While Rosario Rodriguez, who’ll take office Jan. 6 as a new member of the Sacramento County Board of Supervisors, calls herself “a bona fide workaholic,” a vicious heckler interrupted her juggling act last year. 

As she was simultaneously running Sutter Street Taqueria (which she founded), serving as mayor on the Folsom City Council and running for the 4th district supervisor seat she won outright in the March 2024 primary, she was being treated for Stage 1 breast cancer, which had been diagnosed in November 2023. 

Rodriguez was 54 when she underwent a double mastectomy and began chemotherapy, with its predictable side effects: hair loss and some “really bad days” after each treatment, which ran from Dec. 14, 2023, through March 30. 

“But I never missed a city council meeting,” she says proudly in the clear, can-do voice that accompanies her up-tempo and surprisingly candid demeanor (no one had asked her to supply the dates of her chemo; being specific just seems to be an integral part of her persona).

This wasn’t the first encounter with catastrophic illness for Rodriguez, now 55, a San Francisco native. Her husband of 14 years, Paul Hayes, who’d been a civil engineer at CalTrans, died of colon cancer in 2021. “Since he knew what was happening, he prepared his own funeral,” Rodriguez still marvels. “He didn’t want to burden me.” A veteran, he personally arranged to be buried in the Sacramento Valley National Cemetery, which serves American military service members, their spouses and minor dependent children. 

When Rodriguez was widowed, her eatery, like many restaurants, was struggling. “The pandemic had been bad for business,” she says, “and it took a while afterward for things to improve. But the economy hit working people very hard in terms of being able to pump gas into their cars and put food on their tables. Yet somehow, the community really came out for us.” 

These days, the taqueria has six employees working in its 1,200-square-foot space. Rodriguez says she wanted the menu to reflect “my mom’s and grandmother’s recipes,” which she says are a combination of “San Francisco-style Mexican food” and the traditional food her immigrant parents grew up with in the central Mexico city of Guanajuato. She says she’s currently looking for a business partner since her gig as a county supervisor will be “full time and more. I’ll still be involved with Sutter Street, but I need someone who can be there as often as I am now, which is all the time.” 

Rodriguez says the principal focuses of her political career these days and when she assumes her new role in January are and will be homelessness, crime and transportation, which she says are often wrapped together. “As a councilwoman and as a supervisor, I want to work to reduce the impact of homelessness on our businesses, schools and neighborhoods and ensure real services to break the cycle.” 

Homelessness, she says, “affects everything else that matters to us as citizens and business owners: transportation, public safety and quality of life. If the state and counties are getting millions of dollars to help them solve this problem, there’d better be accountability. Like, what are we spending and where are we spending it?” She likes the fact that California cities now “have an official seat at the table” — counties were the main entities empowered to battle homelessness — and she looks forward to cities and counties working cooperatively.

“What we need to look at is how many people experiencing homelessness have severe mental health issues,” she continues. “This is what we have to tackle first: to get them off the streets and into proper care. If that means building a new hospital dedicated to helping them, so be it. ”

That’s not idle talk from someone just holding forth about health care. Rodriguez understands from the inside how the system works. She spent 25 years in the field, during which she was manager of the Women and Children’s Clinic for Woodland Healthcare before moving on to a job as a “revenue cycle manager” in Sutter Health’s business services department. In that job, she was tasked with overseeing and tracking all patient revenue as well as collecting payments. It was appropriate training for someone about to help preside over Sacramento County’s annual budget of $6.3 billion.

She left the health care space, she says, “because I really wanted to work for myself.” That’s when she founded Sutter Street Taqueria. Somewhat simultaneously, her community activism saw her run for the Folsom City Council. She credits former Folsom Councilwoman Kerri Howell with being “a true mentor, showing me how things work and how I could make a 

difference.” When elected to her county post, Rodriguez was serving as Folsom’s mayor, chosen from within the council. The city, whose councilmembers ran for their seats at large, has now switched to a district representative system, which is geographically determined.

The Sacramento County Board of Supervisors is ostensibly non-partisan, though Rodriguez freely acknowledges she’s “a moderate Republican.” (Her predecessor, Sue Frost, was characterized as “ultraconservative” in several news media outlets.)

In a written timeline she provided, Rodriguez writes that when she received her cancer diagnosis, “I had just started a new relationship and the word love was already spoken. I made the decision to not share this diagnosis because it was Stage 1 with a very high likelihood of a successful recovery. I also did not want to alarm people that I may not be able to fulfill my roles as mayor/council member (and) I did not want people to treat me differently during the campaign for Sacramento County supervisor.” The only people who knew about her diagnosis, she says, were her boyfriend, David Loya “and my grandson who was living with me at the time, Antonio.”     

Rodriguez’ dad “passed away a few years ago,” but her mom — whom she didn’t tell of her cancer treatment until it ended — is “85, still lives in San Francisco and is full of life.” She has two sisters: Araceli, who runs a day care center, and Rocio, a marriage and family therapist. Her son, Yovanny Chamberlin, works for Blue Shield, and she has three grandsons, ages 18, 13 and 11. Antonio, the aforementioned eldest, has begun taking an interest in helping at the taqueria, as has middle boy Leo. Stefano, the youngest, is autistic.

“One of the reasons I was so grateful to win the county seat in the primary is that it’ll give me time to really learn about how the county works by the time I take office,” she says. “If the election had dragged on after March and into November, I’d have been too busy campaigning to get the education I wanted.”

Rodriguez says she’ll make fighting crime a top priority and supports efforts by the district attorney and sheriff “to keep our neighborhoods safe.” She says she also wants to “ensure effective transportation for residents by focusing on repairs and improvements of our roads and highways — including completing the Capital Connector to reducing traffic along Highway 50.” That planned route, more formally called the Capital SouthEast Connector, would run from I-5 to Highway through Sacramento County, Elk Grove, Rancho Cordova, Folsom and El Dorado County. 

It’s an ambitious agenda, to be sure. But if anyone can shepherd it to fruition, bet on this “bona fide workaholic.”

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