For nearly eight decades, the Tijuana River Valley has served as a dumping ground for raw sewage, industrial waste, and toxic chemicals carried across the border. This sewage crisis — which the County of San Diego Board of Supervisors has long deemed a local emergency — has affected the region’s wetlands and estuary, posing a threat to public health, ecosystems, and the local economy.
Amid these pollutive conditions, the Tijuana River Valley Community Garden continues to service its community from its location on Hollister Street and Sunset Avenue in southern San Diego — even after the recent end of its lease with the city called its survival into question.
The TJRV Community Garden is the largest community garden in San Diego, hosting 210 public garden plots and 10 quarter-acre plots for local farming businesses. The space is also home to a native pollinator hedgerow and several walking trails that are open to locals daily from dawn to dusk.
Since its establishment in 2002, the TJRV Community Garden has been managed by the Resource Conservation District of Greater San Diego County. But in September 2025, RCD terminated the garden’s lease, giving only a 60-day grace period for farmers to vacate.
Ebony N. Shelton, chief administrative officer of San Diego County, cited health concerns in the TJRV as the reason for closure.
“Every day, more than 50 million gallons of contaminated wastewater surge across the border that carry banned pesticides like DDT, carcinogens like PCB and PAHS and heavy metals including lead and arsenic.”
As soon as growers who rely on the garden heard that the lease was ending, they banded together. From calling the supervisor’s office, attending town hall meetings, posting petitions, and sharing videos on social media, the community worked to save the garden.
“We [didn’t] want to lose our garden,” Nanzi Muro emphasized. Muro first started volunteering at the garden in 2022. Eight months ago, she was finally able to purchase her 30-by-30-foot plot after three years on the waiting list. The garden at TJRV offers gardeners like Muro the opportunity to learn how to sustain herself and her community with homegrown and nutritious food.
“Everything is getting expensive, so being able to grow food and native plants felt like a great opportunity to learn more about our environment,” Muro said.
San Diego County 1st District Supervisor Paloma Aguirre and 3rd District Supervisor Terra Lawson-Remer supported the farmers’ interests. According to Aguirre and Lawson-Remer, the studies that informed the RCD’s decision to end the garden’s lease were outdated and incomplete. They said that these studies have been identifying these dangerous toxins in the river valley for the last 20 years, during which the garden has continued to be in operation.
Aguirre added that many of the garden’s plotholders are “seniors who don’t really have the ability to rip up everything they have been working on and move.”
Community members hoped that the city could come to an agreement that would offer the garden operational support until it found a new organization who would support it. On June 24, the board established the ad hoc subcommittee to address the Tijuana sewage crisis. It chose Shelton to evaluate program options aligned with public health priorities.
Aguirre emphasized that the county is working to attend to the sewage crisis that caused this closure. Among other actions, the city has added air sensors and purifiers in the area and established a county matching fund to air filtration and HVAC upgrades in schools and childcare facilities. The supervisors also approved $270,000 to support a study focused on infrastructure upgrades along Saturn Boulevard, hoping to reduce harmful emissions in the area.
“The county is not ignoring the pollution problem that triggered the RCD’s decision,” Aguirre said.
At the San Diego Board of Supervisors meeting from Sept. 30 to Oct. 1, the city made a final decision — it would support the garden in the interim, and the garden would live to fight another day.
“Because we came together, our garden is safe right now,” Muro said. “There is a lot of work to do, but for right now, everything will be fine.”
