A Retireless Protector of California’s Resources

VENTURA — At age 68, Carla Bard went to work for a new boss last week, with the same fire in the belly that has carried her through nearly five decades of community activism.

By signing on as a full-time planner with the Environmental Defense Center’s new Ventura County office, Bard picked up the pace at a time of life when many of her contemporaries are deciding how to make retirement meaningful.

“I’ve always been blessed with marvelous health and a great deal of energy,” said Bard, an Ojai environmentalist who once headed the state’s top water-quality agency. “I have a lifelong commitment to environmental and social issues, and this new position just seems like a wonderful step to take at any age to advance those interests.”

That the expanding Santa Barbara-based EDC would select Bard as its principal link to the Ventura County community speaks to the breadth of her experience as an activist and administrator and to her 45-year involvement in programs aimed at improving the lives of local residents.

“Carla has a wealth of experience, and she will bring enormous depth to our staff,” said Marc Chytilo, managing attorney for the EDC.

The eco-law firm, which has been involved in local issues for many years, opened its Ventura office Monday as a way to unify the efforts of perhaps two dozen environmental groups. And the hiring of Bard as a strategist was a key ingredient in staffing the three-person office on Ventura’s Main Street, officials said.

Bard arrived at the EDC directly from a year and a half as a part-time environmental analyst at Patagonia Inc., the Ventura-based outdoor-clothing company that contributed $100,000 to opening the EDC office here.

“She brings a sense of history,” said Kevin Sweeney, director of environmental strategies for Patagonia. “She knows what has worked and what hasn’t and how campaigns have unfolded here. She knows water law and water policy. And she’s a good writer.”

Bard’s clearly reasoned arguments have been part of tumultuous debates for many years. Over the last two months, for example, she opposed deeper excavations at a Saticoy gravel pit and, separately, argued against construction of a Santa Clara River levee that would have allowed a minor league baseball park to be built behind the Ventura Auto Mall.

Cultured and elegantly dressed--even genteel in manner--the England-born Bard is a formidable foe, say Ventura city officials whose roads project near the auto mall she successfully fought. They say Bard’s low-key presentations, tinged with a hint of her native London, got into their heads but not their faces.

“She was sincere and eloquent, not confrontational,” Ventura Councilman Jim Friedman said, referring to Bard’s argument that the city had prepared a “stealth EIR” that had not fully considered the environmental effects of extending Olivas Park Drive partly because it did not mention the proposed ballpark.

“She sort of pulled that issue out from under the rug,” Councilman Gary Tuttle said. “I try to listen to everybody, but I listen to her a little harder, because she’s got her facts straight.”

Though disagreeing with Bard’s assertion that the Olivas Park project was linked to the ballpark, Ventura Community Services Director Everett Millais said her efforts were something to behold.

“Carla’s a character. She’s colorful. And she knows how to tweak the media and tweak a process,” Millais said.

Veteran County Supervisor John Flynn opposed her during a recent debate over deepening a CalMat gravel pit near the Santa Clara River. Flynn sided with the majority in approving a scaled-back project. The EDC sued the county on Friday in an attempt to reverse that decision.

“That’s one of the few that I’ve disagreed with her on,” Flynn said. “She’s just a delightful person. But that could fool you because she’s the most issue-oriented person I’ve ever met.”

That is why Flynn appointed Bard to the county Planning Commission in 1973. “Even then, she was very knowledgeable on issues, whether it was flood control, juvenile justice or the criminal-justice system. And she was always on point as far as land-use issues go.”

Bard says she is not sure just how she became a defender of wild and open spaces and a supporter of society’s underdogs.

But part of the answer comes from being raised her first 11 years in London with her father, a Dutch-French chemical engineer, and her mother, a member of a small ranching family in the San Francisco Bay Area. They all appreciated London’s abundant parks and open spaces.

“We would walk in them all the time,” she said. “My nanny took me for walks in them every day.”

But World War II interrupted her love affair with Britain’s natural charms. Her family fled the terror of Germany’s bombardment in 1940 for the safety of her grandmother’s home in the Bay Area.

Following her father’s death, her mother bought an apartment house in Berkeley, where Bard lived until she married Archie Bard in 1948 after meeting him on a blind date while both were students at UC Berkeley.

After graduation in 1950, Archie, the grandson of Ventura County pioneer farmer and U.S. senator Thomas Bard, brought his wife home.

From their ranch in Somis, Archie ran the Bard family company and Carla delivered four children in five years.

“I joined the League of Women Voters to keep my brain from turning to mush,” she said.

A year later, in 1953, she volunteered with the Children’s Home Society, which arranged orphan adoptions. “I remember going to the old Safeway parking lot in Oxnard and picking up a baby only 12 hours old in a basket and driving her up to Santa Barbara for adoption. I was absolutely terrified.”

