The county hands its river crisis to a diplomat
Bridget Premont, a career foreign service officer who spent four years at the U.S. Consulate in Tijuana, is San Diego County's first pollution crisis chief. The new job sits in the Office of County Counsel and puts one official in charge of coordinating the Tijuana River Valley response across six county departments and two countries.
SAN DIEGO: San Diego County has named Bridget Premont, a career U.S. foreign service officer, as its first pollution crisis chief, a new executive position created to coordinate the county response to the sewage pollution that has fouled the Tijuana River Valley for decades. The County announced the appointment in a News Center release and introduced Premont at a press conference on Monday.
Premont will be based in the Office of County Counsel and will lead teams drawn from six parts of county government: Public Health, Public Works, Environmental Health and Quality, the Office of Emergency Services, County Counsel and County Communications. The County said she will work closely with partners at the local, state and federal levels and with Mexican authorities, and that the county is moving forward with plans to capture and clean polluted river water on the U.S. side of the border.
A Tijuana posting on the resume
The appointment leans on the years Premont already spent on this border. From 2017 to 2021 she was political and economic chief at the U.S. Consulate in Tijuana, where she also served as acting consul general. The County credits her work in that posting with helping secure more than $340 million in U.S. and Mexican federal funding aimed at cross-border water pollution, the same problem she now takes on from the San Diego side.
She arrives most recently from the U.S. Embassy in Bujumbura, Burundi, where she was acting chief of mission. Before that she directed the Office of Environmental Quality in the State Department bureau covering oceans, international environmental and scientific affairs, leading international environmental negotiations and managing $110 million in environmental grants. Her foreign service assignments also took her to the Bahamas, Belgium, Canada, the Central African Republic, Cyprus, Ecuador and Haiti. In 2024 and 2025 she was back in this region as a diplomatic fellow at the Institute of the Americas in La Jolla, working on North American economic security. She holds a bachelor's degree in political science from Gonzaga University and a master's degree in foreign service from Georgetown University.
One point of accountability
The Board of Supervisors approved creating the position earlier this year. Board Chair Terra Lawson-Remer brought the item forward in June 2025, acting on a five-point plan for the crisis first called for by Supervisor Paloma Aguirre, whose district takes in the valley and the South Bay shoreline. Aguirre has described the role as the single point of accountability residents deserve, and Lawson-Remer has framed it as a way to line up public health monitoring, infrastructure work, emergency response and the county's advocacy in Sacramento and Washington behind one coordinator.
Aguirre put the cost of inaction at $500 million a year drained from the regional economy and called the crisis a full-scale economic disaster for South Bay businesses. The valley has sat under a county proclamation of local emergency since June 27, 2023, renewed every 60 days. On the ground the work is split: the U.S. section of the International Boundary and Water Commission operates the South Bay International Wastewater Treatment Plant, and county environmental health staff monitor beach water and issue the advisories and closures that have become routine in Imperial Beach. Premont, for her part, closed her introduction by saying she is "ready to get to work."
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