H.L. "Buck" Gibbons, the former Inyo County district attorney who led the tiny High Desert area's 19-year David vs. Goliath litigation with the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power over excessive pumping of ground water from the Owens Valley, has died. He was 59.
Gibbons, who lived in Bishop, died Wednesday in Chicago, where he had gone to be with his mother after she broke a hip. Gibbons died of a heart attack, said Inyo County Dist. Atty. Phil McDowell, a longtime friend.
The highly respected Gibbons first attracted national attention as a young deputy prosecutor helping to investigate the Charles Manson case. Before the Tate-La Bianca murders in Los Angeles that made Manson and his followers infamous, the so-called "family" had lived at Barker Valley Ranch in Inyo on the edge of the Mojave Desert. Gibbons worked to charge members of the group with car theft and malicious mischief during their stay in Inyo County.
But Gibbons engraved his name in California jurisprudence, as well as intergovernmental diplomacy, with the Owens Valley ground water saga, beginning when he was a deputy and continuing through his tenure as district attorney from 1974 to 1997.
"He had a very active and expansive intellect," said McDowell, "and even if people disagreed with him they respected him--including the lawyers from L.A."
Los Angeles and the Owens Valley had wrangled over water since the early 1900s, when city officials quietly bought up the land, then built an aqueduct that started pumping water to the San Fernando Valley in 1913. The megalopolis had drained Owens Lake by 1940.
Gibbons' era of litigation revolved around a second aqueduct, completed in 1971, that enabled Los Angeles to increase pumping by 50% and take ground water as well as surface water. Los Angeles owned the land, so challenging its right to pump out water appeared somewhat quixotic.
Legal Battle Led to an Agreement
Inyo County sued the DWP nevertheless, complaining not about the city's right to pump water but about the resulting damage to Inyo's environment.
Despite some court victories for Inyo County, the issue remained unresolved in 1980. So Gibbons helped draft and win passage of a county ordinance limiting ground water pumping. Los Angeles sued to overturn the new law.
Argument over the cutoff ordinance resulted in a decade of negotiations between Los Angeles lawyers and Gibbons and Inyo-hired private attorney Tony Rossman of San Francisco.
