Day 2: Embracing Relentless Imperfect Progress in Disaster Recovery with James Gore
“We have to grow the ‘we’ if we’re going to survive in the future.” —Supervisor James Gore
2024 WILDFIRE LEADERSHIP SUMMIT
Effective leadership is not about commanding authority, but about cultivating a shared vision and empowering the community. True leaders understand that their role is to listen, collaborate, and build trust with those they serve.
James Gore serves as the District 4 Supervisor for Sonoma County, California, where he has been at the forefront of innovative disaster recovery and community resilience efforts. As a passionate public servant, Supervisor Gore is committed to bridging the gap between government and the people.
In this thought-provoking talk, Supervisor Gore shares invaluable insights on the power of transparent leadership, the importance of embracing failures, and the transformative potential of a united community in the wake of disasters.
Highlights:
- 00:36 The Biggest Fire
- 07:23 Make Sense of Tragedy
- 12:41 Plan a Mission; Get Results
- 16:57 Inspired by the “WE”
Twitter:
Powerful insights from @supervisorgore on the importance of servant leadership, embracing imperfections, and building community resilience in the face of disasters. Don’t miss his inspiring talk! #Recover #Rebuild #Reimagine #podcast #wildfire #DisasterRecovery #AfterTheFire #2024WildfireLeadershipSummit #EmergencyManagement #WildfireResponse #TransparentLeadership #CollaborativeApproach #LessonsLearned #ImperfectProgress
Quotes:
01:21 “It’s hard to lead your community into progress when people are buying into misinformation. And the tough thing is, you can’t just get into a back and forth during that process because it feeds it. You got to stand resolved through it and get to the other end. Then, you can build confidence because the only way you can do that is slow and sure.” —Supervisor James Gore
04:45 “In government service, you have to be willing to embrace better and then do it next. You have to get to 80% of a plan, and execute as fast as possible because if you don’t, you’re getting yourself into paralysis analysis.” —Supervisor James Gore
07:23 “The only way you can make sense of tragedy is to do something with it. If you don’t, you fail.” —Supervisor James Gore
10:41 “We have to grow the ‘we’ if we’re going to survive in the future.” —Supervisor James Gore
16:57 “It’s amazing what you can do when you can rally people around a cause. You can’t do that around things like pandemics where you’re just told everybody is told to sit on the sidelines and not be involved.” —Supervisor James Gore
Meet James Gore, 4th District Supervisor, County of Sonoma; President of NACO
Supervisor James Gore was born and raised in the 4th District, living in Cloverdale, Healdsburg, and the Mark West area of Santa Rosa. He attended Jefferson Elementary in Cloverdale and graduated from Montgomery High in Santa Rosa.
In 2013, James returned home to Sonoma County to raise his family. He was elected to the Board of Supervisors in 2014 after running a relentless, positive campaign built on inclusiveness and a commitment to own the future and deliver for the residents of Sonoma County. As he embarks upon his 4th year on the Board, James is slated to become Chairman of the Board of Supervisors in 2018. Beyond his work as County Supervisor, James is also serving on several counties, regional, statewide, and national organizations.
- Website: http://supervisorjamesgore.com/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=1147402832
- X: https://twitter.com/supervisorgore?lang=en
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jamesgore4/
Transcription:
James Gore Hi, everybody. Mayor Bissen, it’s good to see you. Thank you for being here. Thank you for hosting me with your staff when we came out with the National Association of Counties, just to have a little authentic conversation in the middle. One of the things that we always talk about with fires, and I was told this by a former supervisor, Rob Brown in Lake County. Everybody knows Lake County is about 70% burnt in the last eight, nine years. As he said, “Yeah, sure, we’ve had the Jerusalem fire, the valley fire, this fire, that fire, but the real fire that I really can’t figure out is the Facebook fire, the BS. The stuff that comes.” One of the things when Mayor Bissen and I sat down and talked is there was all this swirling they were getting, I don’t know if you all know this, but there was misinformation being sent in intentionally from other even foreign countries, and bots saying that kids were missing and all these other things, and the government was hiding it. It’s really hard to lead your community into progress when people are buying into misinformation. And the tough thing is that, as you all know, is, you can’t just get into a back and forth during that process, because it feeds it. You got to stand resolved through it, and then you have to get to the other end, and then you can build confidence, because the only way you can do that is slow and sure. Tamara Paltin, raise your hand please in the back. I want to thank you, Council member. County Council works with Mayor Bissen from the Lanai region or district, on the council and all of your colleagues. Tamara gave me some short bread. Come up and ask me, and maybe we’ll share some lilikoi with you. If it’s good. I prefer lilikoi martinis to shortbread, but this will do as well.
