Bilbray’s Bajagua Boondoggle

The D.C. watchdog group Project on Government Oversight has uncovered some strange stuff about California GOP House candidate Brian Bilbray. He sure can be devoted to some strange causes.

In the mid-1990s, an unusual project called Bajagua landed on desks around Washington. Bajagua — a plan cooked up by two Southern California developers — was to pump water from Mexico to San Diego; process the water once; pump it back to Mexico; and process it a second time, then pipe it into Mexican households. POGO’s Nick Schwellenbach wrote a great report on this you can find here.

If that sounds strange to you, you’re not alone. Both the EPA and the State Department rejected the idea. But Bilbray believed! He also got campaign donations from the Bajagua project’s backers.

The only thing the plan needed to work was $156 million (that’s now $600 million and growing) to build the second water plant in Mexico. And a rewrite of U.S.-Mexico treaties, none of which allowed for this kind of thing.

So Bilbray got to work: with another lawmaker, he crafted a bill in 1999 that forced the State Department to renegotiate with Mexico to allow for the project. It also handed the Bajagua brains the keys to a sole-source contract to build the Mexican plant. (Bilbray explains it all in this letter, which POGO obtained.) The bill passed in 2000.

Never mind the complaints coming from the Mexican government that the United States was making decisions about a Mexican project that it had never signed off on.

In 2000, Bilbray lost his Congressional seat. For $35,000, the Bajagua guys snapped him up as their lobbyist. He pressed State to get the OK’s from Mexico and to issue his backers a contract to start building their plant.

Bilbray even testified before Congress on behalf of the Bajagua project. He didn’t bother to mention he was being retained by the project’s creators to sell the thing in Washington, however.

To date, the State Department has yet to let the contract to the developers — probably because Mexico has yet to agree to the State Department’s requests, Nick says. Could Bilbray be more helpful with that from behind a Congressional desk?