Notoriously Nasty Poche Beach Still Crawling toward Cleanliness

OC Parks officials updated City Council on the bureaucratic tangle city staffers are caught in as they continue efforts to clean up the .

Who makes up this bureaucratic quagmire? OC Beaches, Harbors and Parks; Orange County Watersheds; San Diego Regional Water Quality Control; the California Coastal Commission; the Army Corps of Engineers; and laws governing the treatment of and the endangered snowy plover. They all have a hand in what is relatively a simple physical process—cleaning up Poche Beach.

It's a snapshot of the bureaucratic mess that leave so many complaining about California governance.

“There are things that are wrong with this country, and this is one of them” said Councilman Jim Evert. “This is absolutely absurd.”

The cleanup efforts, officials say, consist of periodically digging a channel in the sand to let a drainage pond run into the ocean and .

“This whole thing is so simple and so common sensical,” said Paige Foreman,

The county-incorporated beach along Pacific Coast Highway south of Dana Point, in the Capo Beach area, has a storm water purification system, but its effectiveness was hamstrung by the Coastal Commission when it was first built in 2009.

The system can get 95 percent of the bacteria out of the runoff that goes into the ocean. The Coastal Commission, however, approved the permit for the purifier on the condition that the purified water be discharged into a beach pond, rather than in the surf zone.

In the pond, the germs just grow back, said George Edwards, a senior water quality engineer for Orange County Watersheds.

Tom Bonigut, city engineer, said there will be a test pipe installed in the next two weeks that would likely solve some of the problem. The Coastal Commission is making engineers test the pipe system first to make sure it works, even though system designers created the purifier plans with a pipe running out into the ocean in the first place.

Then officials, armed with test results on bacteria levels, can go back to the various boards and get permits to install a permanent pipe.

Meanwhile, said Susan Brodeur, a senior coastal engineer for OC Beaches, Harbors and Parks, her agency is still working to get permits to allow bulldozers at the beach periodically to clear a drainage path.