My name’s James Gore. I’m here in a way to start with a simple message, which is, Leadership is Followership. Let’s start with that. If you are in a position of leadership, and you execute or try to execute that authority without buy in, without looking to those most impacted by your decisions. If you don’t work in a fire with your block captains like Will Abrams, who I just saw, if you don’t work with your fire staff, who want to give you direct information, if you don’t want to work with your nonprofits, if you don’t want the ground truth and the marching orders that you should get rather than give out, then you’re failing your community, completely. For me, if I really look back and you all have, how many people here from Sonoma County, okay, how many from California? How many people are from outside the state? Okay? How many of you have dealt with fires in your community? So just about everybody.
So we have a story, just like so many have stories, and ours is a story of Genesis, as Chris from my team and I were talking about when we came up, is it’s funny, because it’s a Genesis story for us as a county, a new form of emergency services, a different way of culture, of thinking, a story of our future, not just our past. But it’s also a story of Genesis for After the Fire, for this organization, for really the movement that we are trying to tie together of those of us in different diverse communities with different diverse peoples, but dealing with similar issues and trying to make sure we’re not just a loose network of do gooders who are sharing best practices, but a tight knit group that changes policies, that takes ownership over what has happened to us, to lean into the future and embraces what I call the philosophy of imperfect, relentless progress. Which for me is what the block captains, the fire survivors that I worked with and met with every Wednesday for years following our fire to walk through the subsequent fire of rebuild, recovery, laws, litigation, insurance, that process was so salient in front of my face that we had to make imperfect, relentless choices to forge progress each and every day. That, for me, that really is a reminder that in service and government service is you have to be willing to embrace better and then do it next, and then do it next. You have to get to 80% of a plan execute as fast as possible. Because if you don’t, whatever you’re doing, you’re getting yourself into paralysis analysis, as we all know.
So in 2017 we had the Sonoma complex fires, and indeed, the Northern California Fire siege, as it’s often called. And a lot of people talk about the past and the destruction in the region, 7000 homes, 5300 homes in Sonoma County burnt down, urban, rural, suburban, wild, urban interface, a blowtorch of a fire on the tub side coming out of a canyon out of Napa. 100 mile an hour winds up on the peaks. 40 mile down on the down on the valley floors, an offshore wind, a Diablo wind pulling in so hard from Utah and Nevada, likes of which, in my lifetime, never seen here, a fire that really wasn’t a fire. If you talk to my friend who I graduated high school with, Paul Lowenthal, who drove up into that fire, and I talked to him that night, in the next couple days. When he turned around, he’s like, this isn’t a fire wall. This isn’t a fire that’s moving. This is like, basically mortar. It’s like things are flying all over the place. Fires are igniting everywhere in front of you. Gives me the chills, and I wasn’t even with you.
