Jim Harberson, former Sonoma County supervisor and Petaluma councilman, dies at 78

Jim Harberson, who blended a Southern gentleman’s manners with an engineer’s acumen and served a quarter century in elected office in Sonoma County, died Jan. 22 at age 78.

Harberson, a genuine and affable man who lived nearly 50 years in Petaluma, where he was a City Council member before being elected the south county supervisor, considered his signature political achievement the 1990 formation of a tax-supported agency that has preserved from development more than 120,000 acres of Sonoma County land.

“There aren’t many things you can say will last forever, but that’s one of them,” he said to about 300 guests at his 1999 retirement dinner in Petaluma.

A native of the foothills of North Carolina’s Blue Ridge Mountains and a Vietnam War veteran, Harberson was a sprinter at Georgia Tech and for decades afterward was an avid recreational runner and cyclist. Marathon precinct-walking helped him win seats on the Petaluma council and county Board of Supervisors.

“Nobody walked like I did,” Harberson told Harlan Osborne, a columnist with the Petaluma Argus-Courier last fall.

Harberson’s career in local politics, among the longest in recent history, spanned from his election to the Petaluma council in 1973 to his retirement in 1998 after 14 years on the county board.

Personal hallmarks throughout were his amiable nature and the respectful regard with which he treated even his political adversaries.

He and Paul Ingalls, a retired Press Democrat editor who covered the Board of Supervisors as a reporter during part of Harberson’s tenure, engaged in many political discussions over the decades. Ingalls recalled once remarking to Harberson that a certain local official seemed ill-equipped for the position, but he was certainly a nice guy.

Harberson responded, “There’s a whole lot of good politics in being a nice guy.”

“So true,” Ingalls said, “and especially so true of him.”

Former four-term county supervisor Paul Kelley of Healdsburg said Harberson was a “great colleague” endowed with a charming accent and genteel manners, and also the “ordered mind of an engineer.”

Kelley said he watched as Harberson, wielding the chairman’s gavel, managed supervisors’ public sessions, which were occasionally contentious.

“He had a good way of being in control,” Kelley said. “He was able to run a meeting, get the board’s business done while getting everyone heard.”

“He showed me how to take care of my district like he did,” Kelley said.

Harberson, who died at home, had open-heart surgery last spring and he was largely confined to bed in recent months because of debilitating pain from arthritis in his back.

James L. Harberson was born Feb. 24, 1942, in Hendersonville, North Carolina. He grew up there, then went to the Georgia Institute of Technology to earn a degree in mechanical engineering. His passion for that college, and its football team, and his fraternity brothers would stay with him all his life.

“He was a great lover of Georgia Tech, all things Georgia Tech. Especially football,” said his wife of five decades, Patty Harberson. She said that for many years as a proud alumnus he traveled back to the campus in Atlanta to attend a Yellow Jackets game and hang with his frat buddies.

While a student at Georgia Tech, Harberson trained in ROTC. The Vietnam War was escalating when he was activated into the U.S. Army in 1966 as a 2nd lieutenant in the Corps of Engineers.

Harberson went to Vietnam in 1967 and spent a year there. “He told me that he very much enjoyed the engineering that he did there,” Patty Harberson said. “But he wasn’t taken with the war and the danger they were in.

“He was very happy to get back stateside.”

Following his tour of duty, Lt. Harberson was stationed at Fort Leonard Wood in the Missouri Ozarks when he met his future wife, then a student at the University of Missouri.

They married in 1969 and went together to Fort Lauderdale, Florida, where he found work as a sales engineer with an air conditioning firm.

He hadn’t been there long when he learned of a job with a distinct bonus: it was located in Northern California. Harberson had spent time in San Francisco while he was at Georgia Tech and he’d loved the area.

He and Patty moved to a rental in San Rafael and he went to work as a sales engineer for a company that provided equipment to the petroleum industry

In 1972, the Harbersons set out to buy a home and found they could afford one in Petaluma. They’d been in the river town and former Egg Basket of the World only about a year when Jim Harberson decided to run for City Council.

An interest in political matters hadn’t just come to him. “He was interested in politics when he was a student,” Patty Harberson said. As she recalls, he was student body president at both his high school in North Carolina and at Georgia Tech.

He won a council seat and was 31 when he made his start as an elected official. He would serve on the Petaluma council for 11 years. During that time, he switched careers and began teaching math at Napa Valley College.

In 1984, southern Sonoma County’s widely beloved representative on the Board of Supervisors, Helen Putnam, died at the age of 75. She and Harberson had served together on the Petaluma City Council.

Harberson applied to complete her second four-year term on the board. Then-Gov. George Duekmejian, like Harberson, a Republican, appointed him to take Putnam’s seat.

Voters kept him on the board in 1986 and again in 1990 and 1994.

“He loved what he did,” Patty Harberson said. “That was his thing. He liked talking to people. He did it very easily.”

Jim Harberson did not seek reelection in 1998. He retired from the board and resumed teaching math part-time at the two-year college in Napa.

Petaluma’s Mike Kerns, who succeeded Harberson and served three terms on the board, said he was “a great guy with a great sense of humor” who thrived on camaraderie.

“The joke is that Jim never missed a free lunch,” Kerns said, referring to the lunches open to former supervisors during the Sonoma County Fair’s midsummer run.

The Sonoma County Agricultural Preservation and Open Space District, pushed by supervisors and funded with a quarter-cent sales tax approved by county voters in 1990, is the cornerstone of Harberson’s political legacy, Kerns said.

The agency’s land acquisitions maintained the county’s scenic vistas, and also saved farm operators by paying them cash for easements that assured their land would remain largely undeveloped in perpetuity.

Supervisor David Rabbitt, who succeeded Kerns in the south county seat, said he thoroughly enjoyed every interaction with Harberson, including the “institutional knowledge” of the 2nd District he offered.

Casually, the two talked football, with Harberson a steadfast Georgia Tech fan and Rabbitt partial to his alma matter, the University of Oregon.

Rabbitt, who is in his third term, said the county has grown more liberal since Harberson’s tenure in office, noting that government regulation has expanded since then, along with a more pronounced strain of “distrust in government.”

Media and political consultant Brian Sobel, who served on the Petaluma City Council from 1985 to 1994, said Harberson was by that time “a huge presence in south county.”

“He understood what made Petaluma and Sonoma County tick,” Sobel said. “Jim seemed to be everywhere,” he said, joking that Harberson “would attend the opening of an envelope.”

He had a simple formula for winning elections, Sobel said. “He outworked people,” tirelessly campaigning door to door, a strategy that “translates into votes.”

Harberson once offered his own footnote to his career as a local elected official. He said, “I don’t know if anybody will like the job as much as I did,” he said.

In addition to his wife in Petaluma, Harberson is survived by daughter Julia Harberson of Petaluma, son Jim Harberson of Colorado Springs, Colorado; sister Nancy Dotson and brother Lamar Harberson, both of Hendersonville, North Carolina, and four grandchildren.

A public celebration of Harberson’s life has been postponed due to the pandemic.

Memorial donations may be made to the Hendersonville Alumni Association Scholarship Fund, 1 Bearcat Blvd., Hendersonville, N.C. 28791 in memory of Jim Harberson, class of 1960; or Petaluma Valley Baptist Church, 580 Sonoma Mountain Parkway, Petaluma 94954.

You can reach Staff Writer Guy Kovner at 707-521-5457 or guy.kovner@pressdemocrat.com. On Twitter @guykovner. You can reach Staff Writer Chris Smith at 707 521-5211 and chris.smith@pressdemocrat.com.