The County maintains approximately 595 miles of roadway. The easiest way to see if a road is County maintained is go to GISWEB and turn on the “County Maintained Roads” layer under the “Transportation” layer group, all roads the County maintains will highlight in green on the map. http://gisapps/gisweb/
The Road Operations Engineering section manages records for the County maintained road system, inquiries may be made through our DPW Web email system at: dpwweb@santacruzcounty.us
Accepting Roads into the County Maintained Road System
To be in the County maintained road system, a roadway must be formally accepted for maintenance by the Board of Supervisors. Due to declining revenues for road maintenance and increases in construction cost, the County is unable to maintain its current road network in good condition. For this reason, roads are generally no longer accepted into the County maintained system, because even a new road will be an additional maintenance liability to an already overburdened system.
Under certain circumstances such as where a road provides a significant access benefit to the general public, acceptance into the County maintained road system may still be considered. In such cases, a road would need to be constructed to meet all current County design standards.
County Maintained Road Abandonment
For smaller neighborhood streets where residents wish to take over maintenance of a County roadway, there is a process known as “abandonment” by which streets or portions of streets can be removed from the County maintained system. Such requests are handled by the Real Property section of Public Works and must have complete agreement by all affected property owners as well as agreement of DPW Road Operations Engineering before being presented to the Board of Supervisors for consideration.
Public, Private, and County Roadways
Public vs. Private roadways are a separate issue from County maintained roadways having to do with how the road was legally created by the original landowner. All roadways accepted into the County maintained system are public, however there are many public roadways that are not County maintained. This topic has been a source of confusion in inquiries to the County, so we have created the “Is this a County Maintained Road?” informational article at the link below to help explain the issue.
Public Works only keeps records on County maintained roadways. We receive many inquiries from the public about non-County roads (public and private), these roads are outside our purview, records research and disputes on such roads are private civil matters. In an effort to assist the public seeking information on non-County roads, we have provided some self-help resources below. The “Recorded Map Lookup” document shows how to search for survey record maps, and the “Finding Road Right of Way Information on Record Maps” document explains how to find road right of way information on a survey record map.