A new San Diego border station and road project got a boost April 15 with a $150 million INFRA Grant from the DOT. The $1.3 billion Otay Mesa East Port of Entry job entails building a new toll road on SR-11 and a port of entry on the border near Tijuana, Mexico, to facilitate freight movement and reduce wait times to cross in the area, per the project website.
The $10.9 billion INFRA Grant program, created through the 2021 Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, provides competitive funding for multimodal freight and highway projects of national or regional significance.
The new DOT agreement removed Biden-era environmental requirements, including a zero-emission vehicle charging provision. Previously, the General Services Administration planned to upgrade 38 federal land ports of entry with American-made sustainable technologies such as low-carbon materials in order to boost domestic clean manufacturing.
The new crossing for the San Diego-Baja California region is more than 20 years in the making. It will be built east of the existing Otay Mesa Port, with additional goals of enhancing border security, managing traffic through dynamic tolling and increasing inspection efficiency, according to the release. It will handle personal as well as commercial vehicles.
Seven bridges and three interchanges are also part of the project. The design has a total of 12 lanes, but two would be closed at any given time. Vehicles will be charged a dynamically priced toll that will cap the average wait time to cross the border at 30 minutes.
The new facility will provide an alternative for the nearly 3,600 trucks that cross the existing Otay Mesa and Tecate border stations daily, which are operating at capacity, per the DOT. It will facilitate freight moving across borders to the Ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, and the Inland Empire’s mega-distribution centers in Riverside and San Bernardino counties.
The San Diego Association of Governments and the California DOT are sponsoring the project, and are currently collaborating with federal partners on the project’s final design, SANDAG said in an April 16 news release.
In January the two agencies awarded a $3.5 million contract for preconstruction services to a joint venture made up of Bethesda, Maryland-headquartered Clark and Atkinson, a Renton, Washington-based Clark subsidiary, according to The San Diego Union-Tribune.
Site preparations started in August 2022, according to SANDAG. Swedish builder Skanska finished a $3.3 million utility infrastructure extension project to prepare the site for construction in May 2024. The Mexican side of the project is almost complete, The San Diego Union-Tribune reported, but cannot be finished until Otay Mesa East is also built.
The project’s commercial vehicle facilities are expected to break ground this fall, per SANDAG. It may open the project in phases, with the goal of fully opening the facility in late 2027.
