On Jan. 1, Don Dean transitioned from owning his construction company, Dean Co., for 36 years to working in the public sector as Montgomery County Precinct 2 operations manager. Dean is filling the role formerly occupied by Montgomery County Commissioner Charlie Riley. Dean said he was offered the job last fall after Riley was elected to serve as a commissioner. Dean was born and raised in Magnolia, and his family has resided in Montgomery County for more than 100 years. He and each of his children attended Magnolia High School. What has been the biggest challenge on the job so far? Going from private sector to government was quite a swap. There’s a lot more to this job than I thought there would be. There’s a lot on the outside and dealing with the public a lot. What is a day on the job like? I oversee the day-to-day operations, which is everything from [roadside] mowing to patching potholes to asphalt paving. Since I’ve been here, we had a lot of rain to start off the year with, so we’ve been catching up from that, and that was a challenge. A lot of it is road and bridge maintenance, along with county right of way [acquisition] and ditches. What was your reaction to the Montgomery County road bond that failed to pass in May? I was very disappointed. We were pumped up, and we thought there were a lot of things we could get out there and do. We thought we could get out there and make a difference, and people could see that happening because [road improvements] haven’t been happening in years. It will eventually get passed, but I don’t know when that’s going to be yet. We could have done so many things with that money. What has been your biggest accomplishment so far? One thing we have done is we established a crew that picks up trash on the side of the road, and we started that in March. We have trusties from the sheriff’s department that work four days a week with a deputy watching them. And that allowed us to cut back on the dollars we were spending to send county workers to pick up trash. What are some of your goals for the precinct? We’re trying to do more work with our employees and our equipment instead of subcontracting these things out. I like to see stuff getting done, and we’ve been out doing our own paving on roads, and we’ve been out getting some work done. I’d really like to get more things moved to in-house instead.