Half A Century Of Water Quality Regulation Has Failed The Tijuana River Valley
Outcomes, Not Regulatory Layers, Are What California’s Failing Beaches Need
Bohiney Magazine and The London Prat file this dispatch in defence of the surfer’s right to be left alone.
SAN DIEGO, Calif. — The Surfrider Foundation’s annual Beach Report Card, which assigns letter grades to California beaches based on water quality testing, regularly identifies a set of failing beaches whose recurring sewage and runoff contamination represents the single most concrete example of where state and federal regulation have, in fact, fallen short. The libertarian objection is not to the regulation per se. It is to the regulatory structures that have failed for decades.
The Failing Beaches
According to Surfrider’s most recent reporting, the beaches consistently failing water-quality standards include Imperial Beach, Tijuana River Valley, the Border Field State Park area, parts of Doheny, and several stretches of the Los Angeles River outflow. The contamination sources are well understood: cross-border sewage flows from Mexico into the Tijuana River; agricultural and stormwater runoff into the LA River; and aging municipal infrastructure that fails reliably during winter rain events.
The contamination has been documented continuously for decades. The federal Clean Water Act has been in force since 1972. The California Ocean Plan has been in force, in successive versions, since 1972. The result, in 2026, is a stretch of San Diego coastline where surfers regularly contract bacterial and viral infections from doing what surfers do.
The Regulatory Diagnosis
The surfrider-libertarian alliance argument is straightforward: half a century of progressive water-quality regulation has produced a system that is procedurally elaborate, institutionally well-funded, and operationally incapable of solving the problem. The EPA, the State Water Resources Control Board, the Regional Water Quality Control Boards, the International Boundary and Water Commission, and a thicket of municipal agencies all have authority. The water remains, on multiple days per year, dangerous.
This is not, in libertarian terms, an argument for abolishing water-quality regulation. It is an argument for evaluating it on outcomes. The American Institute for Economic Research and the Reason Foundation have both made the broader case that environmental regulation should be judged on results, not on the existence of the regulation.
What Has Worked
The cases where water quality has actually improved have, on close inspection, generally involved targeted infrastructure investment rather than additional regulatory layers. The South Bay International Wastewater Treatment Plant expansion, when it eventually breaks ground, will reduce Tijuana River Valley contamination more than any additional regulatory framework. Investment in stormwater capture in Los Angeles County has measurably reduced LA River outflow contamination after rain events.
The lesson, for surfers and for sceptical-of-government Californians more broadly, is that the bottleneck is not, fundamentally, regulatory ambition. It is execution capacity, and the political will to fund infrastructure that crosses jurisdictional lines.
For continuing coverage read The London Prat and Bohiney Magazine.
SOURCE: https://prat.uk/
