Nurseries Get 1-Year Reprieve on Bay Runoff

A state water board agreed Friday to withhold, for at least one year, restrictions on fertilizer-laden irrigation runoff into Newport Bay from Orange County’s three largest wholesale nurseries and the Irvine Co.

Instead, the Santa Ana Regional Water Quality Control Board approved a voluntary plan for the growers to continue water conservation efforts that would also reduce runoff that has been blamed for an explosion of algae and plankton growth that critics have called “the browning of Newport Bay.”

Dischargers, meanwhile, have agreed to install equipment to accurately measure the amount of water and levels of nitrate fertilizers that each was sending down San Diego Creek, the main bay tributary draining more than 120 square miles of largely agricultural and rural land.

Officials for Hines Wholesale Nurseries, El Modeno Gardens Inc. and Bordier’s Nursery Inc. have denied that they are the main sources of an estimated 12,000 pounds of nitrates flowing daily into the Upper Newport Bay wildlife reserve and lower Newport Bay.

Nurseries Deny Link

They contend that there is not enough specific data linking them to the algae blooms, noting that rainstorms and urban runoff from neighborhood lawns generate nitrogen that also feeds the bay.

However, Dr. John F. Skinner, a Newport Beach internist who has worked on water quality problems in the bay, told board members Friday that the Orange County Environmental Management Agency had more than a decade of water-sample data. That data, he said, proves conclusively that the nurseries and the Irvine Co. fields--not urban areas--were the source of excessively high levels of nitrates.

Skinner said that the information, contained in a draft report that was not provided to board members by the staff, showed nitrate levels in San Diego Creek 227 times greater than the runoff from Big Canyon Wash, which drains a mainly residential area of Newport Beach.