Come April of next year, the San Diego County Department of Environmental Health is not quite sure where — if at all — it’s going to get funding for routine beach water quality testing. As it stands, the state health and safety code mandates that the department test the water weekly from April 1 through Oct. 31, which is considered to be the peak beach season, and report bacteria levels to the public. But San Diego County’s contract with the state runs out at the end of December, and nobody has stepped up to foot the $300,000-a-year bill, said Mark McPherson, head of the water quality arm of the county department. The California Water Resources Control Board (CWRCB) is the entity that has previously secured funding, and McPherson said San Diego County officials just got word Sept. 30 — via a statement by CWRCB board spokesman William L. Rukeyser in the Los Angeles Times — that the board will “most likely” hear a proposal in November to use $984,000 in state bond money to continue testing for one more year across the state. But Mike Grimmer, a spokesman for Santa Monica-based environmental group Heal the Bay, said $984,000 is not enough. That figure, he said, is 10 to 20 percent less than what California was getting ten years ago, and it would be “optimal” to perform testing year-round. There is no testing done in March — a month in which beaches see high numbers of Spring Breakers and tourists. Grimmer is the manager of Heal the Bay’s “Beach Report Card,” which reports water-quality data compiled by California’s counties. Heal the Bay put out an end-of-summer report Sept. 29 that showed San Diego’s beaches were among the best in the state this year, taking home all “A”s on their report card. But even though San Diego scored highly, Grimmer said that without routine testing there would be know way of knowing if local beaches become polluted by a random problem under the water table, such as a sewage leak or a bad septic system. With so much money coming in to the state by way of beach tourism, he said, testing is something health officials and politicians can’t ignore. “You can’t detect anything if you’re not monitoring,” Grimmer said. “If funding goes away, the public will have to swim at their own risk.” Water-quality testing is a “funded mandate,” McPherson said. “The state gives us the money and we have to do it,” he said. “But we only have to do it if they give us the money.” The water-quality department, overseen by the county’s Department of Environmental Health, collects water from 44 frequently-accessed locations along San Diego’s coastline and analyzes the samples in the San Diego County Public Health Laboratory. In the case that the county doesn’t secure funding, McPherson said, “the [public health] issue would still be there, we just wouldn’t be doing the monitoring and alerting the public to the results.” Heal the Bay’s recent report showed the state of California had one of the cleanest summers to date, with mainly “A”s and “B”s, except for a few failing areas around San Francisco and Los Angeles. There’s one area that’s been problematic in Pacific Beach — PB Point. It’s gotten an “F” rating for several years in a row until this year, when it scored an “A+”. The sampling site was moved 75 feet in 2009 to a more frequented area, said McPherson, so that shouldn’t have skewed the results. He said the high reading had to do with the particular typography of that spot, which can cause seaweed and kelp to build up, and when debris sits in the sun it becomes a breeding ground for bacteria. Only 1,200 feet (about two blocks) from PB Point is another sample site, Tourmaline Surf Park, which has consistently scored highly. McPherson said this year’s higher scores could be attributed to a cooler summer or increased efforts by the municipal stormwater program, but he can “only speculate as to why.”