Northeast Sea Grant Consortium Outstanding Outreach Achievement Award Individual Award Nomination Packet October 2013

Project: Healthy Beaches Program

Nominated by: Beth Bisson Assistant Director for Outreach and Education Maine Sea Grant College Program The University of Maine 5784 York Complex Orono, Maine 04469 Tel: 207-581-1440 Email: [email protected]

Nominee: Keri Lindberg Kaczor Maine Healthy Beaches Program Coordinator University of Maine Cooperative Extension 377 Manktown Rd. Waldoboro, ME. 04572 Tel. 207-832-0343 Email: [email protected]

Background on the Maine Healthy Beaches Program Tourism is Maine’s largest industry, generating approximately $10 billion in annual economic activity (Maine State Planning Office, 2008), and annual tourist spending related to beaches is estimated to be over $500 million, supporting the employment of over 8,000 people (Levert and Douglass, 2009). Maintaining and restoring coastal swim beach water quality is critical to the continued vitality of Maine’s coastal tourism economy. The Unites States Environmental Protection Agency initiated the Beaches Environmental Assessment and Coastal Health Act of 2000 in response to the growing concern about public health risks posed by bacteria pollution at coastal bathing beaches, and created a dedicated stream of funding to support annual proposals from states for swim beach pollution monitoring programs. Here in Maine, Marine Extension Team member, Esperanza Stancioff, worked with the Maine Coastal Program and others to establish the Maine Healthy Beaches Program (MHB) in 2002, a statewide effort to monitor water quality and protect public health on Maine’s beaches. Program URL: http://www.mainehealthybeaches.org/ How Does the Program Work? Maine’s program takes a unique community-based approach to identifying and cleaning up pollution sources to keep beaches clean and safe for swimming. Because Maine has thousands of miles of coastline and limited financial and human resources available for monitoring, the Maine Healthy Beaches Program is designed to build and maintain local capacity for pollution prevention. This partnership approach has helped to identify and fix sources of bacteria polluting beaches, reducing the number of beach advisories in some areas. Who is Involved? In 2013, 28 municipalities and state parks participated in the MHB program with 55 beach management areas routinely monitored by teams of volunteers and posted with advisories according to established bacteria standards for marine recreational waters. Participants include towns, state and national parks, and private beach associations. Beach managers are typically park managers, health nurses, fire chiefs, town administrators and other people who devote time to the Maine Healthy Beaches Program on top of their already full schedules. Citizen volunteers and municipal or park staff, are trained annually in the program’s field methods. How is the Water Tested? Each year, between Memorial Day and Labor Day, participating Maine coastal beaches are monitored for the bacteria, Enterococci, which indicates fecal contamination and the possible presence of disease-causing microorganisms. Maine has adopted the US EPA safety limit of 104 Enterococci per 100 milliliters of sample water. When bacteria levels exceed this limit, there’s an increased probability of contracting illness from the water. This is currently the best available strategy for comprehensive public health monitoring of saltwater beaches. Town or park personnel, in partnership with MHB Program staff, select the monitoring sites for each beach management area based on recommended criteria from US EPA, locations where people swim, and at “high risk” areas like rivers, streams, storm drain outlets, and other freshwater inputs to the beach. Monitoring frequency varies based on local characteristics, and is increased for areas with historically poor water quality and higher risk of pollution. Monitoring frequency intensifies following an exceedance, after a sewage spill or pollution event, heavy rainfall, etc. Conversely, the monitoring frequency is reduced for areas with low risk and where monitoring results are consistently within acceptable limits. In addition to bacteria samples, volunteers and staff also record air and water temperature, salinity, tidal stage, weather conditions and beach characteristics. When is a Beach Advisory Posted? When fecal indicator bacteria results exceed the safety standard, the beach manager, in consultation with program staff, decides whether or not to post an advisory (a sign at access points to the beach and on the www.mainehealthybeaches.org website). An advisory is a recommendation to the public to avoid water contact activities. A beach advisory lasts until monitoring results meet safety standards, or when conditions at the beach no longer pose a health risk. Beaches that exceed safety limits are resampled, and an advisory will be lifted if the resample result is clean. However, due to the lag time in results (28-32 hours after the sample is collected), it may take several days for an advisory to be lifted. For this reason, and because beach conditions can change from day to day and hour to hour, beach status may not reflect current water quality conditions or health risk. Beach actions are not based on a single bacteria count alone. The surf zone is a dynamic place that varies widely from hour to hour and day to day. In addition to bacteria results, the local beach manager and MHB Program staff take other factors into account when considering an advisory. For beaches with historically good water quality and a low risk of pollution, beach managers will often wait for resample results before posting the beach.

