They Destroyed a Living Ecosystem to Pour Concrete

International Industrial Park, Inc. owns a 135-acre parcel in East Otay Mesa, a stretch of southeastern San Diego County that sits at the edge of the U.S.-Mexico border. In December 2022, the company directed its developer, SD Commercial, LLC, to begin the first phase of construction on what it called the “International Industrial Park TM 5549 project.” The plan: grade the land and build five industrial pads, access roads, and supporting infrastructure.

The problem was the land contained something the law is designed to protect. According to a revised Jurisdictional Delineation Report prepared by Respondents’ own environmental consultant, the project area held an estimated 1.474 acres of waters and 3.01 acres of adjacent wetlands, identified as “Drainage A” and “Drainage B” of Johnson Canyon Creek. These were not isolated mud puddles. From those drainages, Johnson Canyon Creek flows approximately 2.5 miles to the Otay River, which then flows directly into San Diego Bay, an embayment of the Pacific Ocean.

The companies bulldozed anyway. From approximately December 2022 through at least March 2023, earthmoving equipment discharged fill material into Drainage A and Drainage B without any federal permit authorization. When EPA Region 9 inspectors and U.S. Army Corps of Engineers staff showed up on July 26, 2023, they confirmed the destruction: 0.529 acres of non-wetland waters and 0.253 acres of wetlands, filled and gone.

They Didn’t Forget to Apply for a Permit. They Faked One.

This was not a paperwork oversight. During July 2023, EPA learned that an employee of SD Commercial, LLC had submitted a falsified Clean Water Act Section 404 permit and a falsified Section 401 water quality certification to the County of San Diego to obtain the grading permit that made all of this construction legally possible. The county issued a grading permit based on documents that were fraudulent.

The employee entered into a plea agreement with the United States Attorney. On May 15, 2024, that employee was convicted in federal court. The conviction was specific and damning: knowingly causing the discharge of a pollutant, fill dirt, from a point source into a water of the United States without a permit, between November 2022 and February 2023.

The company that directed the construction, International Industrial Park, Inc., paid $85,000 ($85,000 is roughly what it costs a family of four to cover basic living expenses for one year in San Diego) and agreed to a mitigation plan. The project will resume.

The Non-Financial Ledger: What Money Cannot Replace

Wetlands are not scenic background decoration. They are biological infrastructure. The wetlands and waterways of Johnson Canyon Creek in East Otay Mesa existed as part of a connected hydrological system: water filtering through vegetation, sediment settling naturally, native riparian and wetland plants anchoring streambanks and feeding local wildlife. Every acre of wetland absorbs storm runoff that would otherwise rush into communities downstream. Every acre filters pollutants before they reach the Otay River and San Diego Bay. Every acre supports species that have evolved over thousands of years to live in exactly that kind of habitat.

The companies buried 0.529 acres of non-wetland waters and 0.253 acres of wetlands under fill dirt. Those aren’t abstract regulatory categories. Non-wetland waters means flowing channels, the arteries of a drainage system. Wetlands means the transitional zone where land and water meet, where aquatic insects hatch, where migratory birds feed and rest, where native plants like willows, sedges, and rushes hold the ground together. The regulatory violation is the legal description. The ecological reality is the erasure of a functioning piece of nature that cannot simply be switched back on.

The required mitigation plan tells you exactly how serious the damage is, by what it demands to partially address it. Respondents must remove invasive tamarisk and trash from a 5.59-acre parcel, restore 1.28 acres of native riparian and wetland vegetation, monitor the site for five years, and demonstrate that the restored habitat meets performance standards. That is years of work, extensive resources, and specialist oversight to try to approximate what existed before. And the mitigation plan is designed to compensate for the illegal fill; it does not guarantee the ecological function that was lost will ever fully return.

The connected waterway compounds the harm. Johnson Canyon Creek’s two drainage channels flow approximately 2.5 miles to the Otay River. The Otay River flows into San Diego Bay. That means whatever sediment, construction debris, and disrupted biology the illegal earthmoving introduced into those drainages did not stay put. It moved downstream. San Diego Bay, a federally recognized estuary, receives the water that passes through Johnson Canyon Creek. The wetland that got buried was not a self-contained unit. It was a node in a larger ecological network, and its destruction sent a ripple through that entire network.

