Marin County public works director resigns

Marin County’s public works director has resigned after a tenure of less than four years.

Rosemarie Gaglione’s exit was not announced by the county. County Executive Derek Johnson confirmed that she resigned effective Dec. 2.

“Ms. Gaglione made the difficult decision to leave county employment after four years to spend more time with her family and continue to serve the public and explore new career opportunities,” Johnson said. “The county wishes the best for Ms. Gaglione in her next career steps.”

Gaglione did not respond to requests for comment.

Johnson said Chris Blunk, the assistant public works director, will lead the department “until such time as a national recruitment effort is undertaken and a successor is identified.”

Gaglione, who was hired in February 2021, was Marin County’s only female public works director. She was paid $277,877 a year plus benefits to run the department, which has about 255 employees and an annual budget of nearly $83 million.

Before coming to Marin, Gaglione was the director of public works for Oxnard for about two years and for Goleta for nearly four years.

The county is planning to conduct an organizational and operational assessment of the Department of Public Works as part of a larger review of county government. In October, county supervisors, at Johnson’s recommendation, allocated $500,000 to hire a consultant for the review.

The assessment will initially focus on the Department of Public Works, the Marin County Community Development Agency and the Marin Housing Authority. Johnson said at the time that having county purchasing, hazardous waste response and search-and-rescue operations overseen by the public works department, as Marin County does, is unusual.

Johnson declined to comment on whether the plans for the assessment influenced Gaglione’s decision to resign. County supervisors either didn’t respond to requests for comment or declined to comment.

Johnson was hired in February. The prior fall, the county changed its county administrator position to county executive, giving the boss increased authority to evaluate the performance of department heads.

When Johnson proposed the assessment, Gaglione pledged her support.

“I”m very excited about this,” she told supervisors during their Oct. 15 meeting. “I think the attitude adjustments are being made. We all want to work together. We want to break down those silos, but we need that external view. So I support this and am looking forward to it.”

At that same meeting, supervisors authorized spending up to $250,000 for a consultant to provide training and support for some of the newer engineers in the public works office. The staff report on the expenditure said that coupled with an increased workload, “the division also experienced a period of high employee turnover in recent years.”

“These factors have led to the delay in delivering some projects,” the report said.

“A couple of years ago, we were really short quite a number of engineers,” Gaglione said in October. “I don’t think there were four or five in engineering when I got here. It was a problem. There are a lot of projects that were delayed because of a shortage of engineers.”

Gaglione said that since then, however, a number of engineers had been hired.

“We probably have 20 now, and we still have a few positions to fill,” she said. “We’re in a much better place.”

About 13.5% of the department’s positions are vacant.