Meet Matt Plummer For Shasta 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. While the Board’s District 4 seat is not open for elections until 2024 we decided to run this campaign coverage early because of the central importance of this seat to local politics. Plummer’s interview was conducted long-form and in person. The questions were drawn broadly from reader responses to Scout’s 2022 Scout reader survey on elections. Plummer’s responses have been curated and paraphrased for this format. Unsure what district you’re in? Find out here.

8.7.2023 9 pm: We have updated the story to clarify Plummer’s role on a campaign.

Scout: How long have you been in Shasta County? What brought you here? What should we know about you as a candidate?

I came to Shasta County seven years ago to help nonprofits do strong place-based work around improving community wellbeing as part of a movement broadly known as collective impact. I was also familiar with Bethel and knew that the church was interested in improving community well-being. I felt like coming here was a chance to combine my professional work with my faith background. 

On the personal side, my wife and I have been married almost fifteen years after meeting in fifth grade. We have three girls who are 5, 8 and 10. When I came to Redding, I was working remotely for a nonprofit organization. I then started my own company that trains nonprofits and businesses, and even government agencies, on how to be most effective. We help them learn how to use critical thinking and problem-solving skills to manage people in a way that gets the best out of them and makes the organization a place where they want to stay and do great work. I’ve been doing that for the last six years or so.

A few years ago, I began to realize that politics and government could also have a big role in improving community both in terms of use of money and implementation of policy but also by influencing culture. Depending on who you ask, they say culture flows downstream from politics, but certainly, leaders also help create the culture. I noticed that, increasingly, across both sides of the aisle, there were political leaders creating a culture that was actually counterproductive and eroding the social fabric that makes a place somewhere you want to live. Healthy social fabric also creates the preconditions to address important issues like chronic homelessness. That’s ultimately why I got involved in government, first by working on a number of campaigns, including three statewide campaigns, and then promoting a ballot measure on school choice. 

Scout: Which statewide campaigns did you work on?

I worked on Jenny Rae Le Roux’s campaign for governor in the 2021 gubernatorial recall election and the 2022 primary. I also was teh project manager on the campaign team of Nathan Hochman for attorney general. He came in second in the primary and lost in the general.

Scout: You said what led you to run is the polarization in local politics. Anything else you’d like to add about why you’re running? 

I’d clarify or kind of sharpen one point, and then I’d add a new point. I think the current board is undermining the ability of our County government to be effective. The clearest sign of that is that department leaders are leaving. Week after week, we hear new announcements of that. According to Gallop, which is sort of the gold standard for corporate research, 70% of the reason why people leave their jobs is because of their manager. That means if the senior appointed staff are leaving, there’s a very high chance that it’s because of the Board, which serves as their manager, effectively. That’s a challenge. And worse, from the conversations I have had with a variety of staff members, there’s also a culture of fear in local county government now. People are afraid to speak up. I’ve had county staff tell me, “Hey, I agree with you on that perspective. But I will not publicly come out and support your perspective on that because I’m worried about what will happen to my department if I do because it will be going against the Board.” How can you have a workplace where your leaders are afraid to put forth the ideas that they think are best because they worry about retaliation? That is not going to be effective.

In some conservative circles, we have a misperception that limited government is always the ideal. But limited government is of no use to us if it’s not also effective government, right? It has to be limited and effective. And right now, although I’m not sure that we’re actually moving towards a limited government (but that’s a different story), we’re certainly not able to be effective.

Another thing is the Board’s current approach to the State, which I think is destined to fail. My perception from the outside is that the current Board’s approach to the state is, “Hey, you know, we largely don’t like what you have to say, and we don’t want you to cram it down on us so we’re just going to kind of give you the middle finger and do what we want.” If we’re going to achieve some measure of policy victory here, then we’re going to go on a grandstanding tour and talk about it and be like, “Yeah, look at everything we did.”

That’s what’s happening with the voting system. AB 969 is a state bill that will likely make it illegal to hand count, you know, for counties like ours that have over 1000 voters. That is a predictable outcome of the Board’s strategy with the state. 

A lot of people in Shasta County feel like the state is opposed to our values. Not everyone, of course, but there’s a good portion, I think, who feel that way, and who feel that we don’t have a voice in Sacramento, at least one that can actually have influence, which is not a diss of any of our current representatives. It’s just the reality of being a super minority. 

