Readying for science center

As construction crews continue working on the Newport Bay Science Center on Shellmaker Island, the various groups that plan to use the facility shared their ideas about how the facility can best be used.

The center boasts four wings intended for administrative purposes, storage, teaching and water-quality testing.

Orange County Health Care Agency Water Quality and Public Health Laboratory staffers will be the first tenants of the new building. It is a welcomed move for the eight-person staff, which has been working out of a triple-wide portable for four years. The lab conducts about 40,000 water-quality tests every year and assists a number of county agencies.

With 3,800 square feet of space in the new water-quality lab, director Douglas Moore plans to add responsibilities.

“Our public aim is toward adult education,” Moore said. “One of the things we’d like to expand is the teaching program courses for certain groups and supply Fish and Game with water-qualities materials for the courses they offer to younger students.”

Moore also plans to use a teaching lab for public seminars and workshops about water-quality testing, state standards and the agency’s various research programs.

UC Irvine researchers, local teachers, Department of Fish and Game staffers, and the Newport Bay Naturalists and Friends are compiling a curriculum for students. Part of that new curriculum may include equipment for DNA analysis, Newport Beach City Councilwoman Leslie Daigle said.

Newport Beach Assistant City Manager Dave Kiff broke down how the various organizations will use each of the four wings.

“Fish and Game will utilize the storage and administrative wings, while also providing courses to the public on basic estuary ecology, and marine life concepts,” Kiff wrote in an e-mail. “The Teaching Lab will include a number of touch tanks and other aquarium items used to educate grade-school students and other advanced tools for the higher grades.”

However, some involved with the project still have concerns about what age groups the programs will focus on.

“The idea is to have a working lab and not a marine petting zoo, not to have the things already there, but to go out and get them from the bay and study them at the facility,” said Dennis Baker, president of the Naturalists and Friends. The Peter and Mary Muth Interpretive Center on the other side of the bay already has a successful program for younger children, he added.

Baker said the new science center will focus on estuaries and tide lands, not ocean waters. “We are concerned what is happening in the bay and what in the watershed effects the bay,” Baker said.

“One of our concerns is that we don’t duplicate those programs,” Baker said in reference to other labs in the area such as the Ocean Institute in Dana Point and programs at the interpretive center. “Why build a big building to do the same thing?”

It’s unlikely that any programs with the schools will begin until fall 2008, Baker said.

City officials and Orange County Supervisor John Moorlach are scheduled to visit the grounds today.