Tracy Press

Just who is Jerry McNerney, the man running against incumbent Richard Pombo?

Defeating Rep. Richard Pombo, R-Tracy, has for more than two years consumed the life of 55-year-old Jerry McNerney.

The Democratic challenger slowed his wind energy consulting work and lived mostly off savings and a small inheritance while he researched, met leaders and formed his vision for California’s 11th Congressional District, McNerney told the Tracy Press this week.

“I saw the country was going in a very bad direction,” said McNerney of his 2004 decision to run for Congress. “I thought the leadership in the Congress had been irresponsible — Congress hadn’t held the president accountable. Then my son called and said there’s no one running against Richard Pombo, and that was the tipping point.”

The write-in candidate from Pleasanton received just enough primary votes to challenge Pombo in the 2004 election. He mustered 39 percent of the vote against the Republican that year, but polls show his chances are much better this time around.

“I have an organization now — I have people to do all the things that need to be done. We have money and we have name recognition,” said McNerney, who added that the electorate’s mood has changed since 2004.

When McNerney comfortably defeated Steve Filson and Steve Thomas in the June 2006 primary, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee considered his views too liberal for him to seriously challenge Pombo and decided against spending serious dough on the race. But McNerney persisted, hiring savvy support staff that mounted an Internet-based campaign that has snagged donations from across the country using the blogger-coined moniker, “We all live in Richard Pombo’s district.”

“I clearly saw the need to have a net-roots campaign, so we kept our eyes open for the best people to help run that campaign,” he said.

That campaign dovetailed with millions of dollars spent over the past year by environmental groups working to unseat Pombo, who as chair of the House Resources Committee has worked to rewrite habitat protection provisions in the Endangered Species Act and drill for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

McNerney has never represented anyone at any level of government, and his low profile has helped him stay clean of the type of dirt on which political muckrakers usually feast.

The self-published hobby writer with a mathematics PhD lists ancient Greek philosophers Aristotle and Plato, 16th-century German philosopher Immanuel Kant and German idealist philosopher G.F.W. Hagel among his influences.

“I believe that mankind has a destiny that hasn’t yet been fulfilled,” said McNerney this week. “I think mankind has a much higher role to play than fighting wars and having squabbles. We have to get along or we’re going to destroy ourselves, and we’ve got some immense problems that are facing us.”

McNerney listed global warming as one of the biggest threats to California and the world economy that needs to be addressed.

“We’re going to be facing a real serious crunch with oil shortages, and we need to find new ways to create energy and become sustainable,” he said.

“Those are immense challenges, and I don’t think we’re facing those challenges yet. I think we can make the world a heck of a better place if we do face those challenges.”

McNerney says he’s been helping solve those challenges since 1979, when he took a job as a contractor designing wind turbine control systems in the “baby field” of wind energy for Sandia Laboratories Group in his hometown of Albuquerque, N.M.. He said he spent three of his five years there working on a national security project for the government.

In 1985, McNerney moved to Massachusetts for a job with U.S. Windpower, which relocated McNerney and his family to Livermore in 1990 before firing him in 1994. The company filed for bankruptcy in 1996, costing hundreds of jobs.

“It was a whistleblower situation,” McNerney said. “They weren’t checking engineering calculations. They would trust a young engineer to calculate the most important loads and for the most important parts of the machines, and I knew that was a problem and I repeatedly told them (that)…. If they had listened to me they might still be in business.”

McNerney stayed in California and began consulting, helping Palo Alto-based Electric Power Research Institute move from spinning disc meters to microprocessors. He worked remotely for the Seattle-based Wind Turbine Company.

“He was the highest paid guy in our company because he essentially knew more than I did about wind energy,” said Wind Turbine president and co-founder Larry Miles, who said McNerney, along with most of his employees, were let go by the company in 2003 when it hit hard times. “We’re struggling to find investor capital — capital markets for wind technology in this country are not the best.”

McNerney said it’s up to private industry to address the capital shortage, but he said he would like to give government incentives to companies that invest in new energy technology.

If elected Tuesday, which McNerney said is a “better than 50/50” chance, the first thing he said he wants to do as a congressman is work toward changing laws that prevent the government from negotiating drug prices with drug companies.

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