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Conclusions and Recommendations
CONCLUSIONS
Current Monitoring Effort
1. Ale total amount of money and effort expended by public utilities,
private industry, and government agencies in monitoring of water quality,
natural resources, and public health in the Southern California Bight is ex-
traordinarily large. A conservative estimate is that current annual expenses
for monitoring far exceed $17 million (see Chapter 4~.
2. Most water quality monitoring programs are organized around the
outfalls of several large coastal municipal wastewater treatment plants
and electric power generating stations and are elaborately detailed in their
requirements.
3. The California Cooperative Oceanic Fisheries Investigation (Cal-
COFI) for natural marine resources in the California Current system and
Southern California Bight has been unparalleled among marine resource
monitoring programs in terms of its commitment to a long-term time-series
assessment. However, station coverage has been reduced by budget cuts.
4. Significant sources of chemical and microbial contaminants con-
tained in riverine and stormwater discharges to the bight have not been
adequately monitored as part of the marine monitoring system in the bight.
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Lack of Program Integration
5. There are no formal institutional mechanisms for integrating the
findings from the different ongoing monitoring programs. This means that
there is no mechanism for integrating the results from monitoring of various
point sources with each other or with the findings of the resource or public
health monitoring programs.
6. There is no system for interrelating the findings of various moni-
toring programs to present a coherent picture of the whole. This precludes
evaluating the human impacts of bightwide human inputs in the context
of natural variability, and thus it is difficult to evaluate whether corrective
actions are effective.
7. There currently is no effective system for reporting findings of
monitoring programs to the public, the scientific community, or policy
makers.
8. The monitoring programs in specific permits have been designed
to address small-scale discrete questions with little attention paid to the
overall question of the status of natural resources and water quality of the
Southern California Bight as a whole.
9. In the past, there have been recommendations for bightwide water
quality, public health, and natural resource monitoring programs. These
recommendations have not been implemented.
RECOMMENDATIONS
A Regional Approach
10. The questions of bightwide inputs and their impacts are growing
in importance. Many of them could be addressed in a regional monitoring
program. A regional program should be established that:
· addresses specific questions about the current environmental con-
dition of the bight and the resources therein, including those associated
with public health impacts, spatial and temporal trends in natural resources,
nonpoint source and riverine contributions, nearshore habitat changes, and
cumulative or areawide impacts of large and small point and nonpoint
source inputs;
· incorporates standardized sampling, analysis, and data management
methods;
· establishes a comprehensive data base management system for all
monitoring and resource data in the bight, which could provide access to the
historic and current data needed to perform comprehensive and bightwide
analyses;
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· can be facilitated through the coordination of local, state, and
federal entities, which integrate their regulatory, data, and management
needs and responsibilities to optimize the utilization of available resources;
· can be achieved largely through coordination, integration, and
modification of existing efforts, rather than through the addition of another
layer of monitoring in the bight;
· can be developed to involve the public and the scientific community
as participants in the program;
· includes built-in mechanisms to ensure that its conclusions are
effectively communicated to the public, the scientific community, and reg-
ulatory agencies; and
· includes mechanisms to require periodic review and to allow easy
alteration or redirection of monitoring efforts when they are justified, based
on the results of the monitoring or new information from other sources.
The effort to develop a regional program will need to address the needs of
the agencies and parties involved in monitoring; synthesis of existing data
and information in order to construct meaningful questions and null hy-
potheses; drafting of an organizational framework; drafting of a monitoring
program; and allocating the financial resources required to carry out the
program. If properly implemented, the benefits and the costs of a regional
monitoring program can be shared by all sectors of society. However, it
should also be noted that a regional approach ultimately has to consider
the effects of competing uses on land, water, and air quality, and tradeoffs
between short- and long-term costs and benefits.
Representative terms from entire chapter:
water quality
