After four months of the County of San Diego footing the bill to monitor the quality of beach water, the state has unfrozen bond money to reimburse the county. The State will reimburse the county $600,620 over the next two years to monitor the bacteria levels at 44 beach and bay sites throughout the county from April 1 to Oct. 31. The state has reduced its reimbursement to the county by 10 percent from past years, according to Mark McPherson, chief of the Land and Water Quality Division at the county’s Department of Environmental Health. During the past four months, the county had only sampled water at 19 locations and has decided to scale back its program to test only 44 sites instead of the previous 57 weekly samplings since the state restored the funding. “This whole ordeal has allowed us to really look at the program and fine-tune it,” said Luis Monteagudoa, spokesperson for County Supervisor Greg Cox’s office. Cox’s district includes communities from Pacific Beach to Point Loma. “As a result, we eliminated some sampling locations that have had very few or no incidents of higher bacteria levels and we added some new sites.” Sites dropped include water samplings at Crystal Pier, Grand Avenue, Sail Bay, Santa Clara Point, Balboa Court and Scripps Pier. The state funds the program with money from Prop. 13, which voters approved in 2000 to sell $1.97 billion in bonds for clean water purposes.