Johnny Pinches, An Appreciation

We have always considered John Pinches to have been a good supervisor, certainly a much better supervisor than any of his four colleagues when one applies the standard of the greater good. The prevailing myth among the County’s libs is that Norman de Vall, Richard Shoemaker, Charles Peterson, Seiji Sugawara, Liz Henry, Hal Wagenet, Kendall Smith, David Colfax, Dan Hamburg, Ted Williams, John Haschak… and all the other Democratic Party endorsed “liberals” are on our side. And anybody in a cowboy hat must be on the other side. Most of our Liberal supervisors have disappeared from political life in the County after their stints as Supervisor, leaving one to wonder what they thought they stood for in the first place. In 2000 Charles Peterson billed himself as a Fifth District Supervisor candidate without launching a single cream pie as an excuse or reason for running. His incessant, content-free yammering went over well with many coast liberals so he joined the other three faux libs during his one term in office. He then quit and disappeared saying he was tired and his critics, many of them the very liberals who voted for him, were a bunch of meanie faces. Shoemaker was a liberal by no known standard of that much abused term; he left office and soon got a cush job as the tiny town of Point Arena’s “city manager.” Etc. In fact, name one liberal who stayed involved in County affairs after their lucrative terms in office. 

Cowboy John Pinches came through the door saying right off the bat that then-Sheriff Tuso was a liar, that dope policies were self-defeating, that the Supes don’t need another layer of computers… Pinches rightly complained that so-called in-service trainings were a waste of tax money, that certain logging rules harm small timberland holders to the advantage of outside timber corporations, that a lot of in-County spending is indefensible… Pinches generally held the bureaucrats’ feet to the fire. Besides which he’s a decent person face-to-face, not one of these pinched-faced Republicans or one of those cowardly backbiters of the Coastlib/KZYX type. 

Many of our vaunted liberals tend to be major jerks up close — arrogant and vain beyond all reason — and have never stood for much of anything beyond getting their pay increase, their cliched opinions and silly faces in the local newspapers, and their nasal-voiced PC platitudes onto KZYX where there are no hard questions, no standards at all and certainly no memory. Yes, my fellow lib-labs, it’s come to this: A libertarian cowboy Republican who announces rodeos, eats big slabs of red meat and cuts down trees is a better liberal than most of the local enviros, KZYX, and The Poetry Hour all rolled into one.

In April of 2001 Cowboy John Pinches of deep Laytonville announced that he probably would run again for the Third District Supervisor's seat that Pinches had held for four years in the 1990s. 

After his initial four-year term as Third District supe in the 1990s, Pinches left his seat for a quixotic run for the state Senate in the Republican primary. A young cipher from a rich Healdsburg wine family beat Pinches in the primary by outspending the Eel River Canyon cowboy who'd limited campaign contributions to $99. Pinches had also offended Republican fat cats by refusing the big dough. 

The incumbent at the time was Tom Lucier, a Willits mortician known around town as “The Jolly Reaper.” In office, Lucier might be mistaken for one of his plumper cadavers; the only times he showed signs of life were when his direct financial welfare was involved. Lucier was quite animated when he took office, easily managing to successfully convince the board's grasping majority that his mortuary's contract with Official Mendocino County for dealing with North County corpses should continue. Just happening to have County contracts with the county he also supervised, Lucier reasoned, didn't necessarily represent a conflict of interest, not even an appearance of one. Gosh, supervisor pay was so low, we'd never attract the kind of “excellence” we would need around here if an elected person can't wear more than one hat at a time. (cf Supervisor Glenn McGourty who grows grapes using Russian River water over whose allocations he has official authority.) 

Their supervisorial excellencies, even before their last two rounds of raises, made almost twice as much as the average Mendocino County worker, especially when the county's fat package of fringe benefits for top officials is factored in. Lucier also tried to weasel some public money out of the Willits City Council to improve a beauty salon — run by his girlfriend – in a building he owned. And, of course, he was all for top-dollar pay raises for supervisors and top bureaucrats. Politically, Lucier was an instinctive, reflexive “yes” vote for bad. If it was big and destructive, The Reaper lit up as if a Greyhound had careened into the Van Hotel in downtown Willits and 60 bods had to be pickled, painted, packaged, and packed in $5,000 caskets at his mortuary around the corner. 

Any other place, Lucier's simultaneous county corpse franchise and elected official position would be regarded as a textbook-quality example of conflict of interest. The law says an elected official isn't supposed to profit from the public's business, but the law in Mendocino County, thanks to our Clintonian cadre of judges and attorneys, is quite a bit more elastic than it is most places; depending on who you are, the law can even be waived. So long as Lucier isn't discovered hunkering over a cadaver with a pair of pliers and a little velvet bag of gold fillings, what the hey? (On second thought, if he said he was doing a tracheotomy he could probably help himself to the fillings unmolested by local authority.)

Pinches is a lifelong Laytonville rancher. The Third District was very lucky he decided he would run for his old Third District supervisor's seat, then occupied by Lucier. The popular Island Mountain rancher knew he could drub Lucier or anyone else who ran against him. In his first election to the 3rd District supervisor's seat seven years earlier it was as if Pinches had been awarded the seat by acclamation. He easily defeated the lukewarm Willits lib, Ellen Drell, who with her husband David, founded the Willits Environment Center. The Drells are long-time Willits-area residents. Mrs. Drell is a capable person who pulled a pretty good slug of the hill muffin vote but, like much of Mendolib and even the flatland 'muffs, she was too comfortably removed from the work-a-day reality faced by a majority of the people in the Appalachia-like 3rd District. Pinches, always a hard worker in a hard-scrabble, resource-based economy, is smart, attuned and sympathetic.

