Meet Susanne Baremore for County Supervisor

This story is part of Shasta Scout’s ongoing citizen-powered election coverage. Our election reporting flips the script by asking candidates to answer questions from the community. Baremore is running against three other candidates for the area of Shasta County known as District 2. Her interview was conducted long-form and in person. The questions were drawn broadly from reader responses to Scout’s latest survey on elections. Baremore’s responses have been curated and paraphrased for this format. Unsure what district you’re in? Find out here.

Scout: What should we know about you? What brought you to Shasta County?

My family moved to Shingletown from L.A. when I was eight years old. We visited Shasta County before we moved and I absolutely fell in love with the area, even as a little kid. Shasta County is home. 

Virtually everything I’ve done in my lifetime, career-wise, has been around either local governance or advocating for rural communities. I’ve held a number of jobs for Shasta County. I’ve worked for personnel, county counsel, public health. So I have a much deeper understanding of how the county’s processes work than other candidates. 

In my current job I work with school districts, many of them very small school districts in communities like the ones I grew up in. I’m what’s known as a PACER or public affairs community engagement representative. I work for the California School Boards Association. It’s kind of a trade association for schools so we provide legislative advocacy, political organizing. I’m passionate about stable governance and my work everyday is about helping schools to gain that. When you run for a position, whether county supervisor or school board, you run as an individual. But when you’re elected you have to pivot. Now you’re part of the board and the expectation from the people is that you will work together as the governing body. 

One of the things I’ve noticed over the last several years of attending board meetings is that there’s such a lack of understanding of specific processes. We have to figure out how to educate people about what can and cannot be done at the county board level. For example, there is a whole lot about the elections process that the county has no control over. If you’re someone who wants voting to happen on a single day with paper poll books in the precincts, you’re going to need to get things changed in Sacramento where those laws were made. Many people run for office based on one or two specific issues and then they get into office and they find out there are many things they can’t actually accomplish in that office. The discretionary funding is very small and many things are actually within the jurisdiction of the state. I like to help people figure out what they can do within the confines of the position they find themselves in. 

I grew up in Shasta County in a rural area, without running water. I remember how hard that was. I remember how traumatizing it was to go to high school with dirty clothes because I couldn’t wash them. There are still kids in Shasta County living without running water today. And those are the kinds of issues we need to address.  

Scout: Why did you decide to run for the Shasta County Board of Supervisors?

The majority of this board is operating at a fundamental deficit as to how county government works and the consequences of the decisions that they’re making. I have a unique understanding of the county’s departments and I already  have relationships with a lot of the county’s department heads. There’s a relatively small learning curve for me because I already know the programs and the funding and the laws and how things get done and how we can innovate.  

I’m also concerned about the lack of respect on the current board for the education and experience of  the technical experts. I’m desperately worried about the Health and Human Services Agency director, Laura Burch, and how much the supervisors have dumped on her: all the departments, all the programs. It’s too much for one person. I would like to pull housing back out of her bailiwick. I want to be effective and efficient with the limited resources that the county has.

I also think this board is really isolationist, they’re not really looking at what neighboring counties are doing. For example getting rid of developer fees in this county if the surrounding counties still have them is going to have a real impact. So trying to figure out how to do things regionally is a big deal to me. I think we can maximize a lot of resources that way. One of the things that I think is going to be really important is the issue of homeowners insurance to protect against fire. And no single county is going to be able to pull off change like that alone.

One good example of the current board’s issues is the way they’re dealing with Igo and the Zogg Fire settlement funds. They’re basically using the District Attorney, Stephanie Bridgett, as a whipping post. They’re taking out their political anger on her. There’s virtually no way the county is ever going to see a change in how the DA spent that money. We need to stop peddling false hope about those settlement funds to the people of Igo and move on to pursuing other funding sources that can actually help them with their ongoing needs.

Scout: How would you describe yourself as a candidate? 

I’m a functional, moderate, fiscal conservative. There’s only so much money to go around so let’s figure out how to get the biggest bang for the buck. When I worked in the county’s Public Health Department, I was a contract analyst. Much of my work was about the outcomes we were getting for the dollars we spent. We need to serve as many people as we can with the resources we have. And we need to serve everybody, regardless of their political affiliations or socioeconomics, or how they identify. 

Scout: Are you committed to following state law?

I am committed to following state law and I’m also committed to changing state law where it makes sense for us locally. I think Sacramento is a place that largely caters to urban population centers and has forgotten the unique and essential role that rural California plays for every citizen in the state.

Scout: Who are your largest funders? What political action committees (PACs) have supported your campaign either directly or indirectly?

I am not PAC funded. I haven’t received any large donations. Most of my funding has been at the grassroots level which is the way I want it to be. I don’t have any radio or TV ads going on right now. I’ve mostly just been going door to door.

Scout: How would you work towards a sustainable county budget? 

There needs to be more homework done in terms of spending. Clearly, the Board did not think through and understand all of the ramifications to getting rid of the county’s impact fees, for example. There has been no legitimate cost-benefit analysis. I believe a reduction in those fees is warranted, but not a complete holiday on it. 