Thank you for your service. I hope I don’t bring that back to give you any memories other than to honor your service. Then watching his community and others burn down, basically where the mountains touch into suburbia, those suburban homes burning down in an unincorporated area of the county where I’m the Director Representative, the fire from those homes actually being the fuel to send that fire and those embers another two to six miles over six lanes of freeway burning another 1900 homes in the suburban area. People dying, sometimes because they were caught off guard, sometimes because A couple, an elderly couple was together in a pool trying to suffocate it because they were trying to hide from it. Other people, elderly who couldn’t open their garage doors because they didn’t have a backup, a disabled individual whose family and they didn’t have a plan. Tragedy is an amazing thing to try to digest, but the only way you can make sense of tragedy is to do something with it. If you don’t, you fail. If you don’t, you fail the individuals who died. You fail the individuals who lost their homes. You fail the individuals who are fighting with their insurance companies. You fail the individuals who want a better system. You fail the individuals who are wondering where they’re taking their kids to schol if you don’t take ownership.
In 2019, two years later, Kincaid fire, historic wind event, 110 miles an hour on the peaks, two cities directly within its path, hillsburg, Windsor, Geyserville, potentially as well, catastrophic wind up in the hills, once again ignited by equipment a whole community, not just on edge, on the edge. But this time, what happened in between 2017 and 2019 we had tested our live alert warning systems on a live feed with multiple communities. We had evaluated and created new evacuation zones. We had done evacuation exercises where I would even jump in with sheriff’s deputies and others, and on Saturday mornings, we’d drive up into the hills, turn on the High, Low sirens. People would would measure how far they could come and how quickly, how quickly they could get out. We had reformed completely a emergency management system, a Department of Emergency Management. We had reformed our emergency operations center. So instead of it being a bunker that held information and didn’t release it, it was a nexus with city individuals, tribal individuals, leaders from throughout we had National Weather Service embedded into the Emergency Operations Center. They were predictive. Cal Fire was using their models to show us the extent of what that fire could potentially do. Because of that, we evacuated 250,000 people, damn near half of our county out of those areas when that fire came as predicted down the area. Yes, we had vegetation management, but not to the extent that we do now. Yes, we had the other systems in place. Yes, we had a surge system better with our firefighters, but we got everybody out of the way. The first responders could do what they needed to do defense structures instead of trying to save lives and cats and pets and all these other things. We had the Halter project and Ms. Atwood kicking butt working to get things done, what we did was we lost zero lives, and at those two city edges, they were able to stop it in the hundreds of houses instead of the 1000s. And you know what? Nobody tells that story that’s not a front page story, because doing what’s right is what people expect out of you and out of me. Running systems perfectly, indeed, the very same systems that people want and expect to run perfectly, but they trust the least. Government, nonprofits, corporations do gooders, like this is this is the real deal. And for me, the realization with my colleagues and I and all of you in this room, all of the partners, the we, is this basic idea of that we have to grow the we if we’re going to survive in the future.
Government saying we got it, when other people in the community are like, No, you don’t what we are. You talking about, right? Every single thing that was either you’d call it a outright failure or an imperfection during our 2017 fires, and every single one of those that we’ve had in 2019 with Kincaid, and every single one of those 2020 with Walbridge and the glass fire during the pandemic, all of those have to be embraced. And as you all know, we have people in our systems who find reasons or excuses to not move forward. They say, Well, we only had the alert and warning system for six months. We weren’t ready to use it. Try and tell that to your community. I didn’t use a tool that I had. Oh, well, we didn’t want to do it because we didn’t want to overwhelm 911. 911 was already overwhelmed. Well, why didn’t we learn from San Diego and create a robust 211 system that is an information outlet so that 911, can be triaged for the actual emergency services. Why didn’t we learn from San Diego?
It’s good to see you, Jennifer. You’re amazing. Guys, if you haven’t talked with her, Jennifer and others from San Diego hosted us in January, after the October, and we took a delegation of 20 people, and we went through with the supervisors and community groups every single thing that they had learned from 2006 maybe, which fire somewhere around there, forward, and we started, we created a recovering resiliency framework. We had 290 different measures that we were working towards in metrics. Will Abrams was one of my best block captains at holding me accountable, to hold the system accountable, so that those measures were not just BS generalities, that we had a top 10 list that we went after it and we attacked them. Plan a mission, results. We can do this. We can do this. Three months ago, we just got done with budget at the Board of Supervisors, and everybody was ready to go and take a little bit of time off. That’s when we have recess. Thank God. Get the electeds the hell out of the office so that the staff can do their work without us mucking things up, right? And we had our biggest, most dangerous early fire start in recent history. The point fire started up in a very dangerous area, Lake, Sonoma, rugged territory, dried out vegetation. Even though we’ve had two great water years that have been drought busters, that also means that we have a lot of grass. A lot of that vegetation can dry out very quickly. 2017 tubs, nuns pocket. 2019, Kincaid, 2020, Walbridge glass, 2024, point.
