Cowell Beach Off 'Beach Bummer' List For First Time In A Decade

SANTA CRUZ, CA — For the first time in a decade, Cowell Beach does not appear in the Top 10 on Heal The Beach’s “Beach Bummer” list, which documents California’s worst offenders of ocean bacterial pollution.

The not-for-profit environmental group’s annual list was released on Wednesday and while six beaches located in Northern California – and more specifically, San Mateo County - were among the state's Top 10 most polluted beaches, Cowell Beach – which is located west of Municipal Wharf – showed improvement in terms of the levels of pollution found.

Each year, Heal The Beach scientists assign letter grades (from A-F) to beaches along California’s coastline. The grades are determined by the levels of bacterial pollution found in the ocean at each beach.

In its report issued Wednesday, Heal The Beach indicated that Cowell Beach has traditionally experienced significant drops in grades over time. But while the beach had been listed among the state's worst for the past 10 years, local efforts in recent years have led to improvements.

The improvement in water quality is derived, city officials said Wednesday, from combined efforts between city staff and Cowell’s Working Group. The group found that birds roosting on or near the wharf was a major source of water quality issues at the beach.

“This is the good news all of us here in Santa Cruz have been waiting for,” Mayor Justin Cummings said in a news release Wednesday, calling the collaborative efforts between the city and Cowell’s Working Group a major breakthrough.

The report stated that Cowell Beach West and Capitola Beach are routinely listed among the group’s Beach Bummers. However, after a local not-for-profit group, Save The Waves, partnered with county officials along other stakeholders to improve the water quality at both beaches, officials have witnessed change beginning to happen.

A major reason is the efforts that city employees and members of Cowell’s Working Group have made oversee the installation of bird screening designed to reduce pigeons and gulls roosting and defecating under the wharf. This, in combination with routine city cleaning and management practices at the Neary Lagoon outlet and Cowell Beach vault, plus improved Main Beach cleaning and management practices, has radically reduced bacteria count, city officials said in the news release.

Cowell’s Working Group was launched in 2014 based on the initative of the Santa Cruz City Council. The group includes representatives from the City, Santa Cruz County, Save The Waves Coalition, Sierra Club and Surfrider Foundation with the mission to study and develop recommendations to improve the water quality at Cowell Beach.

The work, which began 2016, has paid off since, local officials said Wednesday.

“The first steps were taken to ward off birds roosting in the area,” Nik Strong-Cvetich, Save the Waves executive director and facilitator of Cowell’s Working Group said in the news release. “The very next year, the number of water quality samples exceeding state standards dropped by over 50 percent indicating that we were on the right track to improve our beloved and famous surfing beach.”