Another example is the gun thing. What the board just did, passing a resolution opposing SB 2, will have to be redone because I guarantee that it will impact labor negotiations and it will impact who chooses to stay employed at the county and who leaves and all of that has to be factored into the spending process. 

I didn’t see anything terrible happen in the supervisor’s budget process last year. But I was on pins and needles about it because I think there’s a real lack of understanding on the majority of this board that using general fund dollars to maximize what the state sends to you is a good thing. For example, our Health and Human Services Agency has access to a multitude of funding streams that have created a wealth of very dynamic programs and created opportunities to do some really collaborative kinds of work.

Scout: How would you approach any changes to the elections process? 

Elections are another function that is largely controlled by the state. We have to be linked up with the Secretary of State’s office to conduct local elections, full stop. Our boss when it comes to elections is the law. We cannot ask the professionals in our elections office to break the law. And to ask them to do so based on misinformation is particularly ridiculous. To the extent that those laws need to change, that’s a whole other issue.

One of the things I love about our current election process is I feel like it’s a perfect marriage of technology and human diligence. Are mistakes going to be made on the tech side, sure, that’s why we have humans too. One of my frustrations with this whole debate about elections locally is that so many people do not understand the process. If you go and show up at the Elections Office and be kind, respectful and come from a stance of learning you’re gonna learn a lot. There are so many cross checks and double checks in the system. 

One of my biggest concerns about elections at this point is how misinformation is tearing the process down. I have an opponent (Laura Hobbs) who is promoting the Mesa pattern of fraud. And it is absolutely not based on data. And I can show that. What I know is that, for better or worse, we have a highly regulated election system in the state of California. But our elections here locally, are free, fair and accurate. I don’t understand how people my age don’t remember taking civics in school. We learned about election fraud that occurred with paper ballots. And that’s one of the reasons we moved away from paper ballots. 

Scout: How would you work to address homelessness?

We are about to see a huge spike in homelessness. There are a lot of things that are contributing to our housing problems right now: low incomes, our interest rates, fire insurance costs, short term rentals, large school campuses without housing elements built in. 

People move here to be rural and they don’t want to live down the street from high density affordable housing. So it’s gonna take a lot of collaboration to really figure this out. 

We need to figure out how to get better broadband so we can bring better jobs. And to get people to come for jobs we need housing.  So you’re gonna have to work all the pieces at the same time to find a viable solution. 

We also  need to find effective models for helping people who are living outside with significant mental health needs because many of them are never going to be able to live inside on their own.

Scout: How would you address the need for developing additional housing in our community?  

Again, there’s no panacea for this. I’m in favor of reducing the developer fees, but not eliminating them. Reducing them may very well stimulate some new growth. 

Sierra Pacific Industries is looking at the concept of executive villages, professional villages. Basically creating housing for people to live in that are close to their jobs, as a job benefit. And I think that’s an idea worth exploring and I think there’s probably money out there for it. 

Some of our growth and development has been kind of a failed model. Big box stores bring money but they also bring a lot of problems. Those are not jobs that provide a living wage. 

And it’s important to acknowledge that a lot of our property owners are absent. Our greatest export from rural California is our kids and many people have inherited property they no longer live in. That’s another piece.

Scout: How would you address labor concerns at the County?

County jobs should provide a livable wage. I feel like there were some very poor math skills employed in the the last negotiations with county staff. Patrick (Jones) kept talking about having to spend $11 million but we really only needed to spend $4 million because so much of that workforce is funded by state dollars. 

I am very concerned about the condition of the county’s workforce right now. People are overextended. We have had such a huge loss of institutional memory in the last few years. And our county staff vacancy rate is about 25%. All the time and resources we’re having to spend on continually recruiting and training new staff means we’re more focused on building a workforce than delivering services.

I came to work for the county as a single parent with two young children. County jobs were very competitive at the time. But now people are leaving all the time due to the lack of stable governance, low wages, overextension, and burn out. I am very pro-labor because the type of work involved in the delivery of services by the government is so specialized. We need to invest in people and we need to make the county’s workforce culture a place that people want to stay in for their entire career.

Scout: How would you help our community prepare for and reduce the risk of wildfire?

There’s lots of talk about what homeowners can do. You can create a property owners’ association, like a Firewise group, a kind of neighborhood-level Fire Safe Council. And this can give you individual reductions in insurance based on your work to harden your property against wildfire. 

But I feel like we are putting way too much of the responsibility and the cost on the homeowners. In California, 47.7% of the state’s land base is federally owned. A lot of the fires we experience are either started on federal land or they are accelerated on federal land. The Carr fire is a perfect example of that. So I think we need to do some advocacy work. How is CalFire advocating for federal land management? Where is the Forest Service, where is the Bureau of Land Management? They should be picking up some of the tab on this because our fire problems are largely their responsibility. We need to find some tougher ways to hold them accountable. 

Scout: Thank you for your time! How can people learn more about your campaign?

You can visit my website or Susanne for Supervisor on Facebook. 

You can find our other candidate interviews here. Have questions, concerns, or comments? Reach out to us: editor@shastascout.org.