Surfriders Get Political Over Coastal Pollution : Environment: Local chapter’s membership swells to 300. It seems to have lost a battle over a jetty but is making other gains.

As the waves mounted at Surfers’ Point in Ventura last week, a group of 15 surfers gathered at a nearby office building to talk about more weighty matters than the latest big swell.

Though some were dressed in garb more befitting the beach--sandals, exotic T-shirts and the like--the congregation quickly settled into a serious discussion about protecting the ocean and, of course, prime surfing spots from pollution and development.

Once a month, members of the nonprofit Surfrider Foundation gather at Patagonia’s offices to plot strategies for the local chapter to preserve and enhance the Ventura County coastline.

Since the chapter opened four years ago with a few dozen members, it has grown steadily in size and sophistication. Its membership has swelled to more than 300, chapter leaders say, and the group is trying to heighten its profile by issuing reports on ocean pollution at local beaches, among other things.

Some officials have been impressed by the group’s progress.

“They are a very strong organization and frequently come up with some very good ideas,” said Port Hueneme Councilman Dorill B. Wright, a longtime member of the California Coastal Commission. “They are well known to the Coastal Commission and to the local governments where there is good surf.”

Still, Surfrider’s local formation hasn’t been without problems and setbacks. Like a lot of other fledgling environmental groups, its leadership has gone through shake-ups and appears to have lost all its biggest fights to date.

Local group leaders aren’t daunted, though, and say it is only realistic that they won’t win every challenge on the beach.

“It’s like anything: It’s give-and-take,” said Bruce McDonald, Ventura County president for the group. “We have to stand up for what we want and know (when) to walk away from something.”

Walking away is the tact Surfrider has taken in its most pronounced local skirmish. The group opposed some of the proposed jetty expansions aimed at making the entrance of Ventura Harbor safer for boaters.

Claiming the plan to erect a 650-foot groin south of the south jetty would ruin the shoreline at the popular Santa Clara “river mouth” surfing spot, Surfrider even sent a national representative to testify before a congressional subcommittee considering the proposal.

It apparently didn’t help, as the funding now seems imminent, local leaders say. Congress has approved funding for a portion of the project, and leaders of the local chapter have all but conceded defeat.

“It appears we are going to lose that battle,” McDonald said.

McDonald is Surfrider’s most recent local president. Its original president, Rex Thomas of Ventura, left the group out of frustration.

Thomas said he has been impressed that Surfrider has continued to have strong, well-organized leadership in Ventura County now. But he said he dropped out of the organization about two years ago because the group lacked the money and volunteers to make the type of instant impact he would like.

“I realized that a lot of these things take time, and I’m not a man of patience,” said Thomas, 32, a former professional body boarder. “Because I’m not very patient, I decided to pull out of the organization and focus on my own life.”

Thomas said he grew disillusioned after Ventura city leaders reneged on a 1985 promise not to interfere if ocean erosion were to cut into the popular bike path along Surfers’ Point at Seaside Park next to their county fairgrounds.

Thomas said he arranged for experts to explain that building a rock revetment would offer temporary relief at best, and probably speed up erosion farther down the beach, despoiling a famous surfing spot.

“Right after they dropped those rocks at my favorite surf spot, I said, ‘Hey that’s it,’ ” Thomas said. “We all tried. We didn’t have the time and manpower--all the stuff that an organization needs to be productive.”

Nationally, Surfrider has had considerable success. In 1985, the group successfully blocked a mile-long breakwater proposed off Imperial Beach in San Diego. Next, it joined several other environmental groups to halt a plan to build a breakwater and marina at Bolsa Chica, one of the last stretches of virgin beach and wetlands in Orange County.

In 1989, it successfully negotiated with private landowners to provide public access to the historic Hammond’s Reef surfing beach in Santa Barbara. It was also instrumental in getting the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to levy a record $5.8-million fine against two pulp mills for illegally discharging toxic waste into the ocean in Northern California.

