Coast Fouled Anew, Seal Beach Wants Action From State

As Seal Beach grappled with its fourth beach closure in six months, city officials on Saturday said they are considering a variety of measures to reduce pollution, including placing filters over storm drains and treating urban runoff.

More taxpayer support and decisive action from Sacramento will be needed to tackle a problem that has plagued the city and other California beach towns, City Council members said.

“This is an issue of statewide importance,” said Councilman Shawn Boyd. “The governor needs to get involved, and we need much more than passing legislation that does nothing but say, ‘Hey, our beaches are dirty.’ We need to fix things before these problems even arise.”

City Council members fear that the sporadic beach closures will hurt tourism and cut into much-needed sales tax revenue.

A 50,000-gallon raw-sewage spill forced closure of a half-mile of Seal Beach shoreline Friday. It is the 25th such closure in Orange County this year--three more than in all of 1999.

“This hurts our businesses and our retail tax base, something we count on,” said Councilman William Doane. “We rely on our beaches for a successful summer.”

With volleyball tournaments coming up, contaminated surf threatens to be a real bane for beachgoers, Doane said.

On Saturday, the clearest sign that Seal Beach was feeling the pain of the latest closure was the abundance of parking on Main Street. And many of the typically bustling stores were empty, or nearly so.

By 4 p.m., Abe Guirges, owner of Seal Beach Liquors, usually has a line of customers at the cash register and is hurrying to restock the refrigerator to keep up with sunbathers’ demand for refreshments.

“Everything is still there,” Guirges said, pointing to shelves of cold water and soda. “We should be out of them by now.”

Business at the store was down about 45% on Saturday, he said, and if the problem isn’t fixed soon, sales will plummet even further.

“I really wish the city and the county would do something to solve this problem,” he said. “Ultimately, it will affect all of us--businesses, the city and the county as well.”

Across the street at Yvette’s Bikinis, business was still reasonably brisk. The reason? It is one of the few stores in the county that sells bikini tops and bottoms in different sizes.

“I’ve been here for 29 years and I’m very highly specialized,” said owner Yvette Perdue.

Councilman Paul Yost, a board member in the Joint Rivers and Mountains Conservancy, said statewide legislation is needed, noting that many of the city’s beach closures result from sewage spills that originate outside of Seal Beach.

The most recent spill was caused by a blocked sewage line in La Habra. The sewage traveled down the San Gabriel River to Seal Beach.

Local taxpayers will likely have to foot the bill to solve the problem, Yost said. One solution would be to approve a local bond measure to “build up” the city’s sanitation system to treat more urban runoff, reducing the amount of untreated water that travels to the ocean, Yost said.

“It would require an enormous amount of funding,” Yost said.

Treating runoff with filters before it travels down storm drains and into the ocean is another option being discussed by the Seal Beach City Council.

“The challenge is to convince people that there’s enough of a problem to get them to pay for it,” said Yost.

The city recently passed a sewer rate hike to improve its sewage system. But such hikes are “about as popular as the plague,” Yost said.

Diversion of storm drain water from Anaheim Bay, one of the region’s major destinations for urban runoff, could start “really soon,” the councilman said.

On Saturday, a few people braved the water south of the pier, where swimming was not advised but still permitted. North of the pier, where the water was most polluted by sewage, one or two beachgoers strolled along the water’s edge, but no swimmers, surfers, or bodyboarders were to be seen.

“I really think in the next 10 years, the big issues are going to be affordable housing, and urban runoff and water quality,” Boyd said.