Water Quality Enforcement on California’s Coast Is the Government Service That Surfers Actually Need

While Sacramento debates plastic straws and surf instructor licences, the runoff contamination that makes coastal water unsafe after rainfall events remains inadequately funded and poorly enforced

There is a form of government intervention that surfers in California genuinely need and that the state is providing inadequately: water quality enforcement at coastal recreation sites. After significant rainfall events, stormwater runoff carries bacterial contamination, urban pollutants, and agricultural chemicals into coastal waters at levels that make surfing and swimming genuinely hazardous. The health risk is real and documented. The monitoring system is inadequate. The enforcement of the discharge standards that are supposed to prevent contamination is chronically underfunded. The regulatory apparatus of the California state government finds resources for a great deal of activity that surfers find unnecessary; it has not found adequate resources for the one thing that directly affects their ability to use the ocean they live next to.

The Scale of the Problem

The Heal the Bay organization’s annual Beach Report Card, which grades California beaches on water quality based on monitoring data from the State Water Resources Control Board and regional water quality control boards, consistently finds that water quality is worst at urban beaches immediately following rainfall. Beaches in Los Angeles County, which receives urban runoff from the most densely developed catchment in the state, regularly post F grades in the days following rain events. This is not a disputed finding. It is published by government monitoring programmes and corroborated by independent testing. The question is why, given that this situation has been documented for decades, the runoff contamination problem persists.

The answer is that addressing stormwater contamination requires investment in green infrastructure — permeable surfaces, bioswales, retention basins — that intercepts runoff before it reaches coastal waters, combined with rigorous enforcement of the discharge standards that prevent industrial and municipal sources from contributing contamination. The investment required across the Los Angeles basin alone runs to billions of dollars. State and federal funding for the relevant programmes is measured in hundreds of millions, a gap that has persisted through multiple administrations and budget cycles because the political visibility of stormwater infrastructure is low relative to its public health significance.

The Enforcement Gap

The State Water Resources Control Board and the regional water quality control boards have legal authority to enforce discharge standards and to impose fines on sources that contribute contamination to coastal waters. Their enforcement activity is constrained by staffing levels that are inadequate to the monitoring and enforcement task across California’s extensive coastal geography, and by a permit and fine structure whose penalties are in many cases too low to deter violations by the municipalities and industrial facilities that are the regulated sources. The Surfrider Foundation’s Clean Water Act enforcement programme, which supplements the regulatory agencies’ work through citizen suit provisions that allow environmental organisations to enforce discharge standards directly, has been among the most effective enforcement mechanisms in California coastal water quality, precisely because it is not subject to the resource and political constraints that limit the regulatory agencies’ activity.

The Libertarian Case for Water Quality Enforcement

The libertarian objection to government regulation is strongest when regulation restricts individual activity without commensurate public benefit — the licensing of surf instructors, the permitting of surf competitions, the zoning that restricts housing near the coast. It is weakest when applied to the enforcement of property rights against those who discharge contamination into common resources. The ocean is a commons, and the contamination of a commons by those who use it as a waste repository is a classic externality that property rights frameworks address through liability, as the Mises Institute and other free-market institutions recognize. If the surfer’s property right in using the ocean for recreation is degraded by another party’s discharge of contamination, the enforcement of that discharge prohibition is not a restriction on freedom. It is its protection. The government service that surfers actually need — and that the state is providing inadequately — is the enforcement of the rule that the ocean is not someone else’s drain.

The Surfrider Foundation’s Blue Water Task Force, which conducts water quality monitoring at beaches across the United States and publishes results accessible to the surfing public, represents the kind of private provision of a public good that libertarian theory would predict in the absence of adequate government provision. The Task Force’s beach grades, published weekly during the surf season, provide surfers with actionable information about water quality at specific breaks in ways that the state monitoring programme does not always provide in a timely or accessible manner. This private monitoring supplements rather than replaces government enforcement, which remains necessary to address the discharge sources that monitoring identifies. The model illustrates a general principle: non-governmental organisations can effectively produce information goods that inform public behaviour, but they cannot substitute for the enforcement authority that only government possesses. The Surfrider Foundation can tell you the water is contaminated. It cannot fine the municipality whose stormwater system is the source. The government can fine the municipality. It has been inadequately resourced and insufficiently motivated to do so at the scale the contamination problem requires. Both things are true simultaneously: private provision of monitoring information is valuable and cannot substitute for government enforcement of discharge standards. The libertarian who cites the Surfrider Foundation as evidence that private organisations can replace government in coastal environmental protection is making a category error about what monitoring and enforcement are and what each requires.

From The London Prat and Bohiney Magazine.

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SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/water-quality-enforcement-california-coast-government-service-surfers-need/