Grand Jury says county needs funds for water-quality testing

Alex Coolman and Kenneth Ma

HUNTINGTON BEACH -- Residents are urging the county to spend more money

on the Orange County Public Health Lab in the wake of a grand jury report

that finds county water agencies don’t have the resources to match the

workload created by stricter water-quality laws.

There needs to be a “decision made at the county supervisor level to

provide the necessary resources to carry out the intent” of Assembly Bill

411, city spokesman Rich Barnard.

AB 411, passed last year, increased the variety of tests that are

performed at beaches and introduced stricter standards for posting public

health warnings.

The report, released Tuesday, said passage of such laws are creating an

overwhelming workload for county water agencies, which do not have

adequate staff or resources to deal with beach pollution.

“One day you don’t have a law, and the next day you have one,” Barnard

said. “When setting a higher standard, the whole system needs to bump

itself up to meet that higher standard.”

The 1999 passage of AB 411 has more than doubled the workload of the

county health care agency, but staffing is not sufficient to respond to

the increased data flow, the report concludes.

Health lab officials are responsible for testing the Orange County

coastal waters for contamination.

“I’m sure the health department has been very busy with testing,” Barnard

said. “I think [the bill] puts everyone under the gun.”

Eileen Murphy, a member of the environmental preservation group Bolsa

Chica Land Trust, said money needs to be spent on water-quality testing

because water is a critical resource for Surf City. Last summer, ocean

waters off of Huntington Beach were closed intermittently for most of the

summer, leading to a loss of revenue by local merchants and city coffers.

“They better find the money because the water has to be tested,” she

said. The new state standards “will have a negative on Huntington Beach,

if [the county agency] can’t test the water and find out where the

pollution is coming from. It will have an effect on people’s recreation

and business”.In the wake of the new legislation, county facilities have

stretched their limits, said Karen Evarts, a grand jury member and

principal author of the report.

“We were just not impressed with the lack of computer facilities and the

lack of manpower,” she said. “They’re literally using these Excel

spreadsheets spread out on a table and using a felt-tip pen” to analyze

test data.

In response to the problem, the grand jury report makes several

recommendations, including:

* hiring additional staff, including microbiologists and analysts;

* updating the technology used by the public health lab and the Orange

County Health Care Agency;

* posting more current and accurate information on the Health Care

Agency’s Web site.

Monica Mazur, a spokeswoman for the Health Care Agency, said the grand

jury’s characterization of the county resource crunch was accurate.

Mazur noted, however, that the wheels are already in motion to address

the problems that the grand jury’s report addresses.

About $1.2 million in funding is included in the pending state budget for

high-tech improvements to the county’s water-testing lab.

More than $300,000 in county funding will be used to hire a

microbiologist and a lab technician, and to acquire equipment to help

grapple with the data avalanche, said Douglas Moore, laboratory director

for the Public Health Lab.