In the following years, she volunteered on committees that studied the loss of farmland to development and the local criminal-justice system, where she was the only woman on a 55-person task force.

Bard’s sojourn into volunteerism took a heroic turn after her family moved to Hollywood Beach on the Oxnard shore in 1960.

“Plucky Mrs. Bard” was how a local newspaper described the small, thin homemaker after she dove into churning surf early one Sunday morning to pull a thrashing, 150-pound, 14-year-old boy to safety on a deserted beach.

“A little boy came to the door and said somebody was drowning,” she recalled. “So I ran down the beach shoving off my bathrobe and pulling on my swimsuit because I didn’t want to drown naked. . . . I remember thinking, ‘Oh, damn, I’m going to get grabbed and die, and I won’t get to go to Europe’--where we were returning for the first time since the children were born.”

In the early 1960s, Bard also worked as an unpaid investigator for a poverty law office in Oxnard’s La Colonia barrio for a year. And she did her part to implement President Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society agenda by serving on the local Community Action Commission that distributed the flood of new federal dollars.

She helped document the “medieval horror chamber” that was the old County Jail in the 1960s, she said, and confronted the bureaucratic mores of the day when then-Sheriff William Hill refused to allow her to participate in a new program that encouraged citizens to ride along with deputies for a day.

“The sheriff said, ‘Oh no, the deputies’ wives would object.’ I said, ‘Sheriff, your boys are safe with me.’ But he still wouldn’t let me go.”

Continuing an unending string of volunteer efforts, she also worked on a hospital planning board that advised federal officials on how many hospitals should be built locally. And, in 1970, she was appointed to the county Grand Jury.

Flynn, himself a new supervisor at the time, then tapped Bard to become the county’s first woman planning commissioner.

“I said I was appointed to sit by the door,” she said, “because women and minorities were being hired and appointed and placed by the door so everybody could see that the agency had one. It was a great advantage for me.”

Bard immersed herself in land-use issues and remembers learning her greatest lesson from commission colleague and Santa Paula rancher Charles Schwabauer. “He was always asking about the impact on water of various developments,” she said. “I realized that everything relates to water.”

In 1976, she took that knowledge to the state Regional Water Quality Control Board in Los Angeles, an agency that forces polluters to clean up their acts.

By 1979, she had distinguished herself as chairwoman of the regional board and Gov. Jerry Brown appointed her to head the state Water Resources Control Board, a full-time paid position she held for three years.

“I got to learn a whole lot about water all over the state,” she said. “Then I got dumped by Jerry Brown.”

Actually, Brown didn’t have much choice because of a hostile Legislature. “I was no longer confirmable because of my strong position on pesticide control and water-quality issues,” she said.

So Bard came back to Ojai, where she had moved in 1980 from Hollywood Beach.

“I was 53, and I came home and cried,” she recalled. “Then I pulled myself together.”

As an authority on water statewide, Bard continued to champion the causes of clean water, wetlands preservation and free-flowing rivers, testifying at hearings and writing position papers.

For years she served on the board of the Bay Institute of San Francisco, which works to clean up pollution in the bay. She helped found the Ojai Land Conservancy, which works to preserve open space in the Ojai Valley. And she is still a director of the Planning and Conservation League, a statewide group that lobbies in Sacramento on environmental issues.

“She’s all grit and glamour,” said William Davoren, founder of the Bay Institute. “She’s very bright and aggressive in a nice way. And thanks to her energy and conviction, she’s still involved.”

But all things did not go smoothly after Bard returned to Ojai from Sacramento in 1983. A fungus attacked her family’s mushroom farm at Point Mugu, and she went to work to help close it down and file bankruptcy.

“I cast about to see what I could do,” she said. “We’d sold so many things through escrow that I told my real estate person that she ought to hire me. And she did.”

Over the last 11 years, Bard has continued her environmental work, sold property for Lerie Bjornstedt’s Ojai Realty Co., worked for a year in public affairs on Thacher School’s centennial anniversary in 1989 and has served, since 1995, as a researcher and environmental advocate for Patagonia, a company that donates 1% of its profits each year to environmental causes.

“That has been the most extraordinary experience of my life,” she said. “To work for a company like Patagonia is a dream for every environmentalist. Because generally companies I would want to work for as a consultant couldn’t afford to pay me.”

Now she begins a new phase with the Environmental Defense Center, a 10-person group that has been prominent in Central Coast environmental issues for 20 years.

“One of the great weaknesses in the environmental area is that we have had no leverage beyond going to the board of supervisors or the city council and saying we have some problems with this. If they don’t want to listen, they don’t have to,” she said.

“But the EDC will give leverage to the environmental movement in Ventura County, and it will give illumination,” she said. “The public will know that the EDC is here to help.”