Overview of Keri Kaczor’s Responsibilities and Program Leadership Roles Keri (Lindberg) Kaczor began working with the Maine Healthy Beaches program as an Americorps volunteer in 2003. Her skills and talents working with the program’s scientific protocols and many partners and volunteers were apparent, and she quickly transitioned through a series of positions with increasing responsibility and leadership, until she became the program coordinator in 2009. During this time, she also began and completed a Master’s Degree in Marine Policy at the University of Maine, which she received in May 2009. Since 2009, Keri has been principally responsible for: • Hiring, training, and supervising program staff and interns. • Building and maintaining partnerships with participating municipalities, state parks, and nonprofit organizations. • Organizing and providing approximately 33 formal annual trainings (field, laboratory, database and observational follow up) for over 180 volunteer monitors associated with the 55 beach management areas participating in the program. • Planning and facilitating 76 planning and problem solving meetings with local, state and federal partners. • Writing and submitting annual reports on the program to the U.S. EPA. • Preparing technical reports on program outcomes and impacts, as well as volunteer training and outreach materials. • Interacting with news media about beach closures and persistent pollution problems. • Communicating with and maintaining program relationships among state and federal agency partners who administer program funds and set related coastal resource management and policy. • Working with scientists to conduct watershed surveys to identify and analyze sources of bacterial pollution in areas with persistent beach water quality problems. • Preparing and giving presentations about the program for a range of audiences including the public, scientists, and coastal managers and policy makers. Numerous program partners and participants have shared their profound respect and appreciation for Keri’s dedication to the program, her easy, confident, and supportive demeanor with volunteers, and her skill and experience with the research underpinning the program’s protocols and watershed surveys. The attached letters of support are a testament to these qualities. Program Outputs and Impacts: 2011-2013 One of the things Keri identified as a major challenge for municipalities participating in the MHB program is a lack of clear guidance and support for conducting risk assessments and completing sanitary surveys to identify and remediate challenging sources of bacterial pollution, such as leaking septic systems and sewer lines. She focused on this challenge during her graduate studies at the University of Maine, and produced a 72-page publication entitled Municipal Guide to Clean Water: Conducting Sanitary Surveys to Improve Coastal Water Quality (http://www.seagrant.umaine.edu/extension/municipal- guide-to-clean-water). Maine Sea Grant published the Guide in 2010, and Keri’s subsequent work to introduce the guide to Maine’s coastal municipalities and support them as they tackle these stubborn water quality problems has had a remarkable impact. It should be stated here that this effort was Keri’s own academic and professional initiative, and she has worked above and beyond the formal scope of her position to achieve the outcomes described below. For example, Keri’s work with the municipalities of Camden, Rockport, Ogunquit, and Kittery yielded water quality improvements in each of these communities in 2012, and they have continued with these advances in 2013. In Camden, a Boater’s Education Campaign and pollution remediation efforts helped remove Rock Brook from the state’s list of impaired waters, and increase use of the town’s free boat pump-out service. Rockport remediated malfunctioning subsurface wastewater disposal systems, and installed a boat pump-out station in the harbor. Ogunquit passed an ordinance banning the use of pesticides on town property, spent more than $50,000 on sewer infrastructure improvements and stormwater mapping, and acquired 56 acres of green space and wetlands to help protect the Watershed and Ogunquit Beach. Kittery hired a Shoreland and Environmental Resource Officer, who identified and began remediation of pollution sources. Another example of Keri’s initiative and subsequent accomplishments includes an ongoing effort to balance the need for pollution-related beach closures in some areas with the importance of communicating with municipalities, citizens, and visitors to the state, about the overall high quality of Maine’s swim beach water quality, and counteract periodic waves of negative public perception that a series of summertime beach closures can create. In 2011, Keri used Maine Healthy Beaches program data from 2005 to 2010 to produce a report on the status and trends in Maine swim beach water quality. The report clearly explains how and why the data are gathered and reported, and shares a scientific and balanced perspective on the importance of addressing areas of poor beach water quality to protect public and ecological health, while emphasizing the overall quality and safety of swim beaches in Maine, and addressing public concern about the negative impacts of beach closures on the state’s tourism industry. Here is a citation for the report, with a link to a downloadable version: Maine Healthy Beaches Program. 2011. Maine Healthy Beaches: A unique partnership to keep Maine beaches clean, status and trends 2005-2010. Orono, ME: Maine Sea Grant College Program. URL: http://www.seagrant.umaine.edu/extension/maine-healthy- beaches-program/status-and-trends