And so, we need a different strategy to approach the state. We need to collaborate with other counties, we need to collaborate with State officials, and build relationships. After all, you only have an influence where you have a relationship. It doesn’t mean that you agree with everyone. I think as a society, we’ve moved increasingly towards a place where if I disagree with you, then I can’t have a relationship with you, and I can’t affiliate with you, and that’s, that’s, you know, a major problem. And so, we need to build relationships with those in the state, and we’re not going to always get our way, but we can begin to influence them. 

We need to operate with excellence and reason, critical thinking, and sound decision-making. Then people might not always agree with the decisions, but they trust the process. Right now, that’s not happening, at least not in some high-profile examples. So we need to shift our strategy, or we’re gonna get the exact opposite of what the current Board has promised us. we’re going to get what we don’t want, more intervention, more state control. And ultimately, if we have more staff leaving the county, that will empower the state with the authority to come in and take over the control of operating those programs. That’d be the exact opposite of what the Board has promised us that they’re going to deliver. But that’s where we’re headed.

A map of the Shasta County Board of Supervisors’Districts.

Scout: What core values do you apply to the nonpartisan position of county supervisor? 

There are enough challenges that we as a community are facing and opportunities that we can all agree exist, so I’m focused on those rather than those we can’t agree on. I’m also very aware of our tendency to increasingly move into our own echo chambers of hearing opinions that reinforce what we already believe, also known as confirmation bias. Part of my work is teaching companies the skill of critical thinking. The key principle of critical thinking is that to get to really good ideas, you need to consider alternatives to the ideas you already have.  You need to look for the arguments against the ideas you have because that will either strengthen your idea or show you that it’s so weak that it’s not worth pursuing. 

I’m a conservative, and I think the future of conservatism should be about problem-solving, focusing on the problems we all agree exist and insisting on accountability instead of just recounting our spending. It doesn’t matter how much money we spend if it doesn’t produce the outcomes we need. Spending should produce results.

 Scout: That sounds great, but who gets to measure the success of your spending? Who has a voice in measuring outcomes?

In terms of deciding on the outcomes, I think that that should be in full view of the public. In terms of how you measure an outcome, that would depend on the specific outcome. When you’re talking about homelessness, for example, I think, yes, one of the outcomes should be the self-reported quality of life indicators by those who are experiencing homelessness. But there’s also a community measure. Because homelessness doesn’t just affect the people who are experiencing being homeless, it also affects the community around them. And so I would say in that particular example, it should be both because it matters, you know, the impact that it’s having on the individuals as well as the community.

Scout: Do you think there’s been a counterproductive leadership culture on the Board?

I think most people believe there’s been increasing polarization nationally over the last decade. Locally, the last three years have certainly been very contentious. The culture has shifted, making politics a very dominant and divisive force in our region. From my perspective, what’s happening is that you have two political sides that have very different ideological destinations. Interestingly they’re often employing similar tactics to move the community toward their intended point of view. And it’s those tactics that are the problem. How we do things matters. It’s not enough to agree with someone’s values. It matters how they pursue those values. And if they’re pursuing them in a way that is counterproductive to the fabric of the community, then I think it nullifies our agreement with the values. And that’s what I see happening here. 

I studied mechanical engineering in college, and so you have the third law of physics, which is that for every action, there’s an equal and opposite reaction. You can’t expect to be like, oh, yeah, we’re going to take these actions and be divisive and grab power when we can and then not expect the other side to do the same thing. Here in Shasta County, we have a lot of that, one side doing something and the other side reacting to it. Both sides may have some good points when it comes to their hopeful destinations, but some of the tactics being used to get there are not facilitating a healthy, productive community environment.  Someone has to choose the higher ground.

Scout: It’s great to say you won’t target someone, but not taking a side is sometimes just another way to take a side, and not making a statement can speak louder than a statement. How would you respond?

Yeah, I mean, it’s not easy, especially right now, right? The thing I come back to is that debating ideas and actions is fair game. That’s how we get to good ideas as a community and as a society. If you have a problem with what another supervisor does or what he says, you can criticize that. But how you criticize it is important. Even if your end goal is right, how you go about it can undermine it. 

