Why I made this
I live in Imperial Beach. Like my neighbors, I've watched the beach stay closed, smelled the river on bad nights, and wondered why a problem this visible has been so hard to fix.
When I went looking for answers, I found pieces. Federal reports, water board filings, agreements between two countries, news stories, scientific studies. Each one held part of it. None of them told me the whole thing: what is actually happening, what needs to happen, how long it will take, and which parts will genuinely get fixed.
It took hours and hours of reading. At the end of it I still could not find one place that put the pieces together and said what had changed lately.
I understand why most people stop there. The problem looks too complicated to hold in your head, so you put your hands up and decide it is above your pay grade. I felt that, and I hated it. I don't like leaving something this close to home to somebody else.
So I changed the question. Instead of asking how the whole thing gets solved, I asked what one piece of it I could actually help with. Nothing gets fixed without somebody taking a small step, and every small step counts.
That turned out to be what all the reading was good for. It showed me which projects already exist, which ones are waiting on money, and which groups are doing work worth supporting. I could read their own sites and judge for myself whether the work was real and whether a donation would land somewhere that mattered.
This site is that research, in one place. It is here so you can find out what is going on and what you can do about it without spending your evenings the way I spent mine. Pick the way in that suits you: give time, give money, or push for a project that is built and waiting to be funded.
I was tired of putting a sign in my yard saying I wanted this solved. I wanted to actually do something. If you feel the same way, finding out how to start should not be the hard part.
Stacy Willis, Imperial Beach resident
Who makes it
Me. I'm Stacy Willis, I live here, and this site is not run by an agency, an organization or anybody's campaign.
My day job is marketing and website management. I run Peakuilibrium, a local business. Building and looking after sites is the thing I know how to do, so it is what I had to offer a problem that bothers me. This one is pro bono, kept up in my own time.