The communities that rely on clean water downstream from this project, including the people who fish, swim, and live near the Otay River and San Diego Bay, had no say in this. No one knocked on their doors to explain that a corporation had forged federal permits and was about to discharge fill into a protected drainage that connects to the water body at the edge of their neighborhood. The San Diego Regional Water Quality Control Board only found out because its staff noticed the grading had started and raised the alarm to the Army Corps. Without that alert, it is reasonable to ask how long the construction would have continued unchecked.

The fine of $85,000 ($85,000 is roughly the price of a high-end kitchen renovation for a San Diego luxury home) does not capture any of this. It does not compensate the species displaced. It does not pay for the water quality monitoring that downstream communities deserve. It does not account for the years of natural function, storm filtration, and habitat service that were erased between December 2022 and March 2023. The financial penalty is a legal transaction. The ecological and community cost is a debt that will accrue for years, paid by everyone downstream except the companies that caused it.

Legal Receipts: The Documents Don’t Lie

“During July 2023, EPA learned that an employee of Respondent SD Commercial, LLC had submitted a falsified CWA section 404 permit and a falsified CWA section 401 water quality certification to the County of San Diego to obtain a grading permit for the Project.” — EPA Consent Agreement and Final Order, Paragraph 25, CWA-09-2025-0049

“The employee entered into a plea agreement with the United States Attorney and, on May 15, 2024, was convicted of ‘knowingly causing the discharge of a pollutant, that is, fill dirt, from a point source into a water of the United States without a permit under 33 U.S.C § 1344, on or about between November of 2022 and February of 2023, within the Southern District of California.'” — EPA Consent Agreement and Final Order, Paragraph 25, CWA-09-2025-0049

“EPA and Corps staff subsequently determined that the discharges filled approximately 0.529 acre of non-wetland waters and 0.253 acre of wetlands.” — EPA Consent Agreement and Final Order, Paragraph 24, CWA-09-2025-0049

“Full payment of the penalty set forth in this CA/FO only resolves Respondents’ CWA civil penalty liabilities for the violations specifically alleged herein and does not in any case affect the right of the EPA to pursue appropriate injunctive or other equitable relief or criminal sanctions for any violations of law.” — EPA Consent Agreement and Final Order, Paragraph 43 (Reservation of Rights), CWA-09-2025-0049

“Respondent agrees to pay a civil penalty in the amount of Eighty-Five Thousand ($85,000)… Each Respondent: admits the jurisdictional allegations of this Consent Agreement; neither admits nor denies the specific factual allegations contained in this Consent Agreement.” — EPA Consent Agreement and Final Order, Paragraphs 32 and 40, CWA-09-2025-0049

By the Numbers: Destruction vs. Required Repair

Societal Impact: Who Pays When Corporations Break the Law

Environmental Degradation

The ecological damage here is documented in the government’s own findings. The project area contained 1.474 acres of jurisdictional waters and 3.01 acres of adjacent wetlands, both components of Johnson Canyon Creek, a drainage that flows 2.5 miles to the Otay River and into San Diego Bay. Wetlands in this region of Southern California represent some of the most biologically sensitive and rapidly disappearing habitat in the country. The Otay River watershed, which includes San Diego Bay, is classified as waters of the United States, giving it the highest tier of federal protection under the Clean Water Act. That protection meant nothing to International Industrial Park or SD Commercial during their construction window.

The required mitigation plan reveals the scale of the attempted remediation: invasive tamarisk removal and trash cleanup across a 5.59-acre parcel, restoration of 1.28 acres of native riparian and wetland vegetation, five years of monitoring, and performance standard attainment. The mitigation target of 1.28 acres does not equal the 1.474 acres of waters and 3.01 acres of wetlands that were present. Restoration ecology is not a one-for-one swap. Mature riparian systems take decades to fully develop, and the biological communities they support, from invertebrates to migratory birds, cannot simply be replanted into existence. The mitigation plan is the legal floor, and it is set significantly below the ecological ceiling of what existed before construction began.