As a supervisor, Pinches was scrupulously honest, plain-talking, careful with public money, and unafraid to take on the county's entrenched upper-echelon bureaucrats, many of whom behaved as if they'd descended directly from the Sun King. Pinches drove the County's monarchically inclined department heads nuts, which all by itself was ample reason to vote for him. But what was most refreshing about Pinches, it seems to me, was his ability to get along with all kinds of people. Mendolib, for all its talk of tolerance and dialogue, regards argument or criticism as a form of bad manners or confuses it with what they call “negativity,” and tends to be about as tolerant of dissent as the right-wing they oppose.

Pinches eventually ran and won back his Third District Supervisors seat in 2002. But many people have forgotten that before that, in 2001, prior to his run against Lucier, Pinches applied for the County’s vacant Director of Transportation position, then being filled by an interim appointment. 

Long-time KZYX radio host Karen Ottoboni invited Pinches on the air to discuss his application and the Supervisors’ refusal to appoint Pinches. From that discussion it became obvious that Pinches should have been appointed to that top slot in the county's crucial Department of Transportation. It turned out that Pinches had been jobbed out of the job by the County Counsel's office to whom his enemies on the then-Board of Supervisors, notably the incompetent and dishonest Patti Campbell, had rushed for a legal pretext to deny Pinches a position he was eminently qualified for by temperament, training and experience. County Counsel dug up a personnel stipulation they claimed said the top local DOT guy had to have a college diploma in engineering. (They waive these things all the time, but not for Pinches.) Who would you rather have maintaining local roads? The guy who's done it, or the guy who has read books about doing it and knows where the next grant is coming from?

We’re pretty sure that the real reason Pinches' enemies in the County Administration Center — and he had got lots of them — didn't want him in charge of keeping Mendocino County's roads in good repair because of his unshakable commitment to fiscal responsibility and effective, efficient, well-managed operations. 

The Laytonville cowboy annoyed the hell out many entrenched local bureaucrats and those among his elected colleagues when he was previously on the Board because he was constantly on the watch for ways to save taxpayer money. Lots of tax-paid, well-paid slugs out on Low Gap or wandering around the County Courthouse with their coffee cups and blissed out grins on their plump pusses resented the hell out of Pinches and feared him because he was the only supervisor in recent history, aside from Jim Eddie of Potter Valley, who had a clear majority of his constituents behind him. And he never hesitated to take on the bureaucrats, the only supervisor since Joe Scaramella to do so.

During his hour with Ottoboni, Pinches said he'd like to “trade in some old, little-used equipment for an excavator so that the county could assign a small group of workers to do their own safety-related road repair and upgrades.” Pinches said the county workers could be helped by CCC, CDF and inmate crews, the work to be done in the summer months when the county crews aren't as busy as they are in the winter. Pinches was referring to projects like the restoration of blind curves to at least partial vision, the widening of narrow spots in the many miles of perennially hazardous outback roads and so forth. He also said he thought county trucks should be used “to deliver our own aggregate for our own projects, instead of contracting the work out.” The guy pays close attention, he carries budget books around like a bible thumper carries his bible, and he knows what he's talking about. Naturally, he had to be prevented from getting the job as department boss. Hell, competence could break out all over county government and then where would our travel and conference budgets and two-hour lunches go?

The amiable Pinches, who somehow manages to keep his temper even when sorely provoked, mentioned that as he was denied the county's Department of Transportation job, Fourth District supervisor Patti Campbell had gratuitously remarked that he was “a liability to the county. I didn't appreciate that,” Pinches said.

We didn’t either, and several thousand other Mendolanders are similarly unappreciative, especially considering Patti Campbell's performance in office. 

During the last election, out of which Campbell, thanks to the Coast's abundance of no-spine liberals who either don’t bother to vote or consciously vote for criminality as represented by the incumbent, emerged with another four years in office. In office, Campbell faithfully ran errands for a handful of unindicted Fort Bragg crooks, er developers, while cooing at the libs that she feels their pain. She also seemed to be mildly nuts, several times breaking down in tears during supervisor meetings at no visible provocation. Not that being dishonest or crazy has ever been viewed by county voters as electoral negatives, but Campbell took the negs pretty far even by local standards. Perhaps the most outrageous of her many lies during her campaign for another four years ensuring that Mendocino County remains a retro public policy sinkhole, was when Campbell took credit for paving the Branscomb Road, a project in fact accomplished by Pinches when he was a supervisor.

Anyway, during the Pinches-Ottoboni discussion, Pinches pointed out that the County's Department of Transportation budget had ballooned from $8 million a year to $14 million annually since he left office, and that stat just about says it all about why the powers that be didn't want Pinches running the department. The guy who got the job that rightly should have gone to Pinches, a fellow named Calvert who'd already once abandoned the position for more lucrative work outside the county, said of his department, “We're lucky to get three projects done a year.” Pinches said three projects a year is “unacceptable.” It is unacceptable, as is officially sanctioned sloth in much of what official Mendocino County does.