Other notable MHB program accomplishments and impacts achieved between 2011 and 2013 include: • Providing source tracking studies and data necessary to make infrastructure improvements necessary to reopen clam flats in Ogunquit. The Ogunquit River and neighboring beach have a history of water quality impairment due to unsafe levels of bacteria that threaten public health, a tourism-based economy, and valuable shellfish growing areas. The EPA-funded and Sea Grant/Cooperative Extension-coordinated Maine Healthy Beaches Program supported multi-year enhanced monitoring and source-tracking efforts in the Ogunquit River and Beach watersheds, including collection and analysis of multiple water quality parameters, and providing equipment and technical expertise. Studies of circulation and transport pathways determined the fate of contaminants and bacteria’s relationship to environmental conditions such as rainfall and tide stage. The local Code Enforcement Officer and agency partners surveyed approximately 90 properties in the watershed, and the town improved and expanded sewer and stormwater infrastructure. As a result, sections of the town’s shellfish growing areas were “seasonal conditionally approved” for clamming, creating $13,000 in revenue from licensing, plus food and source of income to clammers. Ogunquit amended their zoning ordinance to include additional water bodies, created a setback requirement along each new stream and additional resource protection areas within the town. Residential septic systems within the Shoreland Zone now must be pumped out every three years and systems outside of this area every five years. These measures will ensure clean water and open clam flats in the future. • Numerous other policy, legislation, and resource management changes enabled or influenced by MHB program data and studies: o ME Legislature passed LD 256, Act To Amend the Law Regarding Repairing a Structure in a Coastal Sand Dune System. o ME Legislature passed LD 1601, Act to Create the Lincolnville Sewer District. o York passed a Septic System Ordinance for the . o Grand Beach (Scarborough/OOB) passed a dune development policy. o Old Orchard Beach ME established a bi-annual tax credit for private property septic system maintenance. o Maine DEP made changes to the Clean Water Act 303(d) List of Impaired Waters o Kennebunkport passed a new water quality ordinance for Goose Rocks Beach

Interactions With and Contributions to the Research Community and Public Outreach Audiences Keri routinely works with researchers both within Maine and with scientific communities in water quality and coastal resource management fields in other states to conduct watershed bacterial pollution surveys, learn and share new water quality field methods and sources of data, and provide updates and reports on Maine Healthy Beaches Program methods and impacts. EPA scientists working with Keri and staff have assisted MHB with development of low tech pollution source identification tools applied to troublesome pollution issues in community watersheds (Tim Bridges and Jack Parr, Region 1 EPA). Keri also worked with: 1) a research scientist from UMaine Fort Kent, Kimberly Borges, Professor of Environmental Studies, on microbial source tracking to identify sources of fecal contamination in coastal York County; 2) Steve Jones, a UNH Microbiologist, to identify sources of pollution in the Cape Neddick Study, and to share library-based DNA Ribo-type source tracking methods; and 3) with John Bucci, a research scientist with the University of New Hampshire Department of Natural Resources and the Environment, to develop a molecular technique using real-time (q)PCR to detect mammalian host mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) in environmental surface water samples.

