Interview on KQNY 91.9 FM in Quincy

Transcript

Tommy: Welcome back to the program, and we are speaking now with Richard Minner. He is running for our newly redrawn First District Congressional seat here in Northern California. And welcome to KQNY, Richard.

Richard: Hey, thanks for having me. I really appreciate the invite. This is first time running for really any office, because this part of my, I think, strength is I’m a non-politician.

Tommy: Cool, and you’re listed on the ballot as no party preference.

Richard: Correct, I’ve been no party preference since I found out when I was about 22 that you didn’t need a party to vote. So I switched to what they used to call decline to state, and then they changed it to no party preference, which is a little better. And so that’s how I’ve been for 40 years.

Tommy: All right, what we’d like you to do is take a few minutes here, introduce yourself to our listeners, and let us know what your background and experience are and how they’ve prepared you to serve as our member of Congress here in the first district.

Richard: Yes, so I just retired on April 17th. That’s my last day. I’ll be 65 on May 6th.

And I’ve been a software engineer and then architect for 40-some years. And so I’ve been dealing with very complicated systems and had a keen interest in the political structure and dysfunction of our country for most of my adult life, or actually since I was a teenager, really. What I bring is, I’ve said this on the website, the engineering sensibility is wanting things to work.

And you’re not worried so much about which solution is going to end up being the right one. So you kind of approach a problem with understanding your limitations. Architecture that I moved into like the last 20 years is about how all the pieces fit together and all the compromises needed.

So I’ve been doing that, dealing with these very complicated systems, a lot of stakeholders and different opinions and approaches and all that sort of thing. So that’s what I bring to it. I’ve seen the dysfunction and the inherently partisan nature of the way we do things right now and decided, you know, I think there’s a better way, so I’m going to offer it.

Tommy: All right. And what do you see as being the major challenges, concerns, things we should be dealing with here in not just the first district, but the state of California and the nation? And it was a pretty wide open question here, but what kinds of approaches would you plan to bring to Congress to deal with some of those things?

Richard: Absolutely. The main thing, and again, it’s explained in some detail on the site, is I believe in the actual representation of the citizens. And right now we have a system where that doesn’t really happen for anywhere from 30 to 49% of a given district because the way we structure things is these very close races and then somebody wins, and then if you’re on the other side, you kind of get lip service and you don’t really get much.

And so that’s been the game. Gerrymandering, you know, rigged districts has come to the fore lately and it’s become a real battle. Most seats in Congress are considered safe for one party or the other.

So, seeing that with Prop 50 kind of put me over the line. I said, you know, this is getting ridiculous. Then I found out that I had been moved from District 4 to District 1 in Santa Rosa because they’re both part of the gerrymander.

So what I bring is a nonpartisan perspective of wanting to represent all the people in a given district because there’s really no other way to get them representation. And so what I outline is a district advisory council as a semi-formal body somewhere around 20 people drawn from the district trying to represent as many political views as possible. And the only requirement is the civility.

As long as you can get together, express yourself, not interrupt other people, and try to understand why we disagree as opposed to just assuming why. And that’s sort of my main approach.

Tommy: All right, okay, so if we look into something like that, a citizen advisory council is saying about 20 people.

Richard: Approximately, I don’t know yet exactly what we’re gonna have to do

Tommy: I could see about 20,000 people wanting to serve on it. What would be your selection criteria or mechanism? How would that work that people would be a part of this?

Richard: Yeah, no, it would be definitely an application process that people could sign up with some self-identifying where their views are. And I’m looking at trying to put together actually a pilot right now to kind of flesh this out a bit. The idea would be, if at all possible, you can group people by their political leanings and their approach to things, and then each of those subgroups, I would put it to them and say, okay, we’ve got about 20,000.

It might be, but hopefully not that many. If it gets [to 20,000] we’ll have to figure something out. But if you got a few hundred, say, or even a thousand divided by 20, you got these groups and you basically hook them up and you say, okay, you guys get together and figure it out.

It’s like you’re gonna do your own voting or your own polling or whatever to come up with one to represent each of these subgroups.

Tommy: Okay, and how would they, with the different groups within this body or as it is, how would you respond to their concerns? How would that translate into speaking to your agenda?

Richard: Yeah, well, my agenda is really to give voice to the range of views. Because my main goal here is to try to do something a little different. Instead of coming to Congress with an agenda and with a preset, like, what we need to do is this, more of this, less of that, whatever, is to say, look, these are complicated problems.

This is back to my bias as an engineer and an architect. I know most problems, you come into it, you don’t know everything. And I learned over, you know, painful mistakes over decades that if you come in with, oh, I know what to do here, you’re gonna get burned.

And I feel like the country’s been getting burned because we just go back and forth. So one side says, we gotta do this. And then they finally, they get some control and they do it and it goes poorly.

So then the citizens go, enough of that. And then they go the other way. So rather than that is to express these differences in Congress.

And so I call it a bridge building within the district and between the district and Congress to take the range of views and distill them down and present them in Congress, into the congressional record and basically call out these oversimplified solutions to things and say that you’re not taking it into account. I’ve got constituents who raise this issue and this and this and this. So we’ve got to find a compromise solution.

Tommy: So to wrap us up here, how do you see things playing out in Congress either if we keep doing things the way we’ve always done them or if we’re going to take a completely new approach like you’re suggesting?

Richard: Definitely appreciate it. People say the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result. So the way we normally do these congressional races, a lot of people don’t pay much attention to the primary because it’s like not the real election.

They’re thinking, oh yeah, congressional election, November midterms, okay, got it. But the June 2nd primary is actually the critical piece because that’s where we pick the top two that go head to head. And the way it normally works, the turnout in a midterm primary is 30%, maybe 35 if something exciting happens.

Maybe people get excited about what I’m doing, we’ll get the turnout up. And so a lot of people, they get the ballot, they look at it and they don’t even necessarily, they have a little name recognition and party recognition and they vote for their party. So what we expect to happen here is James Gallagher is the one and only Republican in the primary.

He’s also running in the special election, which is a confusion for four counties, not Plumas. And so you expect the Republican will get 30, 35%, and then Democrats will fight for second spot. So then you’ll go to the general and you’ll have the Republican against the Democrat and then the Democrat wins by five to 10 points, because that’s how the district is structured.

So that’s the normal way. And what I’m offering is willing and able to serve a different path, which is if enough Republicans and probably leaning folks in the new district one recognize it’s not gonna be a Republican in November, with a 10 point lead, which is about what the district is, it just doesn’t happen except in extreme circumstances. This is a midterm, there’s no coattails, there’s no other things.

And things are so partisan, it seems really long. So what I’m pushing is give me a shot, if I get in that first or second spot [in the primary], I think I can explain this further in the longer campaign to November and actually take the seat and then bring these ideas to Congress.

Tommy: Great, well, if you just tuned in, we’ve been speaking with Richard Minner. He’s a software engineer and architect and he’s running in the primary for our congressional seat for our first district here. Richard, thank you for joining us today.

Richard: Thank you so much for inviting me.