The Ventura County chapter has made progress on some local fronts.

Recently, the group won permission to stencil Ventura’s 1,400 storm drains with the slogan, “Don’t dump, drains to ocean,” to alert polluters of the destination of their refuse.

It also has joined other environmental groups in fencing off an area of Ormond Beach near Oxnard to protect nesting grounds of an endangered sea bird known as the least tern. And it has organized countywide monthly beach cleanups.

Still, Surfrider’s most ambitious undertaking has been the formation of its Blue Water Task Force, a committee that weekly descends on area beaches and samples the water for coliform bacteria.

The early testing has revealed that much of the pollution at the beaches occurred after rainstorms, task force members say.

“The river mouths are the hot spots,” said Don Funk, a schoolteacher from Ojai and a member of the task force.

Richard Sweet, who heads the blue-water committee, said the most polluted ocean waters in the county are near the mouths of the Ventura and Santa Clara rivers and the Oxnard shore area. Such pollution most commonly leads to ear, nose and throat infections, he said.

The task force plans to release regular beach pollution reports to the public through local media, Sweet said.

“Education is a big aspect of it,” said Sweet, an environmental health specialist and county waste-water treatment operator. “We feel we can change people’s bad habits by making them aware of what bad habits can do to the ocean.”

The water-quality testing also revealed that most bacteria in the ocean is what’s known as “non-point source pollution,” which means it isn’t traceable to a single factor.

Don Davis, a laboratory supervisor at the Ventura Wastewater Treatment Plant, said city testing has also confirmed high levels of bacterial runoff at beaches after storms. But he said the problem is widespread along the coast and lasts only a short while after a storm.

Part of the problem, according to Surfrider members, is people who dump motor oil and other contaminants in storm drains. The pollutants are then washed into the ocean, untreated.

Surfrider hopes to call public attention to the link between dumping in the storm drains and ocean pollution through its stenciling program.

Since Memorial Day weekend, group volunteers and others have been stenciling the design on curbs above catch basins along Ventura Avenue. The design has a white background with a dolphin, a fish and two swimmers painted green.

“Some people have said, ‘Hey, it looks good,’ ” said John Betonte, maintenance services manager for Ventura.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has required cities with more than 100,000 residents to put warnings of the danger of dumping on all storm drains. Given its growing population, Ventura will have had to meet the requirement in the near future, Betonte said.

“Surfrider volunteered to paint the logos on the catch basins and I said, ‘Great. Let’s do it,’ ” he said. “It would have cost me a lot of money to do it” with city staff.

Surfrider chapters across the nation are involved in similar stenciling projects, McDonald said. There are 15 chapters in all.

So far, about 120 of Ventura’s 1,400 storm drains have received the stencil warning, McDonald said. It could take two years or more to finish the project.

“The intent is to get all 1,400 drains done, and then we’ll try to move to the county,” he said.

Delia Gorey, who helped launch the Blue Water Task Force, said she and husband Larry Manson no longer surf immediately after a storm because pollutants from the river and storm drains wash into the ocean. They wait at least 72 hours before entering the water, she said.

“It’s not just us,” she added, “but the fish are eating the garbage, and we eat fish.”

Gorey said she hopes polluters heed the warnings of the stenciled messages. When she and her husband surfed right after storms, she recalled, they would come down with throat and nose infections.

“We are both very, very healthy people. We don’t get sick in general,” she said. “But we have both come down with polluted-water illnesses.”

McDonald, too, hopes polluters pay attention to the message on the stenciled signs.

He also hopes Surfrider’s strategy of working within the system to protect the shoreline is successful, even if such progress takes time.

“We want to be here to fight the battle of tomorrow,” the Surfrider president said. “It doesn’t do any good if we all wind up in jail or dead.

“We don’t want to be martyrs.”

Times correspondent Kay Saillant contributed to this story.