WASHINGTON — Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack has given Karen Ross a daunting job, and California farmers a bigger voice, by selecting the former Sacramento-area resident as his new chief of staff.
The longtime head of the California Association of Winegrape Growers, Ross now helps run a sprawling federal agency of more than 100,000 employees. It's backbreaking and politically delicate work, but it's also a boon for the Californians who contend they need one of their own in a top Agriculture Department job.
"She's going to be in the room when a lot of these big decisions get made, and that's just really key," Zachary Coile, spokesman for Democratic Sen. Barbara Boxer, said Friday.
With an annual budget exceeding $96 billion, the Agriculture Department is one of the nation's largest cabinet agencies. Through its crop subsidies, loans and school lunches, among other ventures, it's entangled in many people's lives.
The department can also get whipsawed politically, and it's a notoriously challenging agency to administer. Investigators and minority farmers still blast the department's civil rights record. Food safety programs are eminently fallible. Congressional pressure can get intense.
"We know she's the best person to be in that position," Kim Ledbetter-Bronson, chair of the California Association of Winegrape Growers' board of directors, said Friday. "She's very driven, and she has a work ethic like steel."
Ledbetter-Bronson, who is also vice president of the Lodi-based Vino Farms, added that Ross "has an ability to really take in all the information she needs to make a decision." A Nebraska native and University of Nebraska graduate, Ross served as president of the winegrape growers' group since 1996.
"I guess Pinot noir is my favorite, but I really like sparkling wine, too," Ross once told Wines & Vines magazines, when asked about her wine choices. "And don't tell anyone, but I also like an occasional martini."
Ross previously served as vice president of the Agricultural Council of California. She also knows national-level politics, having also worked for a Nebraska senator and for the 1988 presidential campaign of the Midwestern state's then-Sen. Bob Kerrey.
Ross replaces Iowan John Norris, who served as Vilsack's first chief of staff until being nominated to a slot on the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. The Senate confirmed Norris on Dec. 29.
Norris and Vilsack previously served together when Vilsack was governor of Iowa. Norris, in turn, was only one of a number of Midwesterners that Vilsack surrounded himself starting last January.
Of 54 Obama administration secretarial and presidential appointments to the Agriculture Department through May, only two individuals had any discernible California background. The poor patronage showing for the nation's leading farm state — albeit one less dependent than others on government subsidies — chafed Californians.
For nearly a year, Boxer, other California lawmakers and myriad California farm organizations actively urged Obama administration officials to appoint Ross. In essence, she had become the consensus candidate among California's farm interests.
"There were a number of letters and calls made on her behalf," noted Bret Rumbeck, spokesman for Rep. Jim Costa, D-Fresno.
Costa and a fellow member of the House Agriculture Committee, Rep. Dennis Cardoza, D-Merced, coordinated a congressional letter last February touting Ross for the job of deputy secretary of agriculture. Ross was reportedly a finalist for that position, which ultimately went to Kathleen Merrigan, an assistant professor at Tufts University in Boston and an advocate for sustainable agriculture and organic farming.
In early December, though, Ross quietly began work as one of several senior advisers to Vilsack. Ledbetter-Bronson indicated the assumption at the time was that Ross would shortly be elevated to the job of chief of staff.
The California Association of Winegrape Growers is now embarking on a search to find Ross's replacement.
Ross could not be reached to comment Friday.
