For almost a decade the Mobile Baykeeper environmental group has been testing popular swimming spots in the bays of Baldwin and Mobile Counties. This past week they announced on their website that the testing would be paused due to "a lack of dedicated project funding."

SWIM, short for Swim Where It’s Monitored, test more than 20 sites regularly for Enterococcus or E. coli, along with other indicators of water quality. Those results were regularly posted on their Swim Guide so users could quickly check conditions at their favorite swimming spot.

The State of Alabama will still provide it's monitoring of Baldwin beach areas through ADEM and the Coastal Alabama Beach Monitoring Program. Alabama Department of Environmental Management (ADEM), in cooperation with the Alabama Department of Public Health (ADPH), initiated a program to routinely monitor bacteria levels at five select swimming beaches on the Gulf Coast. The effort was later expanded to include six additional sites along the Gulf Coast and Mobile Bay.

Since October of 2000 the federal Beaches Environmental Assessment and Coastal Health (BEACH) Act was signed into law. This act mandates the monitoring and assessing of coastal recreational waters and the prompt notification of the public when applicable water quality standards are not being met.

The selection of ADEM sites and the frequency of sampling are determined using a risk based evaluation and ranking process. This process considers a number of factors for a given site, most importantly the amount of use and the amount of risk. Depending on the site, samples are collected twice per week, once per week or once every other week during the swimming season (June through September) and once per month during the cooler months.