Brian Kahn, briefly Sonoma County’s youngest supervisor, dies in Montana at 73

Brian Kahn, a driven and insatiably curious citizen of the world who worked to uplift the human condition and for the blink of an eye was the youngest person ever to serve on the Sonoma County Board of Supervisors, died Thursday on a hunting trip with his wife in their adopted state of Montana.

Kahn’s love of nature and his urge to bring people together fueled his wide-ranging successes as a conservationist, public servant, candidate for Congress, documentary filmmaker, author and journalist, mediation-focused attorney, radio broadcaster and advocate for the environment, youth and the search for common ground. He was 73.

“He was a remarkable guy, a creative thinker and someone who was always looking for ways to improve the world,” said longtime friend Clay Clement, a Santa Rosa attorney.

Kahn and west Sonoma County’s Eric Koenigshofer both were in their 20s when they and the late Helen Rudee were elected to the Board of Supervisors in the late 1970s and constituted what was then a quite novel conservation-minded majority.

“He was a warm guy — and he was real,” Koenigshofer said. “He was very intelligent about sorting things out. He also had just a great, dry sense of humor. It was a pleasure working with him, and I learned a lot from him.”

Through the four years that Koenigshofer and Kahn, then both bachelors, co-led the county board with Rudee they were known variously as the Young Turks, the Youth Corps or, to their chagrin, the K-K Boys.

Friend, fellow attorney and former Congressman Doug Bosco of Santa Rosa said of Kahn, “My image of him will always be of the good-looking, brash young guy who turned our crusty old Board of Supervisors upside down many years ago.”

All his life an avid outdoorsman, Kahn began the day Thursday with his wife and former Sonoma Valley resident Sandra Dal Poggetto at a friend’s deer-hunting cabin outside the central Montana town of Lewistown. The couple lived since 1989 in Helena, about 200 miles west of the cabin.

On Thursday Kahn and Dal Poggetto ventured separately from the cabin, staying in touch by cellphone. Their son, Dylan Kahn of Oregon, said his father took a walk and returned to the cabin before his mother did.

She walked in to find Kahn on the floor, lifeless. Dylan Kahn, 32, said it appears his father suffered heart failure possibly related to Parkinson’s disease, with which he was diagnosed more than a dozen years ago.

Dylan Kahn said the disease progressed only slowly in his father, who even recently was active though “a bit more frail and wobbly than he used to be.”

The depth and breadth of Brian Kahn’s life experiences, interests and achievements were stunning. Having grown up mostly in Sonoma Valley, Kahn graduated from SVHS in 1965, became a varsity boxer at UC Berkeley, then stepped up to lead the team when the coach died during a match.

Well read and drawn to conservation and generally progressive politics, Kahn became an attorney and then a district representative for late Santa Clara legislator John Vasconcellos.

Few people in Sonoma County had heard of Kahn when, in early 1976, then-Gov. Jerry Brown appointed him to fill the 1st District seat on the Sonoma County Board of Supervisors vacated by Ig Vella, who’d resigned to become manager of the Sonoma County Fair.

The day Kahn was sworn in he was barely 29, making him at that point the youngest person ever to serve on the five-person panel responsible for directing all functions of the County of Sonoma. His term was to expire at the end of 1976.

He ran for a full, four-year term, and he won. He was sworn in the same day as fellow election victors Koenigshofer, who at 26 eclipsed Kahn as the youngest person ever elected to Sonoma’s Board of Supervisors, and Rudee, a 58-year-old veteran of the Santa Rosa School Board.

The county board had its first woman ever, its first two 20-somethings and a rare liberal, pro-conservation majority.

Youngsters Kahn and Koenigshofer saw eye-to-eye on most issues, but not all. Perhaps most notably, Kahn took heat from some environmentalists for his support of the construction of Warm Springs Dam in the hills between Healdsburg and the coast.

Kahn was just shy of 30 when his colleagues elected him chairman of the board in 1978. The following year he made a dramatic announcement: he would not run for another term and instead would seek the Democratic Party nomination to oppose Don Clausen, the Republican from Humboldt County who for nearly 20 years had represented the North Coast in Congress.

Kahn lost the June 1980 primary to fellow Democrat Norma Bork, who then lost the general election to incumbent Clausen. That December, both Kahn and Koenigshofer stepped down from the Board of Supervisors.

In a profile in The Press Democrat, reporter and now Executive Editor Catherine Barnett wrote that the pair had “worked together to squelch growth in rural areas, nettling developers accustomed to pro-business supervisors.”

Kahn then ventured more often to one of his favorite places for hunting and fishing: Montana. His name returned to headlines early in 1982 with his appointment, again from Gov. Jerry Brown, to the state Fish and Game Commission.

Kahn would serve on the panel through 1986. In one of its more disputed and well-publicized actions, championed by Kahn, the commission voted in favor of attempting to avoid the extinction of the California condor by capturing all known remaining condors and placing them at the Los Angeles and San Diego zoos and the San Diego Wild Animal Park.

The gamble worked. Captive birds bred in captivity, their offspring were released to the wild and the species recovered.

While active on the Fish and Game Commission, Kahn exercised his passion to educate himself and others on the global need for greater preservation of wildlife. In 1983 he produced an acclaimed video, “Return of the Desert Bighorn.”

With that project completed, he traveled several times to the Soviet Union to research and film “A Thousand Cranes,” an award-winning documentary on international efforts to save the Siberian Crane.

In 1988, Kahn turned from documentary filmmaker to journalist and became the first American columnist for a Soviet newspaper. His pieces appeared also in the Los Angeles Times.

The following year, 1989, he departed California for good. He and Sandra moved to Helena after he was hired to lead the Nature Conservancy in Montana. The Kahns retreated often to a cabin they purchased near West Yellowstone.

In addition to his work in conservation advocacy, the tirelessly intrigued Kahn wrote books that include 2019’s “Rediscovery America,” which grew from a cross-country journey he took with two Russian journalists. Among his other books were “Real Common Sense,” which he subtitled “Using our founding values to reclaim our nation and stop the radical right from hijacking America.”

His son said he was highly distressed by the Trump presidency.

The past 14 years, Brian Kahn was the radio host of the “Home Ground” program carried by more than 50 stations in the Rocky Mountain region. He interviewed all manner of interesting people on an endless range of topics.

Just a month ago, it brought headlines across the country when former Montana governor and Republican National Committee chair Marc Racicot told Kahn in a broadcast interview that he will vote for Joe Biden, not fellow Republican Trump, for president.

In 2009, Kahn’s impressive collection of honors and awards grew with his accepting of the Montana Governor's Award for the Humanities.

As the Parkinson’s disease slowly advanced, Kahn was preparing to let go of the radio program. “I think this was going to be his last year,” his son said.

Summing up his father, he said, “He was a pretty remarkable dude.”

In addition to his wife in Montana and his son in Oregon, Brian Kahn is survived by his brothers, Steve Kahn of Davis and Tim Kahn of Shelburne, Vermont, and his son from an earlier marriage, Brice Kahn of Concord.