NACo President Gore seeks out leadership challenges

James Gore searched the world and found what he was looking for back home in Sonoma County, Calif. That was where, when he was a kid, his mother and grandmother first talked to him about his future.

By: Charlie Ban
County News Digital Editor & Senior Writer

James Gore searched the world and found what he was looking for back home in Sonoma County, Calif.

That was where, when he was a kid, his mother and grandmother first talked to him about his future.

“My mom and my grandma sat me down and said, ‘We want you to do good things in this world. We believe in you,’” he said. “When I was a teenager, I was always a happenchance leader — I’d raise my hand when they’d call for volunteers and get involved that way. Then when I was in my late 20s and early 30s, I decided I was going to make public service my mission, and it wasn’t going to be happenchance anymore.

In the meantime, he studied agricultural business, worked as a lobbyist for the wine industry, then turned his sights toward service. First as a Peace Corps volunteer in Bolivia, then in a series of roles in the U.S. Department of Agriculture Natural Resources Conservation Service during the Obama administration, working in impoverished areas throughout the United States.

But with a 1-year-old daughter, Gore and his wife Elizabeth moved back to his childhood hometown in 2013. And soon after, a seat on the Sonoma County Board of Supervisors opened, and he won, albeit sooner than he anticipated pursuing public office. One of his early supporters said his misgivings were unfounded.

“Once I met Jimmy, I knew he had the right energy,” said Valerie Brown, a former Sonoma County supervisor who served as NACo president from 2009-2010. “He is a big thinker. You watch certain people, and you can see how well a role will suit them. With his background, supervisor seemed like the right place for him to put his background and experience to work for a place he cares deeply about.”

Rather than seeing government purely as the tool for solving problems, Gore views leadership as an opportunity to galvanize people to work on behalf of the greater good.

“Instead of people talking about what’s wrong or hoping somebody does it or hoping there’s a government program, we need a bunch of people just to stand up and take action,” he said.

And the people elected to county office need to be assertive to get what they want and not be bashful about what counties do, which is “getting stuff done,” Gore said.

“We need to remind each other that we’re doing the work on the ground and that we don’t have to choose in the county world to fight or focus on every wedge issue that divides us in this country,” he said. “We are the ones who get it done on the ground each and every day.

“As the president of NACo, my biggest goal is to make sure that we are owning our place, by not asking for it and demanding it, but by sitting at those tables and forcing our way into the room so that we are the ones driving those solutions,” he said.

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