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Carla Bard Crusades for the San Joaquin
Carla Bard's voice still gives away her British birth. With its elegant vowels and clear, soft timbre, it is a voice that sounds more suited to garden parties and tea tables than to demanding, as Bard has for nearly two decades, that state officials restore and protect the San Joaquin River.
The San Joaquin, says Bard, who resigned last year from the Bay Institute's board of directors, is "sometimes referred to, not unjustly, as the lower colon of California." Most of the San Joaquin's flow is diverted at Friant Dam to irrigate farmlands between Fresno and Bakersfield, leaving the river dry for a 20 mile stretch below the dam. The lower San Joaquin is polluted by agricultural drainage. Bard worked with former U.S. Fish & Wildlife biologist Felix Smith to persuade the Washington D.C.-based advocacy group American Rivers to list the San Joaquin as one of the nation's most endangered rivers this year. In 1996, Bard and Smith petitioned the state's Water Resources Control Board to release more water from Friant Dam, arguing that the agency has a public trust duty to protect non-agricultural uses of the river.
Bard's interest in the San Joaquin dates back to her days as the first woman to chair the state water Board. Appointed by Governor Jerry Brown in 1979, Bard served until 1982, a period she remembers as "thrilling and difficult." During her tenure the Board established a Bay-Delta program to gather data supporting stricter water quality standards and a toxics program. "That was the first time the Board had looked at regulating pesticides," she remembers. "Up until then the Department of Agriculture had total control. It caused a big stink."
People who have worked with Bard describe her as courageous, dedicated, articulate, theatrical and well-prepared. However, some former colleagues also say that she can be "a pain"-a charge even her friends don't dispute. "Carla doesn't beat around the bush and she's a tough negotiator,' says Smith. "She expects the people she's working with to be as committed as she." Throughout her tenure on the Board, Bard commuted from her home in Ojai, where she has lived for 40 years. "If you spend too much time in Sacramento your brain turns to Jello," she explains.
The defining moment of Bard's career occurred during her last year on the Board. "The Bureau of Reclamation applied for water quality standards so they could complete the San Luis Drain," she recalls. "They testified that there were absolutely no problems with pollutants in the drain. They lied under oath." Later, after the environmental disaster at the Kesterson Wildlife Refuge emerged, Bard worked for more than a year to compel the Board to close the drain, and she continues to fight efforts to reopen it.
Brown did not reappoint her when her term expired, some say because of pressure from agricultural and chemical interests unhappy with her activism. "Jerry Brown threw her to the wolves," says her friend Lloyd Carter of the California Save Our Streams Council. Bard herself is philosophical: "A friend of mine at the Trust for Public Land told me that if I had been reappointed it would have meant I wasn't doing my job," she says.
Bard is contemptuous of the Bay-Delta Accord and the CALFED process. "To try and deal with the problems of the Bay-Delta without including San Joaquin flows below the Friant Dam is at best ingenuous and at worst perverse," she says. Bard says she has a carrot and stick approach to environmentalism. "It is entirely appropriate for some organizations to negotiate and conciliate," she says. "But unless there are also organizations and people like me who remain hardline, the negotiators have no leverage." Bard says that since the Board has taken no action on her and Smith's petition,"I expect that we will soon file suit."
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