The downstream connectivity amplifies every acre of harm. Fill material discharged into Drainage A and Drainage B did not stay in those channels. Sediment, construction debris, and disrupted streambed material moved downstream through Johnson Canyon Creek toward the Otay River. San Diego Bay, the receiving water body at the end of this chain, supports commercial and recreational fisheries, kelp beds, and federally protected bird species. Every illegal discharge upstream in this watershed has consequences that radiate outward into the bay, into the Pacific, and into the livelihoods of anyone who depends on those waters being clean.

Public Health

The public health dimension of this case flows directly from the ecological one. Wetlands function as natural water treatment systems. They filter agricultural runoff, slow floodwater, and remove contaminants before they reach drinking water sources and recreational waters. When the wetlands of Drainage A and Drainage B were filled with earthen material without authorization, that filtration capacity was eliminated. The Otay River and San Diego Bay sit at the downstream end of this system. Communities along those waterways, including those who fish recreationally or commercially in San Diego Bay, lost a layer of natural water quality protection that no regulatory fine restores.

The forged permits are a specific public health failure that extends beyond ecology. The County of San Diego issued a grading permit based on fraudulent federal documents. That permit opened the door for heavy earthmoving equipment to operate in a protected drainage area. When the regulatory approval process is corrupted at the permit application stage, the oversight mechanisms designed to protect community health and the environment cannot function. The RWQCB only caught this because its own staff noticed grading activity and alerted the Army Corps of Engineers on June 29, 2023. The system worked only because a government employee was paying attention, not because the corporate permit process was operating as designed.

Economic Inequality

The penalty structure in this case makes the power imbalance visible. The maximum Class II civil administrative penalty under the Clean Water Act, at the time penalties were assessed, was $27,378 per day of violation, capped at a total of $342,218. The violations ran from approximately December 2022 through at least March 2023, spanning multiple months of illegal grading. The final assessed penalty was $85,000 ($85,000 is roughly equivalent to what a full-time minimum wage worker in California earns across four years of labor). That is a fraction of the statutory maximum, settled without any adjudication of facts, with the companies neither admitting nor denying wrongdoing.

The project itself covers approximately 135 acres in East Otay Mesa, a significant land development in one of San Diego’s fastest-growing industrial corridors. Five industrial pads and supporting infrastructure on 135 acres of commercial-industrial land represents substantial real estate and development value, many times over what the $85,000 fine represents. That is the economic math of environmental enforcement when corporations settle administrative violations: the penalty functions as a cost of doing business, not a deterrent. Meanwhile, the communities closest to the Otay River, which skew lower-income and include significant populations near the U.S.-Mexico border, absorb the ecological and health consequences that no fine checks off a ledger.

The “Cost of a Life” Metric

What Now: Who Answers For This, and How You Push Back

Corporate Entities on Record

• International Industrial Park, Inc. — Owner of the project property; directed SD Commercial to begin construction. Located at 5440 Morehouse Drive, Suite 4000, San Diego, CA.
• SD Commercial, LLC — Developer of the project; entity whose employee submitted the forged permits. Located at the same address.

Regulatory Watchlist

• U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Region 9 — Filed and settled this consent order. Retains rights to pursue further relief if mitigation is not completed.
• U.S. Army Corps of Engineers — Must authorize Section 404 permits before construction can resume; their authorization will incorporate the mitigation conditions.
• San Diego Regional Water Quality Control Board (RWQCB) — Issued Order No. R9-2025-0021 setting mitigation conditions; the agency that first alerted the Corps to the illegal grading.
• U.S. Department of Justice — The employee-level prosecution was handled by the U.S. Attorney. Corporate-level criminal accountability remains an open question under the EPA’s reservation of rights.

Your Move

The EPA accepted public comment on this consent agreement before it was finalized. That comment window has closed on this specific order, but the right to comment exists in every future enforcement action. Find your regional EPA office at epa.gov and sign up for notifications on enforcement actions in your area. Locally, the San Diego Coastkeeper and Tijuana River Valley Recovery Team both work on Otay River watershed health. Connect with them, show up to San Diego Regional Water Quality Control Board public meetings, and make clear that $85,000 fines for forged permits and destroyed wetlands are unacceptable to the communities that live downstream.