In reporting my story today about the city of San Diego’s real estate holdings, I was unable to get comment from the Border Patrol. The federal agency paid about one-third what it was billed monthly and stopped paying rent to San Diego altogether in September 2006 for the use of a building at the pedestrian crossing at San Ysidro, according to city of San Diego records.
City records show an outstanding balance of $153,853.
Today, I played phone tag with a Border Patrol official. I eventually received this response in a voice mail:
We’re still doing some research on that and we’re not going to know until tomorrow sometime what has happened there, and find out exactly what happened in our system.