. Bureau of Land Management (BLM) El Centro Field Office director. The call was scheduled to help address some of the many concerns Harmon had been expressing regarding the border project.
Those past assurances aside, USBP more recently asserted that it has the legal authority to have drilled the unpermitted groundwater wells, in spite of the county’s contention to the contrary. The federal agency’s position was made explicit in an Aug. 5 letter to the county’s counsel.
That letter was sent in response to a July 13 letter that county counsel sent Border Patrol contending that the unpermitted wells and groundwater usage are subject to and must comply with the county’s groundwater management ordinance.
In his July 13 letter to a U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) representative in Washington, D.C., County Counsel Adam Crook requested that USBP cease all operations of the groundwater wells that were installed within the Ocotillo-Coyote Wells Groundwater Basin without a conditional use permit.
The county also contended that a waiver the U.S. Department of Homeland Security issued in May 2019 precluding CBP from complying with certain environmental laws and regulations that typically apply to border barrier construction did not extend to the use of groundwater resources.
“Therefore, the County respectfully requests that CBP cease all well operations being conducted for the barrier wall project, and refrain from drilling any additional groundwater wells, unless and until CBP, the Corps, and/or BLM obtains the necessary permits for the wells as required by the County,” Crook stated.
In his Aug. 5 response to Crook’s letter, Paul
Enriquez, USBP Program Management Office Directorate’s Acquisition, Real Estate and Environmental director, stated that the agency respectfully disagreed with the county’s assertion that a permit was needed to install and operate the groundwater wells.
The six wells in question are located on federal property designated as the Roosevelt Reservation – a 60-foot strip of land abutting most of the Southwest border that was created in 1907 for the express purpose of customs and immigration enforcement, Enriquez’s letter stated.
The agency also disputed the county’s contention the DHS waiver has any bearing on the project’s drilling of wells and extraction of water, again citing the legal authority extended to the agency by the Roosevelt Reservation.
“CBP is unaware of any applicable law or regulation that would require CBP to obtain permits pursuant to the county groundwater laws in order to drill and use groundwater wells located on federal property,” Enriquez’s letter stated.
An early indication of the federal agency’s legal position came months earlier, when it disregarded an “Order to Stop Construction” the county had issued on May 14 to project personnel at the site of the well initially discovered by Harmon.
As the order to cease operations states, those found in violation are subject to a daily fine of $500, or incarceration of up to six months.
The county is currently reviewing the Border Patrol’s legal position, and anticipated ongoing discussions regarding the permit status of the wells in the Ocotillo-Nomirage area, Linsey Dale, county public information officer, stated in an Aug. 17 email. She previously had indicated that the county’s options for any recourse were limited.
“Because the project is located on Bureau of Land
Management land, if the federal government elects to ignore county land use and building permit regulations, they have the supremacy laws that permits this course of action,” Dale stated in a June 11 email.
Trickles of information
To date, six groundwater wells have been drilled to support the border barrier project known as El Centro Project 1.
That project has installed 15 miles of barrier in the Yuha Desert, a federally-defined Area of Critical Environmental Concern west of the Calexico west port of entry. The Yuha Desert extends to the eastern boundary of the Jacumba Wilderness, a separate federally protected area of about 31,000 acres also managed by BLM.
Though the installation of the barrier’s panels was completed in May, some of El Centro Project 1’s electrical, concrete and road improvements had remained ongoing as of late July, Border Patrol reported.
Another two wells that will draw from the Ocotillo-Coyote Wells aquifer were slated to be installed as part of El Centro Project A. That project is ongoing and scheduled to install three miles of barrier within the Skull and Davies valleys areas of the Jacumba Wilderness, Border Patrol reported.
Both projects have been undertaken by USBP, in conjunction with ACE, the BLM and the project contractor, BFBC LLC, an affiliate of Barnard Construction, of Bozeman, Mont.
