Orange County Coastkeeper

Coastkeeper's mission: All people have the inalienable right to clean water. Coastkeeper protects and restores water resources that are swimmable, drinkable, fishable, and sustainable.

Coastkeeper's goal is to significantly improve water quality in our waterways, harbors, and coastal waters. Also, Coastkeeper is in the process of restoring degraded marine habitats to have once again healthy, thriving marine habitats. In our early history, Coastkeeper primarily focused on polluted stormwater and urban runoff, including discharges from industrial facilities. Later, our focus broadened to include drinking water sources such as water capture, reuse, and recycling.

Coastkeeper has six pillars of our program: Education, Advocacy, Restoration, Research, Enforcement, and Sustainability.

Education: Coastkeeper each year sponsors a STEM watershed curriculum in over 30 middle and high schools. We host field trips for students to show them water-related infrastructure and state-of-the-art treatment plants. Also, we have programs that focus on elementary school children as well. Through our various programs, Coastkeeper educates nearly 5,000 students each year.

Advocacy: Coastkeeper collaborates with cities, business, special districts, and
regulatory agencies. We have earned a reputation as being reasonable and productive to work with. Over the years, we have achieved much success in working as a stakeholder in developing solutions to our partners' challenges. With our legal staff, Coastkeeper, as a stakeholder, is very involved with developing the discharge permit language and requirements of our Regional Water Quality Control Boards that cities and industrial facilities must comply with.

Restoration: Coastkeeper develops and implements marine restoration programs. We grew giant kelp in laboratories and out-planted kelp on reefs along the Orange County coastline for ten years. Today there are large canopies of kelp where there were none for the past 35 years.
Currently, Coastkeeper is six years into planting eelgrass in our estuaries, and adjacent to eelgrass, we are aqua-culturing Olympia Oysters.

Research: Over the past 20 years, Coastkeeper has taken thousands of water and sediment samples to generate data that regulatory agencies use to develop regulations and policies.
We have implemented numerous projects designed to achieve results and prove a condition.

Enforcement: Coastkeeper very actively enforces federal and state clean water laws. To date, Coastkeeper has filed approximately one hundred cases in federal court with a 100% success record in cleaning up the discharge of polluted urban pollution in each case. Coastkeeper has not lost a case. We are committed to cleaning up the watershed one polluting site at a time, if necessary.

Sustainability: Coastkeeper is committed to making southern California more water sustainable. We have identified four actions that will result in a sustainable southern California. We are working to implement those action items. One of the four actions is changing residents' behavior by causing a transition from traditional turf landscapes to where drought-tolerant landscapes are commonplace. Currently, Californians are using 60% of the developed potable water to irrigate landscapes. This represents the low-hanging fruit to change this practice. With our 2.5-acre drought-tolerant demonstration garden, Coastkeeper is reaching thousands of property owners and actually teaching them how to transition their landscape.

Coastkeeper was founded in 1998, and we opened our office doors on March 1, 1999. We were the 27th licensed N.G.O. to become a Waterkeeper program licensed by the Waterkeeper Alliance. Today there are over 300 programs spread in 29 countries. In 2007, Coastkeeper separately licensed with the Waterkeeper Alliance, a new program that covered San Bernardino and Riverside Counties, called the Inland Empire Waterkeeper (IEWK). The IEWK is a program of Orange County Coastkeeper. Coastkeeper's region is vast, covering over 3,000 square miles of a densely populated and developed urban area, with over 5 million people, and the Mojave Desert going east to the Colorado River.

With Coastkeeper's office in Costa Mesa and the IEWK office in Riverside, We employ fourteen full-time and nine part-time dedicated professionals. With the six program pillars described above, each pillar is a department and is led by a professional and staff. We have management staff and employ an outside media company for comprehensive media relations and messaging coverage. Our staff is well seasoned and has proven leadership.

After 20 years of operation, Coastkeeper is welcomed and expected to be at the table representing the environment and, particularly, water quality and healthy marine habitats. We have achieved numerous successes in all of our programs.

Coastkeeper has the benefit of having a very committed, engaged, and supportive Board of Directors. Besides the board providing governance to the organization, they are very engaged in our programs and very supportive financially.

Coastkeeper has achieved success in all of our programs. All of our programs have grown in staffing, budget and people reached and goals accomplished. In the past decade, we have won several large campaigns. Our legal department is held in high regard by State agencies for our work on enforcement cases and permitting. In the region, Coastkeeper is relied on to be the experts on water issues.

Our goal going forward is to continue to grow our programs and increase our capacity and effectiveness to do more representing the environment in new arenas.