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 statewide beach monitoring and 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. The program 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 ceasing of state funded monitoring at La Jolla Shores, Mission Beach, Pacific Beach 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 check water quality at 151 sites as they comply with wastewater permit regulations, according to city officials. While the county and the city do often monitor the same sites, the county will no longer be able to analyze those data from samples collected by the city because of the budget cuts. The samples let health officials know if the beaches were potentially contaminated. The program also paid for signs about water contamination so people can decide where they want to enter the water, McPherson 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],” he said. Though McPherson said that the health of San Diego beaches is good overall, they continue to warn people to stay away from high risk areas, which include areas near storm drains, 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 puts a strain on local environmental groups whose volunteers venture inland and along to the coast to monitor the bacteria of the regions waterways, said Bruce Reznik, executive director at 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 regions 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 the regions waterways eventually reaches the coast so volunteers monitor 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.