The Redd Blog

Published July 2026 | The Redd Blog

I have a rock sitting on my desk right now.

It’s not decorative. It’s not sentimental. It’s the rock that a Humboldt County road maintainer kicked up while I was driving behind it, and it cracked the transmission pan — the metal housing bolted to the bottom of the transmission that holds the filter and fluid. I leaked ATF all the way back to town without knowing what was wrong until I got there. The repair cost me almost $3,000. I was without my car for over two weeks.

I went back out later that day and found the rock. I kept it, because I needed something concrete — literally — to hold onto while I figured out who was responsible for what just happened to me.

Here’s what I landed on: the county should be liable. And not just for what I actually lost.

What a Road Maintainer Actually Does

If you’ve never seen one of these machines, a road maintainer — sometimes called a grader — is a piece of heavy equipment used to keep gravel roads in shape. It drags the loose gravel and dirt toward the center of the road, builds it into a ridge, then goes back over and flattens it out. The result is a smoother surface and better drainage. It’s necessary work.

It also kicks up rocks. Big ones. Fast ones. At low-profile vehicles that have no chance of getting out of the way.

I drive a Corolla. I sit close to the ground. The maintainer was working on a county road when I came up behind it. The rock came off the road surface — disturbed by county equipment, on a county road, during county maintenance activity — and hit my car.

That’s not an accident. That’s a foreseeable consequence of the work being done.

The Problem with “Actual Damages”

When most people talk about suing for property damage, the conversation starts and ends with actual damages — what it cost to fix the thing that got broken. In my case, that’s about $3,000.

But actual damages don’t tell the whole story.

They don’t account for the two weeks I spent figuring out rides. They don’t cover the time I spent on the phone with insurance, in the shop, and rescheduling things that needed to be done. They don’t touch the stress of not knowing if I could afford the repair, or what I’d do if the damage had been worse. They don’t capture the fact that I had to spend hours of my life on a problem that only exists because county equipment disturbed a rock on a county road.

Actual damages are what it cost in dollars. They’re not what it cost in life.

The Case for Multiplied Damages

Some legal frameworks allow for damages beyond what you actually lost. Punitive damages exist to punish bad behavior and deter it from happening again. Treble damages — triple the actual loss — show up in some consumer protection and antitrust cases for the same reason.

My argument is simpler than any of that. I’m not saying the county acted maliciously. I’m saying that when a government entity uses tax dollars to perform work that predictably causes harm to taxpayers, actual damages alone don’t create accountability.

If a private contractor damaged your vehicle the same way, you’d sue them. You’d win. You’d probably get your costs covered, and depending on the facts, maybe more.

But counties and local governments often operate behind shields of governmental immunity — legal doctrines that limit or eliminate their liability for exactly this kind of thing. The result is that you’re out $3,000, two weeks of your life, and a significant amount of frustration, and the county pays nothing and changes nothing.

The fix I’d propose: allow individuals to sue county governments for road hazard damage caused by maintenance activity, up to six times actual damages. Six times isn’t arbitrary. It’s meant to account for the parts of harm that actual damages miss — the time, the disruption, the inconvenience — and to give governments a real financial reason to think about how they operate equipment on public roads.

“But That Would Cost the County Too Much”

Maybe. Or maybe counties would start putting up better signage, using escort vehicles during active maintenance, or simply being more careful about what their equipment does to the road surface in front of oncoming traffic.

We fund these roads. We fund the equipment. We fund the operators. At minimum, we should be able to recover something when that equipment causes us harm.

The Rock Is Still on My Desk

I don’t know what I’m going to do with it yet. Part of me wants to mail it to the county office with a bill attached. Part of me just wants to make sure I write this down before I move on, because I think this matters past my own inconvenience.

Gravel roads are everywhere in rural Iowa. Maintainers run all summer. Low-clearance vehicles get damaged. And most of the time, the person driving just takes the loss and moves on because fighting the county feels impossible.

I’d like that to change.

What do you think — should you be able to sue the county for damage caused by road maintenance? There’s a poll running through July 25th. Vote here. Subscribe for $1.99/month to see the results in Issue #3.