Rafael Maestu, chief data scientist and economist at the State Water Board, told the work group that the Board intends to publish BeachWatch datasets to the California Open Data Portal to meet statutory data-access goals and to provide tools for program evaluation.

Maestu cited AB 411 (the beach-monitoring statute) as the origin of program requirements and AB 1755 (the Open and Transparent Water Data Act) as the driver for publishing structured datasets. He said the Water Board will extract four datasets from BeachWatch: postings and closures, the location of monitoring stations, beach metadata, and the raw monitoring results. "We are planning to make this data publicly available maybe by the end of next week if we can," Maestu said, adding that internal protocols to redact personally identifying information must be followed before release.

Maestu demonstrated prototype visualizations that show advisory counts and the historical "beach-availability" metric (percentage of days a beach is available for swimming). He noted historical limitations: older records sometimes lacked event end dates or extent, which complicates computation of "beach-mile days." The Water Board intends to publish the structured datasets with a data dictionary so external users and legislators can reproduce performance metrics.

Attendees asked whether real-time monitoring would be possible for immediate swimmer guidance; Maestu and other staff said existing statutory reporting is designed for monthly program reporting, whereas real-time information is primarily provided by county public-health officers and depends on testing cadence and lab methods. Maestu invited feedback on the proposed data structure and dashboards and said the state will welcome suggestions to make the open-data extracts more useful for partners and the public.