She also regularly provides presentations on her work to public outreach audiences, water quality organizations, and at water quality-related workshops and events throughout Maine. The list below includes examples of presentations and workshop or conference sessions that Keri gave and/or organized for local, state, and national audiences between 2011-2013. Notes: 1. Keri recently married and subsequently changed her last name from Lindberg to Kaczor. 2. Keri is currently on maternity leave, so it was not possible to obtain a full list of presentations and workshops from 2013, so please consider the panel session at the 2013 Maine Beaches Conference a highlight, rather than the sole example from this past year. • Lindberg, K. Municipal Guide to Clean Water: conducting sanitary surveys to improve coastal water quality. US EPA National Beaches Conference, 16 March 2011, Miami, FL. • Lindberg, K. Municipal Guide to Clean Water: conducting sanitary surveys to improve coastal water quality. Knox-Lincoln Soil and Water Conservation Workshop, 6 April 2011, Waldoboro, ME. • Lindberg, K. Maine Healthy Beaches Program: working together to improve coastal water quality. University of Maine Cooperative Extension, 13 June 2011, Orono, ME. • Lindberg, K. Maine Healthy Beaches Program basics and what you can do to protect water quality. Maine State Lifeguard Academy, 15 June 2011, Phippsburg, ME. • Lindberg, K., and M. Evers. Restoration of impaired rivers and streams. Goosefare Brook Water Quality Meeting, 6 December 2011, Old Orchard Beach, ME. • Lindberg, K. Strategies to identify, eliminate and prevent sources of bacterial pollution impacting coastal water quality. New England Association of Environmental Biologists Conference, 23 March 2012, Falmouth, MA. • Lindberg, K. What you can do to keep our coastal beaches healthy. Lincolnville Central School, 6 April 2012, Lincolnville, ME. • Lindberg, K. Strategies to identify, eliminate and prevent sources of bacterial pollution. Hancock County Regional Planning Commission Symposium, 26 April 2012, Ellsworth, ME. • Lindberg, K. What you can do to keep our coastal beaches healthy. Warren School Nature Club, 30 April 2012, Waldoboro, ME. • Lindberg, K. What you can do to keep our coastal beaches healthy. Maine State Park Lifeguard Academy, 13 June 2012, Phippsburg, ME. • Kaczor, K. Strategies to identify, eliminate and prevent sources of bacterial pollution impacting coastal beach water quality. Center for Watershed Protection Watershed and Stormwater Conference, 10 October 2012, Baltimore, MD. • Kaczor, K. Working together to improve water quality on and in the Spurwink River. Spurwink River Water Quality Meeting, 20 November 2012, Scarborough, ME. • Kaczor, K., F. Dillon, J. Bucci, and E. DiFranco. The Source Tracking Toolbox. Panel Session at the 2013 Maine Beaches Conference, 12 July 2013, South Portland, ME. This panel was organized by Keri. Please see below for a session summary and a link for downloadable versions of the four PPT panel presentations: Session Summary: Tourism is an integral component of the Maine economy and spending related to beaches is estimated to be over $500 million annually. Elevated fecal bacteria levels impair coastal waters and may post a human health risk. Rivers, streams and storm drains transport pollutants from upland areas to the shoreline. Identification and remediation of harmful bacteria sources often requires enhanced monitoring and in- depth studies beyond the immediate shoreline area. The “Pollution Source Tracking Toolbox” includes successful and innovative tools to identify pollution sources impacting valued coastal beaches, from Maine Healthy Beaches strategies to address sources of bacterial pollution, to the City of South Portland bacteria and optical brightener study of the storm drainage network, to genetic and molecular techniques allowing differentiation of pollution sources at the species level, to sewage-sniffing dogs. Downloadable panel presentations (under link for “pollution source tracking” session): http://www.seagrant.umaine.edu/maine-beaches-conference/program

Regional and National Influences: MHB Program is a Model for Other States The Maine Healthy Beaches Program serves as a model for other coastal states’ bacterial pollution monitoring programs, because of both the volunteer training component, and the fact that it is a non-regulatory program. The MHB model has been highly successful because of the buy-in from the local communities, and the fact that it brings together multiple state agencies to work in concert with local communities to solve pollution problems. In many parts of the state, this kind of collaboration had never happened prior to this program. This unique situation and development of MHB has also spurred the linkage to and action from local citizens. Other states (MI, MA, WA CA, OR and others) have adopted the MHB model to improve their own public outreach, and to use MHB training materials and resources to facilitate better cooperation at the local level. Examples of this include other states’ use of: 1) the MHB organization structure for state partners, 2) media and outreach resources (posters, fact sheets, website) and, as detailed under Program Outputs in this application, 3) the Municipal Guide to Clean Water. The national Center for Watershed Protection has used this comprehensive guide to develop training modules for webinars as an international resource.

Biographical Information for Keri Kaczor Keri joined the Maine Sea Grant/UMaine Cooperative Extension Marine Extension Team (MET) as an AmeriCorps/Maine Conservation Corp volunteer in 2003. She became the statewide coordinator of the Maine Healthy Beaches Program in 2009. The program is supported by the U.S. EPA, and engages municipalities, state agencies, and volunteers in a unique partnership to monitor water quality and identify pollution sources in order to protect human health on Maine’s coastal beaches. Keri’s work is primarily focused on ecosystem health-related projects, and she provides training and support to various water quality monitoring groups statewide. Keri received a B.S. in Zoology and Biological Aspects of Conservation from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2002, and an M.S. in Marine Policy/Marine Ecology from the University of Maine in 2009.