Surfrider Foundation Buoyed at Winning Cleaner-Ocean Battle

“We’re absolutely stoked,” said Teri Schulz, 27, speaking of her foundation’s legal victory on Monday. “We went for clean water, and that’s what we’re going to get.”

Schulz is a surfer. She also is administrative director of the Surfrider Foundation, a 7-year-old environmental organization dedicated to protecting surf and shorelines. On Monday, the foundation announced legal concessions that it had won from two pulp mills which had been polluting waters in Northern California’s Humboldt County.

The Surfrider Foundation operates with a staff of seven. Five work at its small office at 315 3rd St. in downtown Huntington Beach, about two blocks from the pier. An environmental director works in San Diego and a staff lawyer in San Francisco.

The Surfrider Foundation started in Malibu in 1984. Poorly funded and with a small membership, it was scarcely known. Today, Schulz said, the foundation has 15,000 members “nationwide, though 80% are on the West Coast,” has an annual budget of $500,000 and “is getting attention now from the news media.” The legal victory in Humboldt County is another boost to the foundation’s growing name recognition, Schulz said.

In a 1990 interview, Robert W. Caughlan, a member of the foundation’s board of directors, said the multibillion-dollar surfing industry had given the group financial support.

“We have had good fund raising, and manufacturers have been supportive of us,” Caughlan said. “They have come on full force, and it has helped us get some notches on our gun.”

Previous victories occurred in 1985, when the foundation successfully opposed a milelong breakwater proposed by the Army Corps of Engineers off Imperial Beach in San Diego County. The foundation said the project, had it been built, would have caused severe beach erosion.

In 1989, the foundation successfully negotiated with private landowners to gain access rights for the public to Hammond’s Reef surfing beach in Santa Barbara County.

The foundation also is currently monitoring a sewage plant in San Diego, a Chevron USA rock jetty in El Segundo and plans for a hydropower plant and a big, new resort in Hawaii. All of those projects might pollute ocean water and/or destroy natural surf, according to the foundation.

“We’re not a litigious organization, either in our design or our attitude,” said foundation executive director Jake Grubb on Monday. He said the foundation tries to use persuasion and considers the courts a last resort.