San Diego beaches recently brought home good grades on their water quality report card. But keeping them healthy took a lot of work — and now all that progress could go down the drain because of budget cuts to a statewide program that monitors beach contamination. San Diego County Department of Environmental Health officials have stopped checking a majority of beach areas for bacteria because of state budget cuts that wiped away the funding of beach monitoring and a public awareness program that county officials say originated in San Diego several years ago. San Diego County alone stands to lose about $302,000 — the program’s entire budget — which paid for weekly beach water sampling during the dry months of April through October, said Mark McPherson, chief of the Land and Water Quality Division for the San Diego County Department of Environmental Health. Water monitoring will stop at about 55 sites, from San Onofre to the southern border, including cessation of state-funded monitoring at La Jolla Shores, Mission and Pacific beaches and Ocean Beach, he said. Some county monitoring already under way will continue, he said, but new monitoring will stop. City water agencies will also continue to monitor beaches at 41 sites as they comply with waste-water regulations, but the county will no longer be able to analyze those data because of the budget cuts, he said. The samples let health officials know if the beaches were contaminated according to standards of pollutant measurement. The program also paid for signs about water contamination so people can decide where they want to enter the water, he said. “Having that kind of data is important because you can make real-time decisions because of that history. It’s always preferable to have a continuous data set. So you don’t want to stop [monitoring],” McPherson said. Though McPherson said that the health of San Diego beaches is good overall, health officials continue to warn people to stay away from “high-risk areas,” including flowing storm drains to the beach, creek outlets and open lagoons. County officials also remind people to stay out of the water up to 72 hours after a rainstorm. A Heal The Bay beach report card released recently gave mostly “A” grades to the city’s beaches, with a few beaches near San Diego River outflows receiving poorer grades. The full interactive report can be found at www.healthebay.org. “But far as beach water quality data … during the dry season, if we’re not sampling, we don’t know what’s there and the public doesn’t know what’s there, either,” McPherson said. The impending cuts in county resources put a strain on local environmental groups, whose volunteers venture inland and along the coast to monitor the bacteria of the region’s waterways, said Bruce Reznik, executive director of San Diego Coastkeeper. Data gathered by the county and city agencies let the volunteers know of potential health risks at the beach areas and associated waterways. And while Reznik said the city and county officials continue to do a good job monitoring beaches and waterways with the resources they have, he added that San Diegans still don’t have a “really good assessment” of the health of the region’s waterways. “As it stood, they (monitoring programs) were already under-funded. So to see that last bit of funding being cut is really disappointing,” Reznik said. Coastkeeper volunteers continue to monitor the San Diego watershed. Water from rivers and other inland sources eventually reaches the coast, so volunteers focus on the inland region, Coastkeeper officials said. Volunteers from environmental groups such as the San Diego Chapter of the Surfrider Foundation and San Diego Coastkeeper join forces every month to train new volunteers for the monitoring task. New volunteers can sign up by contacting San Diego Coastkeeper officials through www.sdcoastkeeper.org.