This is a little bit broader and maybe not answering your question, but I’ve seen this in other campaigns where if I pictured with certain other people on social media, other people freak out about it. They will say that means you’re so-and-so or that means that this is what you believe. I think that is very destructive. I’m running for county supervisor, to represent everyone in the county, I should go to any type of event where there’s people in the county who are trying to make progress on things in the county or who are voicing their opinions on the county. My presence there or my presence in a conversation or talking with a certain person doesn’t mean that I endorse and support all their views. It means that I value their perspective enough to hear it, but it doesn’t mean that I agree with it. I want everyone’s support in the county. So if you’re on the right, even if you’re on the “far right,” I feel like I have a good argument why you should support me and not Patrick. If you’re on the left, I also feel like I have a case. I’m trying to win everyone’s support. I am happy for anyone to support me. And I’ll talk with anyone and hear their opinion. And I’ll go to any event.

 Scout: What are current supervisors doing well?

I think the idea of adding more scrutiny to county systems is good.

I think the recent ad hoc committee effort to collaborate with the cities in the county is a good step forward. And I’m cautiously optimistic that that will move in a positive direction.

Scout: One of the barriers to effective leadership on the Board is that you are only one voice among five. How would you work to create change with that limited power?

For one, I will focus on debating ideas and taking action over personal attacks. You won’t see me making personal attacks toward anyone on the board, regardless of how much I disagree or agree with them. Number two, we need to remember we’re not on different sides. We’re a team that’s trying to make positive progress. What that means is that if somebody does something good, you should compliment them. If somebody does something wrong, you should critique them. 

It needs to keep coming back to what we can agree on. Take voting: if we keep yelling about how Dominion is a fraud or hand counting is stupid, we’re not going to convince each other of that. But we can all agree on some things. I think we can agree that we want our voting system to meet four criteria: we want it to be accurate, secure, cost-effective, and time efficient. So let’s talk about that. How would we measure those four things? Let’s talk to people who work with election systems and who work in security. Let’s come up with a way to measure that, and then let’s assess the options before us on those criteria and see which one performs better. We have to get to the specifics of having a conversation versus yelling at each other. And so, on an issue like that, I’m not wedded to Dominion, but I’m also not necessarily a fan of hand counting. I think we want to have the best voting system that achieves the objectives that we want to see in a voting system.

Scout: So you’re not taking a side on the voting system issue?

I don’t think we’ve actually done an analysis of the possible solutions yet. I think that’s a big part of the problem, right? The board made a decision and said, “We don’t need evidence.” I know, in every board meeting, somebody puts up a slide that suggests that there’s some evidence, but that’s not the kind of rigorous evidence that we would need to actually establish the possibility of fraud from voting machines. We need to agree on a strong criteria and then evaluate our options on that basis. If we do have a hand count in November, I would want to evaluate the systems used for that on how well they perform on metrics the Board has already decided.  If the systems perform well on clear, strong metrics, that’s fine with me. If they don’t perform well, then we should consider what the alternatives are.

Scout: But voting systems have already been analyzed in many other jurisdictions across the United States. Are you suggesting we have to analyze them differently for this county? Or could we look at existing research?

I think we can look at other systems that have been analyzed. It’s the classic issue of transferability of a scientific study and whether it was done in the other area in a way that is representative of the way it would be done here. I think there’s a lot of times where you think, well, certain things occurred somewhere else, so we can do them here. Then when you look at the specifics, the other area had very different characteristics that don’t pertain to here. But yes, assuming there is transferability, and then we should, yeah, we should look to research that’s already been done. 

Some leaders have cited a lack of community trust as the reason for decisions like the voting machine system changes. How do you measure community trust?

I think trust is an important variable, but we need to be careful about it. If people don’t trust a system that’s performing well, that doesn’t mean we should throw out the system. It might mean that we need to build trust in the system.

Our first step is to establish whether the system we’re using is effective based on criteria we can all agree on. And if it is, but there’s lack of trust in it, we need to question why. Responsible leadership involves building trust in the systems that have been proven to work. 

Scout: If you’re affiliated with a religious community, how would that affect your role on the board of supervisors? I’m asking this question because many people in our community have thoughts about Christian nationalism, the extent to which someone tries to bring God’s moral law, as understood by Christians, into government, and the effect that way of governing would have on populations like the gay community.

