Come April of next year, the San Diego County Department of Environmental Health is not quite sure where \u2014 if at all \u2014 it\u2019s 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\u2019s 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 \u2014 via a statement by CWRCB board spokesman William L. Rukeyser in the Los Angeles Times \u2014 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, represents 10 to 20 percent less than what California was getting 10 years ago, and it would be “optimal” to perform testing year-round. There is no testing done in March \u2014 a month in which beaches see high numbers of Spring Breakers and tourists. Grimmer is the manager of Heal the Bay\u2019s “Beach Report Card,” which reports water-quality data compiled by California\u2019s counties. Heal the Bay put out an end-of-summer report Sept. 29 that showed San Diego\u2019s 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 no 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\u2019t ignore. “You can\u2019t detect anything if you\u2019re 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\u2019s Department of Environmental Health, collects water from 44 frequently-accessed locations along San Diego\u2019s coastline and analyzes the samples in the San Diego County Public Health Laboratory. In the case that the county doesn\u2019t secure funding, McPherson said, “the [public health] issue would still be there, we just wouldn\u2019t be doing the monitoring and alerting the public to the results.” Heal the Bay\u2019s 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\u2019s one area that\u2019s been problematic in Pacific Beach \u2014 PB Point. It\u2019s 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\u2019t 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\u2019s 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.”<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Come April of next year, the San Diego County Department of Environmental Health is not quite sure where \u2014 if at all \u2014 it\u2019s 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. […]<\/p>","protected":false},"author":726,"featured_media":256873,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"11559","_seopress_titles_title":"Despite health concerns, 2010 may be last year for beach water testing","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"jnews_override_counter":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[11559,12360,11551],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-256874","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-beach-bay-press","category-duplicate","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/256874","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/726"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=256874"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/256874\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/256873"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=256874"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=256874"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=256874"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}