Water Quality Monitoring

Monitoring the Health of California's Waterways

California knows very little about the overall quality of its waters. California only reports on the health of 6% of its coastal shoreline, 28% of its lakes and reservoirs, and 17% of its rivers and streams. Even less attention is given to the quality of the state’s groundwater basins.  There is no single place where the public can go to determine the health of their local waters, or even the overall health of California's waters.

Numerous federal, state and local water monitoring efforts occur with little coordination, severely reducing the utility of available data. Better information is needed to produce better decisionmaking, and to allow the public to make well-informed choices about using and managing its waters. Moreover, better monitoring is needed now to track water quality improvements from hundreds of new projects funded by millions in bond funds, which otherwise will essentially go unmeasured.  View a map of citizen monitoring groups near you and join their efforts.

CCKA Is Taking Action

CCKA creates policies, maps, and other tools to ensure that information about the water quality of local waterways is readily available to Californians.  CCKA drafted and sponsored legislation to address monitoring issues.  SB 1070 (Kehoe), sponsored by CCKA and signed into law in 2007, requires the state agencies who collect water quality data to coordinate their data collection and reporting activities and provide the public with online access to water-related information.  The bill also established a California Water Quality Monitoring Council to advise the state on how to develop coordinated water quality monitoring data collection and reporting systems.  In December 2010, the Council released a Comprehensive Monitoring Program Strategy for California.

As the Public Representative on the Water Quality Monitoring Council, CCKA emphasizes the need for the state to develop clear, practical tools to improve the public's understanding of water quality issues that directly impact their local communities and ecosystems. CCKA helped draft a Council report to the State Water Board on improved coordinated statewide water quality monitoring and reporting. The final Council report included recommendations to develop impaired waters maps modeled closely on CCKA’s maps.  Now, publicly-accessible data products consistent with the Council’s report are regularly released by the State Water Board. These tools provide the public with information answering key public safety questions such as: “Is it safe to swim?,” “Is it safe to eat the fish?,” and "Are our wetlands healthy?"