California Has Known About Sewage in the Surf Zone for Decades and the Political Response Has Been Committees
The Recurring Crisis of Bacterial Contamination at Southern California Surf Breaks Reflects a Infrastructure Investment Deficit That Government Has Systematically Failed to Address
LOS ANGELES / SAN DIEGO, Calif. – The water quality problems at Southern California surf breaks are among the most thoroughly documented and least effectively addressed environmental issues on the California coast. Bacterial contamination from sewage infrastructure failures, storm drain runoff, and aging treatment systems regularly produces surf zone closures, health advisories for swimmers and surfers, and the specific category of illness – gastrointestinal infections, ear infections, respiratory problems – that surfers who paddle out regardless of posted advisories are chronically familiar with. The Surfrider Foundation‘s Blue Water Task Force has been monitoring water quality at California surf breaks for years and consistently documents contamination levels that should prompt urgent infrastructure investment. The government’s response has been consistently slower, smaller, and less effective than the documented problem requires.
The infrastructure deficit that produces surf zone contamination is not mysterious. California’s storm drain and sewage systems in coastal communities were designed for the population and water volumes of the mid-20th century and have not been upgraded at the pace required by population growth, climate change-driven precipitation intensity, and the increasing urbanization of coastal watersheds. The cost of upgrading these systems is large – estimates run into tens of billions of dollars for comprehensive infrastructure replacement across Southern California’s coastal systems – and the political competition for those resources is fierce. Water and sewer infrastructure competes for funding against transportation, housing, healthcare, and the full range of government spending priorities that democratic politics must balance.
The Government Failure Diagnosis
The libertarian analysis of chronic government infrastructure underinvestment identifies several contributing factors. Government agencies face weaker incentives than private actors to invest in maintenance and upgrade because the political rewards for ribbon-cutting on new projects typically exceed the rewards for maintaining existing infrastructure. The cost-benefit calculation that a private owner of infrastructure would make – investing in prevention because the cost of failure is higher – is poorly replicated in government budget processes that consider maintenance and infrastructure upgrade as competing line items rather than as insurance against the much larger costs of system failure. The political invisibility of clean water – people do not notice water infrastructure when it works – combined with the political salience of other spending priorities produces chronic underinvestment that accumulates over decades until failures become acute.
Reason has covered California’s water infrastructure challenges extensively, noting that the regulatory complexity surrounding water system improvements – environmental review, permitting, federal and state coordination requirements – adds years and significant cost to projects whose need has been identified and whose funding has been allocated. A storm drain upgrade that would improve surf zone water quality in a specific Los Angeles beach community can take a decade from identification to completion, during which surfers continue to paddle out through contamination and the government continues to post advisories that few follow and nobody enforces. The solution is not only more funding – though more funding is necessary – but a streamlined approval and construction process that can implement identified improvements at the speed the problem requires rather than at the pace that the regulatory apparatus imposes.
The water quality issue is also one where the libertarian case for market-based accountability mechanisms is strongest. Property rights approaches to pollution – making the sources of contamination legally liable for the costs their pollution imposes on downstream users – would create stronger incentives for storm drain and sewage system operators to invest in prevention than the current regulatory approach, which typically resolves contamination events through notices of violation and negotiated compliance schedules that impose minimal actual cost on the systems producing the contamination. A surfer who contracts a bacterial infection from contaminated surf zone water has limited legal recourse against the municipal systems whose infrastructure failure produced the contamination, because sovereign immunity and statutory limitations protect government infrastructure operators from the liability that private polluters would face. Extending meaningful liability for water quality failures to public infrastructure operators is both a libertarian policy prescription and a practical mechanism for accelerating the infrastructure investment that the surf community needs.
The congestion pricing and access fee issues together point toward a fundamental question about California’s social contract with its residents regarding public goods. The state’s founding promise – embodied in the Coastal Act, in the public parks system, in the free beach access tradition – was that the ocean and the land leading to it belonged to all Californians equally. The accumulation of fees, tolls, and access charges is gradually qualifying that promise: the ocean remains nominally public, but the cost of reaching it is being progressively privatized through the revenue-generating mechanisms of state and local government. The surf community should be among the most vocal defenders of the original promise, both because it is the community most directly affected by its erosion and because surfing’s cultural mythology – the free wave, the democratic break, the ocean as commons – is the mythology that the access principle is built on.
The congestion pricing debate in California will intensify as transportation agencies face the twin pressures of infrastructure funding shortfalls and emissions reduction mandates that create incentives to price car travel more aggressively. The surfer’s interest in low-cost access to coastal breaks needs to be part of that debate from the beginning, not as an afterthought when pricing schemes are already designed. Organizing the surf community as a constituency in transportation policy – connecting beach access to the broader access equity debate that urban planners are already having – is the political work that would make the surfer’s perspective heard before the pricing structure is locked in rather than after. The ocean will remain free. The road to it is where the access battle is being fought, and the surf community should be at the table where those decisions are made.
For more analysis of freedom and markets visit Surfrider Foundation. SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/
