Carla Bard; Activist, Expert on Water Issues

Community activist Carla Bard, a pioneer of the environmental movement in Ventura County and a statewide expert on water issues, was killed over the weekend when her car slid in a driving rain and plummeted down a steep embankment near Paso Robles.

Bard, 69, was driving alone Saturday on U.S. 101 to a meeting of a conservation league in San Francisco when the accident occurred.

The chairwoman of the state Water Resources Control Board under Gov. Edmund G. Brown Jr., Bard was remembered Sunday for nearly five decades of community activism in Ventura County.

“She was at the apex of the environmental movement here, and her loss is beyond calculation,” said Neil A. Moyer, president of the Environmental Coalition of Ventura County. “She was involved for so long that her memory of why and how things happened was supremely better than the bureaucrats’.”

Cultured and always elegantly dressed, the England-born Bard labored for decades as a volunteer on social issues locally and still worked full-time as an analyst at the Environmental Defense Center office in Ventura.

“It’s a terrible shock,” said husband Archie Bard of Ojai. The couple married in 1948 while both were students at UC Berkeley. “She was not any garden-variety person.”

Even as Bard quietly celebrated her 69th birthday last week, she was planning to continue a tireless routine that had marked her adult life, Archie Bard said.

“She was just gearing up to continue everything that she had been doing,” he said. “Wherever there was a problem that needed fixing, whether environmental or otherwise, she had the energy and the perspective to attack it. She may have stepped on people’s toes, but a lot of those toes needed to be stepped on.”

In recent months, Bard had opposed deeper excavations of the Saticoy and El Rio gravel pits in Ventura County and argued successfully against a housing project that would have covered 815 acres of farmland on the Oxnard Plain.

“I’ve always been blessed with marvelous health and a great deal of energy,” said Bard in a January interview.

Bard moved to Ventura County in 1950 with Archie, the grandson of Ventura County pioneer farmer and U.S. Sen. Thomas Bard.

After 20 years as a volunteer for a host of social causes, Bard was tabbed to be Ventura County’s first woman planning commissioner.

In 1976, after three years as a planner, she took her knowledge of water issues 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 Brown appointed her head of the State Water Resources Control Board.

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Kelley is a Times staff writer; Chi is a Times correspondent.