Since all of this time that we have passed through, not only the institutional not only the program changes, we have a well funded system. We have a sales tax, 30 plus million dollars a year going into the fire system the county. We led a grinding effort to consolidate from 40 fire agencies down to about 11. We put $12 million in ongoing money on the table. We negotiated different ways of managing emergency services. And once again, this is all not rosy, blood sweat and tears and failures and mishaps all throughout this process. But what happened with a significant fire start with a good wind is is that the Cal fire person was completely coordinated with our local lead from Sonoma County Fire. They did a surge request. A beeper went off on every single resource we had in the area. They brought in the other resources from Cal Fire coordinated the Chinook helicopters that now can fly at night. First time they’ve flown at night here in Sonoma County. The evacuation zones worked well. I never say perfect, because you can’t say that in emergency management. They worked extremely well though. We got people out of the way. We had a basically mobile command unit up at Lake Sonoma, from Sonoma County Emergency Services, a Starlink that we never had before. There was managing it all from about a rural area, instead of down with no eyes on it. People were coming in, going out, and they surged hard and quickly in areas that had dozer lines, that had home hardening, not completely, when we saw a dramatically different result. And people are absolutely right. If they want to look at me and say, apples and oranges and grapefruit and whatever, all those fires are different, and you can’t claim credit for this or that or the other thing. Absolutely, absolutely right, but at the same time, what I can judge is our response. I can judge the fact that I, as a County Supervisor, as a local elected leader, can have confidence that I don’t have to manage and get involved when the real professionals are getting it done, that my community, can have confidence that the alert and warnings are going out, and then I don’t have to go and tell a PIO to finish writing a statement instead of waiting for it to be reviewed, because by the time they finish that statement, they’re going to release. It’s sanitary stale, and it’s over. And so you read something that’s like government that says that didn’t tell me anything.
We still work as hard as ever, but we do it more transparently. We do it more collaboratively, and we do it with a get stuff done attitude. My tell people, my real political party is the get shit done part. Repeat after me. Get shit done. 1, 2,3, get shit done. Why not? I mean, when you’re burning down and you’re doing all these other things, what the hell? Trying to be offensive. I’m trying to rally. It’s amazing what you can do when you can rally people around a cause. You can’t do that around things like pandemics where you’re just told everybody is told to sit on the sidelines and not be involved. That’s the worst thing is, when there’s energy in the room. I say the fire brought such a heat to our community that when the fire was gone, that heat remained, and it was looking for a place, either accusations or purpose or whatever. On the side of the news, there was so much effort on the failures, on the lack of alert and warning. Why didn’t you do this? The blame, the blame, the blame. Sometimes you just got to take extreme ownership and say, “Yeah, we should have woken up the world, even if we didn’t know how it was going to go.” No more excuses that allowed us to move to where they started to cover the media started to cover when we were doing proactive efforts. I sit here today as somebody who is inspired by the “WE” not by “ME”. Sure I can get up and get passionate, because I love this stuff. I do public service because of purpose, and I know that’s why you’re here too. So you got to find that energy, right? You got to leave here with it. You got to take it back home. You got to ask tough questions. You got to dive in, and you got to just keep going. There’s nothing else. Maya Angelou, one of her most famous quotes that we hear is, “Once you know better, do better. Once you know better, do better.” and then keep going. Thank you all very much. It’s a blessing to be with you today.