County road commissioner: Counties of Madera and Tehama.

Assembly Member Tangipa, joined by Senator Dahle, advances a narrowly tailored option to reorganize county road administration in Tehama and Madera by allowing each county’s Board of Supervisors to abolish the road commissioner’s office if all duties are transferred to the county director of the public works department. The measure contemplates the county DPW director assuming oversight of road-related responsibilities, with civil engineering tasks handled by a registered engineer under the director’s authority. This approach is presented as a local, county-specific arrangement rather than a statewide reform.

The proposal creates two new local provisions applying to Tehama and Madera counties that authorize the abolition of the road commissioner’s office and the transfer of its duties to the county DPW director, notwithstanding other laws. The director is not required to hold a special permit, registration, or license, while civil engineering functions that would have been performed by the road commissioner would be performed by a registered civil engineer acting under the director. This framework aligns with existing practice in a subset of California counties that permit transferring road-commissioner duties to the DPW director, but it uses a special-statute approach targeted to these two counties. The measure includes findings asserting the necessity of a special statute due to local needs, including difficulty in recruiting qualified candidates for the road-commissioner position. It also states there is no state appropriation or fiscal-committee requirement.

Implementation would be driven by local actions, with the Board of Supervisors perhaps adopting a resolution or ordinance to abolish the road-commissioner office once all duties have been transferred to the DPW director. Day-to-day governance would shift to the DPW director, and the licensed civil engineer would supervise engineering work under that director’s authority. The measure does not specify a transition timeline, and the actual staffing and project-delivery impacts would depend on county decisions, labor agreements, and internal reallocation of duties. Enforcement and oversight would occur at the county level, with no centralized state enforcement mechanism or funding accompanying the change.

In a broader policy context, the bill situates itself within a pattern of allowing county-specific rearrangements of road administration to address local staffing and governance needs. The accompanying findings emphasize local circumstances as justification for a special statute rather than a general reform, and the fiscal language clarifies that any transition costs would be borne by the counties themselves without state funding. Overall, the measure delineates a path for Tehama and Madera to consolidate road responsibilities under the DPW director while preserving licensure requirements for engineering work, leaving broader questions about process, contracts, and governance to local decision-makers.