The Mendocino County Board of Supervisors earlier this week moved forward with plans to put a one-cent sales tax on the November ballot to fund road repairs around unincorporated parts of the county.
At Tuesday’s meeting, the Board of Supervisors voted 4‑1, with Supervisor Madeline Cline dissenting, to advance to the next step in the process of drafting the ballot measure.
According to a proposal written by Howard Dashiell, the director of the Mendocino County Department of Transportation, the measure would allow the department to improve county roads that they don’t have the funding for.
The proposal says that with the sales tax increase and the support of some funds from the state, the department would have an additional $5.5-6 million per year to repair about 337 miles of roads in the county.
With the help of the Mendocino Council of Governments, county staff, and consultant Curtis Below from the Oakland-based consulting firm FM3, a survey was conducted in late 2025 to determine whether voters would support a ballot measure proposing a one-cent sales tax increase.
In this survey, 660 people in the county were asked if they would vote yes on the measure. The findings show that support for the measure reached approximately two-thirds at the time the survey was conducted. A tax measure for a specific purpose like repairing roads would require a two-thirds majority for approval.
Supervisor John Haschak pondered who would be drafting the language of the measure and how the content of the measure would be communicated to the public.
“Getting the word out to people, are there ideas about who might rally around this? Is that part of your survey?” Haschak asked the FM3 consultant.
“What we do is we just take the opinions of voters. We don’t engage different community stakeholders or ask their willingness to participate in a community-based campaign,” Below said, adding that the county would also be responsible for drafting the language of the ballot measure.
Haschak was supportive of the potential measure but also expressed concern due to the financial struggles he has witnessed in Mendocino County. But he also said that the Board of Supervisors has been discussing the issue of county roads for a long time.
“This is an issue that the board has looked at for quite a few years, and MCOG has looked at it quite a few times, and we’ve finally got the research done, and this is kind of the time to do something. I think we should take it to the voters and have them decide what they want to do with it,” Haschak said.
Cline, who represents District 1, which includes Potter Valley, also known as “pothole valley” among some locals, said that the state has been shortchanging rural areas like Mendocino County.
“All of this funding is being collected by the state through the gas tax, and we’re not receiving our fair share, so the county is getting blamed for not keeping up with road maintenance and being derelict in that duty,” Cline said. “We are not talking about the broader conversation of how there’s declining revenue through the gas tax plus the formula is set up to shortchange us as a rural community.”
Supervisor Ted Williams, who has been discussing allocating more funding to county roads in recent board meetings, said that a sales tax measure would be a way of asking voters if they want to collectively “buy better roads.”
“If the answer is no, we live with what we have. But when was the last time we asked the public if they want to buy better roads?” Williams said.
But Cline, who said that her constituents in District 1 have been distrustful of the government’s past efforts on county roads, said she would not ask her constituents to consider this measure at this time.
“I will say that the First District does have the worst roads in the county of Mendocino … but there has not been any track record improving their roads,” Cline said. “I understand the perspective of putting this in front of them and it’s their decision, but there’s no buy-in from them that the county is going to take care of their roads.”
Haschak said the county will likely have draft language of the proposed sales tax measure ready by this summer for the Board of Supervisors to vote on before the November election.
The next Board of Supervisors meeting is scheduled for 9 a.m. on March 24 in the board chambers at 501 Low Gap Road, Ukiah. Meetings can also be watched virtually via Zoom. More information, including agendas, is available at this website.
This story originally appeared in The Mendocino Voice.