In April, ACE awarded $569 million in a no-bid contract to BFBC to complete the overall work. The contract award was a modification of a $141 million contract awarded BFBC in May 2019 to replace vehicle and pedestrian barriers in El Centro and Yuma, according to the U.S. Department of Defense website.
Though the matter of groundwater well permits appears to have reached an impasse of sorts, USBP on Aug. 5 honored some of the county’s July 13 requests for information related to the existing and planned wells’ operation, including the approximate GPS coordinates for Project 1’s six wells.
Two of those six wells were reportedly decommissioned because of their minimal groundwater yield, which at best extracted from 15 to 20 gallons per minute (GPM). In contrast, the project’s four operational wells yielded anywhere between 75 to 250 GPM.
All six wells were drilled to a depth of about 400 feet. Between December 2019 and June 2020, each had respectively extracted anywhere between 40,000 to 700,000 gallons on a monthly basis.
During that time span, a total of about 56,580,900 gallons had been extracted from all six wells, according to data Border Patrol provided the county on Aug. 5. Those 56 million gallons roughly correspond with about 173 acre-feet.
An additional groundwater well installed as part of the El Centro Project A was recently drilled, but failed to extract an adequate level of water, so a second well was being prepared in the Ocotillo-Coyote Wells Basin, a CBP spokesperson stated.
The information disclosed by Border Patrol in its Aug. 5 letter to the county is responsive to three of the four explicit requests the county had included in its July 13 letter to USBP. The border project’s Environmental Stewardship Plan (ESP) that the county had requested was not provided, since it was still in the process of being completed at the time, USBP stated.
The agency had advised it would notify the county once the plan, which assesses the project’s environmental impact, is published on its website for public review. As of Tuesday, the plan did not appear on CBP’s webpage for ESPs and Environmental Stewardship Summary Reports.
For her part, Harmon has been seeking much more detailed information about the wells’ operations, and in particular the respective wells’ current and initial groundwater levels at the time of their drilling, as well as water quality.
The agency’s failure to provide appropriate parties such information to date, Harmon said, can make it more difficult for the U.S. Geological Society to continue to adequately monitor groundwater levels within the Ocotillo Coyote Wells Groundwater Basin, which is a federally-designated sole-source aquifer.
“It is essential that CBP or (Army Corps) supply the missing original water level measurements and water quality at the time wells were drilled and to provide subsequent water levels as soon as possible,” Harmon stated in her Sept. 2 email to various federal, state and local officials.
Some shared concerns
When Harmon is not busy corresponding with various parties regarding the ongoing border project, she is hiking in many of the areas in question as part of an attempt to document how the barrier construction has altered the wilderness landscape.
“String together all the most negative adjectives you can think of, and it still doesn’t come close to what has happened and is about to happen,” Harmon wrote about the border construction project in the June 2020 edition of Desert Report, a publication of the Sierra Club’s California/ Nevada Desert Committee, after one such outing.
Nor does she appear to be alone in her critique of the scope and manner in which the local project, as well as others, has unfolded.
Recently, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Inspector General released a report that faulted CBP for reportedly failing to consider alternative methods other than physical barriers to secure the southern border.
The July 14 report further criticized CBP for reportedly not using a “sound, well-documented methodology to identify and prioritize investments in areas along the border that would best benefit from physical barriers.”
The OIG made three recommendations in its report. CBP concurred with only one, and did so in a manner that prompted the OIG to consider all its recommendations open and unresolved.
“CBP has not fully demonstrated that it possesses the capability to potentially spend billions of dollars to execute a largescale acquisition to secure the southern border,” the OIG concluded.
In recent years, the Border Patrol has added 341 miles to its border barrier system, the CBP website stated. As part of that construction, some 509,000 tons of steel, and 732,000 cubic yards of concrete have been utilized. An additional 240 miles remain under construction, while 157 miles are under pre-construction.
“In January, we reached 100 miles of new border wall system. In June, we achieved 200 miles. In August, we marked the 300th mile — and by the end of this calendar year we will reach over 450 miles of new border wall system,” DHS Secretary Chad Wolf recently said during his State of the Homeland Address.