3. Port Governance and Infrastructure

The Port of San Diego was established in 1962 by the California Legislature. The Port’s primary role is to manage San Diego Bay and the surrounding waterfront. Of California’s 11 ports, the Port of San Diego is the fourth largest. It is governed by a 7-member Board of Port Commissioners appointed by the City Councils of San Diego, Chula Vista, Coronado, Imperial Beach, and National City. The Port oversees two maritime cargo terminals, two cruise ship terminals, 22 public parks, and the Harbor Police Department.

The Port also manages hundreds of leases for tenant and subtenant businesses around San Diego Bay, including 17 hotels, 74 restaurants, three specialty retail centers and numerous other attractions including museums and bay tours (Source). The port’s maritime cargo terminals are the National City Marine Terminal and the Tenth Avenue Marine Terminal. The Tenth Avenue Marine Terminal encompasses 1,000,000 square feet of warehouses and transit sheds, 25 acres of open space for cargo, and 8 berths and offers a variety of storage options (e.g., cold, dry, bulk). The National City Marine Terminal is a 125-acre complex with seven berths and is the main point of entry for a variety of foreign automobiles.

The Port’s Tuna Harbor Basin is an area of 5.4 acres of land and 13.1 acres of water designated for commercial fishing purposes. Tuna Harbor Basin has a total of 105 commercial boat slips (68 in service at the time of writing) distributed across three docks with lengths ranging from 17ft to 80ft and water depths ranging from 13ft to 25ft. Tuna Harbor Basin also includes three piers: G Street Mole which is 900ft, Tuna Harbor Pier which is 370 ft and the Fish Market Wharf which is 100 ft. (Source). Fishing industry support services in the area include three bait facilities, six hoists, two boatyards, cold storage, fuel docks, and eight haulouts. San Diego’s waterfront is home to 11 marinas, six boat launches, more than 2000 boat slips and almost 500 moorings.

3.1 Commercial Seafood Handling Infrastructure

A variety of commercial fish businesses receive, and in some cases, process the catch landed at the Port of San Diego by commercial fishers (Table 1). These include businesses that lease and operate the fish receiving stations located in Tuna Harbor, other local and non-local businesses that receive the unloaded catch from these receiving station operators and some fishers who handle their own (and in some cases others’) catch. In 2021, 70 fish business licensees had a mail, street, or plant address of San Diego (Table 1). Sixty-five unique fish business licenses received catch at the port. Of those based in San Diego included commercial fishers licensed to receive and sell their catch, and several smaller locally owned receivers that also had retail storefronts and/or restaurants.

Like most ports along the California coast, commercial fish businesses in San Diego have slowly declined, from 87 in 2003 to 70 in 2021 (Figure 2). From 1989-2021, fish businesses were at their lowest in 2014 (52). The contraction of the processing sector is in part due to simultaneous declines in important fisheries such as swordfish and red sea urchin, which made it hard for receiving and processing businesses to stay afloat. Fishermen’s retail licenses declined for much of that period, however, in 2020 (33) and 2021 (29) they had more than doubled from the annual totals in the 20 years prior. This is likely due to the port’s efforts to build a local direct-to-consumer market. In 2014. the port started the Tuna Harbor Dockside Market, an open-air Saturday market in which the public purchase fresh-caught seafood direct from local fishers.

Figure 2: Fish Business Licenses by type in San Diego, 1993-2021

Table 2: Timeline of selected events affecting San Diego’s primary fisheries.