I appreciate that way of framing it. I would like people to ask me these questions directly. Do I go to Bethel? Yes. If you’re concerned about that, I hope you’ll ask me about the specifics related to Bethel that concern you.  When we say people are from Bethel or are MAGA Republicans or leftists, we are grouping people in order to alienate them from ourselves rather than focusing on the specifics that actually let us know if somebody will make good decisions.

We’ve seen that the idea of the “church” imposing its morality on the world was a failed experiment. But even if it did work, it’s not the point of government. John Adams said we need to decide on what the end goal of government is. In his perspective, what he said is, at the end, the pursuit of government should be the happiness of people that it serves. To me, that means the goal is to improve life for most people, the vast majority. It is not to impose some moral code on them.

 Scout: What do you see as the top concerns facing us in Shasta County right now?

Certainly, public safety and homelessness. I think the root causes of these are actually what I call the five factors of family failure, actually the root causes. If you look at Shasta County’s performance relative to the rest of the state on child abuse and neglect childhood trauma rates, divorce rates, percentage of kids growing up in single-family homes, and domestic violence, we’re either the worst or among the worse on all five of those dimensions. 

If we don’t address these things, crime and homelessness are just going to perpetuate themselves. So that is the area where I think we’re not actually spending enough time. It’s ironic because that’s where the county government is actually best positioned to address things, Health and Human Services, which is essentially the biggest part of county government. We also have wildfire and water shortages, which are more or less critical issues depending on where you live. 

I would say it’s also essential to get our county to a place where people want to work there. We need to be a county that has both goals and plans for achieving those goals, which allows the public to provide accountability for our progress toward those goals. As a county, we also need to move from a culture of divisiveness that uses fear tactics and intimidation to a culture of respect, civility, and service.

Scout: How would you work to address homelessness?

I think we should start by replicating what’s working. In my last job, I had the opportunity to work with an organization called Community Solutions that came up with a strategy called Built for Zero. I wrote an article for  Stanford Social Innovation Review on them. Their work includes about seventy communities that have made significant progress on homelessness, including fourteen that have achieved what’s called Functional Zero with at least one population. The first part of their strategy is that you need to focus on outcomes. We need a more personalized case management approach that includes updates on a monthly or biweekly basis that addresses individuals by name. This is much better than relying on a point-in-time count. I also think the data coming out of Texas is compelling in terms of investing in permanent supportive housing. The lack of that housing in Redding is pretty significant. I also think we need to work as hard as we can to get sufficient shelter so we can really force people to move into either shelter or some type of housing. People aren’t out there because they’re bad people. They’re out there because, due to the incentives and the environment around them, it’s easier for them to do that than it is to do something else. I also support Care Court.

Scout: Recently, there was a strike by a labor unit that represents almost half of the county staff. How would you address labor issues?

I think the central assumption of the Board in those decisions was that we expect to grow revenue by 3% a year at the county level. Which means they didn’t think we could give a raise larger than that. But there are many ways to accomplish what’s important.  I talked with someone from the union and they told me that some people are sleeping in their cars due to low wages. That’s horrible. We need to have more conversations about what trade-offs we can make in the budget to get the people who work for us to a living wage.

Scout: Do you think we need a bigger jail?

The top priority has to be staffing the current jail so that it can be fully opened. I’m disappointed that we haven’t made faster progress on that. I think there are both financial and cultural issues that are contributing to the issues with staff recruitment and retention at the jail. Still, from what I can tell, we also need a bigger jail and one more suited to rehabilitation. I don’t want to be part of a community that builds a bigger jail every 20 to 30 years. I want to be part of a community that is figuring out how to reduce the amount of crime that’s happening so that we have fewer people that need to go to jail. But I do think it’s important that we have enough rooms in the jail so that if people are committing crimes, they know there will be consequences.

Scout: How would you mitigate wildfire risk?

From what I’ve heard, although I need to confirm this, 90% of wildfires are starting near the roadside. That makes me think if we could just spend an extra million dollars to clean up vegetation surrounding the roads on a consistent basis, that would help us tremendously. We need to look at innovative solutions where we can spend a little bit of money and have a huge impact.

Resources:

You can view Matt Plummer’s candidate filings, including who his donors are, here.

---

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