Lake County”s quagga mussel and boat inspection program has drawn wide attention, but despite the tremendous amount of work done by many individuals the plan isn”t yet complete.
In fact, it”s still in its infancy. Presently there is no viable system to re-inspect boats that have left the county and returned. There is also no decontamination system in place for boats suspected of being infected with the mussel.
Greg Giusti chairs the Lake County Fish and Wildlife Advisory Committee and is a scientist with the University of California. He has an idea that, in my opinion, would do away with a lot of the paperwork while also being extremely effective.
According to Giusti, the way the plan would work is for the state to identify bodies of water now infested with the mussel. These would include Lake Mead (located near Las Vegas), Lake Havasu, the Colorado River and various lakes in San Diego County. Boats registered within a certain distance of these infected waters would be issued a special sticker (for discussion sake, let”s say a red sticker).
In addition, if a boat is launched in an infected body of water it also would be issued a red sticker. Any out-of-state boat that passed through border check points and came from an infected area would also be issued a red sticker. If a body of water became infected it could be added to the list.
The Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) registers all the boats in California. The DMV has the zip codes of the owners of these boats in their computer data base. All it would take would be for the DMV to issue that special red sticker when boaters pay their annual boating fees.
Presently all the known infected bodies of water have inspecti on stations. There are also inspection stations at the state”s borders, where all boaters are required to stop. If a boat is taken from an infected body of water the local inspection station would issue the owner a red sticker. The same would apply at the border stations.
For example, say a person towing a boat from one of the Midwestern states is stopped at a border station. That boater would be issued a red sticker.
Giusti says a program of this type would eliminate the need for the counties to issue their own stickers such as is now being done in Lake County. There could be signs posted at the entrances to the county stating that any boat with a red sticker would have to be inspected before it could be launched in Clear Lake.
“Why should a person who has never had their boat out of the county be required to pay $10 for a sticker?” Giusti said. “The same would apply to boaters from Mendocino, Sonoma and other nearby counties.”
According to Giusti, the financial burden placed on small counties such as Lake County to implement their own program is just too great.
For example, to set up mandatory check stations on the highways leading into Lake County would cost more than $1 million per station each year. With a minimum of four stations to cover all entrances to the county, that comes to more than $4 million. Lake County (and most of the other small counties) do not have that kind of money. The cost to the state would be minimal.
Since the DMV already has the addresses of the boat owners in their data base, all they would have to do is issue a special sticker that costs less than 50 cents each. The counties could still do the monitoring of the sticker compliance in their own county. For example, the boat patrol could easily be on the alert for any boats with a red sticker.
I agree with Giusti. The quagga mussel program should be the state”s responsibility for a number of reasons. First and foremost, if the mussel ever got established in Clear Lake the results would be disastrous for the counties downstream from Clear Lake as the mussels or their larva would most likely wash through the gates at the dam.
There is another reason for the state to administer the program. As more and more counties put in place plans to keep the mussel out of their areas, the entire mussel prevention program will become fragmented, each county going its own way. Just as the hydrilla eradication plan is a state responsibility so should the quagga mussel prevention plan.
Like all ideas Giusti”s isn”t perfect and will probably need a number of modifications, but the concept is good and I believe it can work.
