Sam Farr: How Democracy Can Work

Of all the threats democracy faces, I think the greatest is the risk that we’ll lose faith in it. There have seldom been more reasons to do that. But there are also reasons to keep believing, and I thought this would be a good time to offer one: an inside look at what it’s like to be an elected official actually trying to do the right thing — and often succeeding.

My guest this time is Sam Farr. Sam devoted 44 years of his life to elected office at the local, state, and federal level. That included 24 years as the Congressman for the Central Coast of California, where he grew up in the seaside village of Carmel. 

Among his inspirations were his father, longtime state legislator Fred Farr, President John F. Kennedy, and the Peace Corps, which he joined as a young man. If that makes him sound like an idealist, I’d say that’s accurate, but it’s only half the picture.

The other half is very pragmatic, with an obsessive focus on the nuts and bolts of policy and politics.

As you’ll hear in this interview, when both of those halves come together, democracy can work. Sam has lots of great stories about how that happens, some of them funny, some very moving, and all of them hopeful.

— Spencer

About Sam Farr

Sam Farr, a Democrat and fifth-generation Californian, represented the state’s beautiful 20th Congressional District, which includes all of Monterey and San Benito Counties, and the southern parts of Santa Clara and Santa Cruz Counties, including the city of Santa Cruz. He grew up in this area, where his father, Fred Farr, was a State Senator for many years.

After college, Sam attended the Monterey Institute of International Studies where he learned Spanish, and signed up for the Peace Corps, serving two years in Colombia, South America. He was a California Assembly staffer for a decade, and then held elective office himself when he became a Monterey County Supervisor in 1975. In 1980, he was elected to the California State Assembly, where he was known for writing one of the nation’s strictest oil spill liability laws and being a champion for the organics industry. He was elected to the House of Representatives in 1993 by special election when the former Congressman Leon Panetta resigned to assume a position with the Clinton Administration. Sam was elected to a full term in Congress in 1994, and has continued to serve this district ever since. He is recognized as a leader in legislative efforts for educational excellence, environmental protection, and economic development.

Sam served on the powerful House Appropriations Committee which oversees the distribution of the federal budget. Sam was the Ranking Democrat and only Californian on the Agriculture, Rural Development, FDA and Related Agencies Subcommittee. He served as the Second Ranking Democrat on the Military Construction, Veterans Affairs and Related Agencies Subcommittee. Additionally, Sam was a member of the Subcommittee on Legislative Branch.

Through his work on the committee, Sam was able to promote and protect the interests of the Central Coast: promoting key agriculture research, lobbying for strict federal organic standards, facilitating the final agreement that conveyed the former Fort Ord to civilian hands, working to establish a veterans’ cemetery at Fort Ord, and helping maintain the Naval Postgraduate School and Defense Language Institute as premier educational institutions.

Sam represented the largest National Marine Sanctuary along the continental United States and has long been an advocate for our oceans. He was an original co-chair of the bipartisan House Oceans Caucus. In the late 1990s, Sam authored legislation to establish an oceans commission, patterned off the law that created the Stratton Commission in the 1960s. This Oceans Act was signed into law on Aug. 8, 2000 and in 2004 the U.S. Commission on Ocean Policy released a comprehensive inventory of our nation’s coastal and marine resources, ocean programs and policies, federal funding priorities, infrastructure requirements and technological opportunities.

In response to this report, Sam and his fellow House Ocean Caucus co-chairs introduced legislation to broadly overhaul our ocean management system, the Ocean Conservation, Education, and National Strategy for the 21st Century Act. This bill has been re-introduced in the 110th Congress as H.R. 21, OCEANS-21.

Sam worked throughout his tenure in Congress to help the Central Coast to manage and benefit from the closure of Fort Ord in Monterey County. Fort Ord was slated for closure two years before he came to Congress, in 1991. Sam facilitated the final agreement that conveyed the fort’s land to civilian hands at no cost and continued to secure funds for clean-up and economic development on the former base, including more than $65 million in defense conversion funds to start a new California State University at the closed base.

Sam was instrumental in securing a Defense Department finance center that employs more than a hundred federal workers; a new University of California science research center; a new housing project for the homeless; a veterans’ clinic; a business-industrial airport; two new public golf courses; 8,000 acres of new federal parkland, and a one-stop job training and employment center.

Sam strongly believes that the tens of thousands of veterans who served at Fort Ord during its more than fifty years as an active Army training base deserve a final resting place on the grounds of the former Fort. He worked with the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs and the California Department of Veterans Affairs to establish a veteran’s cemetery at Fort Ord.

In addition to the House Oceans Caucus, Sam was Co-Chair of: the Congressional Travel and Tourism Caucus, the Congressional Organic Caucus, the Defense Communities Caucus and the Unexploded Ordinance Caucus. He also served as the chairman of California’s Democratic Congressional Delegation in the early 2000s.

Sam was born on the 4th of July, 1941. He graduated from Carmel High School and earned a Bachelor of Science degree from Willamette University in Salem, Oregon. He and his wife Shary are longtime residents of Carmel, and have one grown daughter, Jessica. They are also the proud grandparents of two seventh generation Californians, Ella and Zachary Fisher.