Coffey Park business owners try to regain homes and livelihoods

Eleven years ago, John Thill knew he’d found a special place to fix crumpled cars when he moved to a small shop on rural Mark West Springs Road.

“Have you ever been to a body shop that has a view like mine?” he asked a visitor one drizzly morning last month, waving north to oak-covered hills and a nearby ranchette with extensive white-fenced corrals.

But Thill’s shop a mile east of Highway 101 lay in the path of the Tubbs fire. So did his Coffey Park home in northwest Santa Rosa. The October wildfire destroyed both properties, leaving Thill and his wife, Colleen, among scores of county residents who had lost both homes and businesses.

Their ranks include landscapers, painters, house cleaners, musicians and others - most who used their houses for a home office or a place to secure key tools. Exact numbers are hard to come by, but a local service club has received requests for fire relief from more than 250 county business owners.

“What we found were these home businesses are really at the fabric of our community,” said José Guillén, a project manager for a fire relief fund overseen by local Rotary club leaders. The Rotary members have interviewed fire survivors and are helping to distribute roughly $1.4 million in fire relief, including $1.1 million from the North Bay Fire Relief Fund.

The October wildfires in Sonoma County claimed 24 lives and destroyed almost 5,300 homes. The losses includes four lives and 1,200 homes in Coffey Park, a compact neighborhood of tract homes built more than a quarter century ago.

The effort to rebuild a business after a natural disaster is hard enough, fire survivors suggested. But for those who also lost homes and possessions, the tasks of recovery at times are overwhelming.

“Emotionally I’m running on empty,” said Bill Perkins, a Coffey Park resident who owns AA Driving School.

Perkins, 66, and his wife, Cora, were awakened by their husky, Bailey, on the morning of the fire and were able to escape their Barnes Road home. The fire destroyed the house and three vehicles parked there that Perkins and three employees had used to give behind-the-wheel training sessions.

The couple plan to rebuild their home. Bill Perkins, who had been in business a quarter century, said he is thinking of once more training students, though he may focus less on teenagers and more on senior citizens who need to demonstrate their fitness to remain behind the wheel. However, he said he now lacks the energy that would be needed to hire employees.

“No one understands a disaster until you’ve had it hit you,” he said.

At 1 a.m. on the first morning of the wildfires, Thill got an automated emergency call that warned of approaching flames near his body shop. He immediately set out to save the four cats living at the property.

But when he reached the corner of Mark West and Old Redwood Highway, he could go no farther. Two cars were burning near the intersection and law enforcement had blocked off Mark West to eastbound traffic. Thill looked east toward his shop and “the whole hillside was on fire.”

He drove west toward his house in Coffey Park, still thinking the neighborhood was safe because Highway 101 stood in the fire’s path. Before he made it home, he received a notice on his mobile phone that the flames had jumped the six-lane freeway. The Thills quickly escaped their Dogwood Drive home before it burned.

Shortly before the fires, the couple purchased the Mark West property that includes the body shop and two small houses. All three buildings burned.

In November, Thill’s problems were compounded when he broke a leg while working in a muddy field near the shop.

He since has outfitted the bed of his red GMC pickup with a portable generator and air compressor to help with work.

Even so, he remains unsure how much auto body work he can accomplish in a tent that he’s set up on the Mark West property. The fire destroyed $200,000 in tools at the shop, he said, but his insurance provided only $60,000 to replace them.

The Thills plan to rebuild not only their Coffey Park home but also their business, John’s Auto Body. And John Thill expressed gratitude for the $5,000 he received through the Rotary club program. The money mattered, he said, and so did the sense that the community cared about his wife and him.

“It’s huge to each one of us that gets help from it,” he said of the program.

The Sonoma program is part of a four-county effort by the region’s Rotary clubs to help both individuals and businesses that suffered from the fire. In this county, about 60 members from 10 clubs volunteered to process applications, interview business owners and make recommendations about who should get grants of up to $5,000 each.

“It was a like a small company starting up,” said Chris Ranney, who led the county effort. Rotarians, he said, spent their own funds on administration and travel so that every dollar raised could go directly to fire survivors.

By last week the Rotarians had approved grants to 161 small businesses and 71 individuals. Another 30 requests by businesses remained under consideration.

Most of the program funds came from the North Bay Relief Fund, a partnership of Redwood Credit Union, The Press Democrat and state Sen. Mike McGuire, D-Healdsburg. The fund has raised and distributed $32 million to more than 6,500 fire survivors and aid efforts.

Among the business people helped were John LaBonte and Barbara Winestock. The husband and wife lost their Kona Place home in Coffey Park, but LaBonte was able with his daughter’s boyfriend to save a rental house the couple own nearby on Coffey Lane.

In the fire, LaBonte said, “I lost every tool that I own” for the painting business he has operated for over 25 years. In addition to the painting business, he has worked full time for Caltrans since 2011.

The $7,500 in Rotary grants they received for their painting and property rental business helped buy a used van to equip a LaBonte Painting crew of four workers. LaBonte said he hopes to eventually get back to employing eight painters as he did before the fires.

The couple said they still find it overwhelming to deal with fire related paperwork, including the forms connected to claims with five different insurance companies for homes, business and vehicles. But they expressed gratitude for the help they’ve received from at least a dozen businesses and organizations. The list includes Caltrans, the Jewish Chabad Center of Santa Rosa, Winestock’s son’s Marine Corps unit in Hawaii and several construction suppliers, contractors and retailers.

Without such help, LaBonte said, “there is no way that we could have gotten back on our feet. We’re far from 100 percent, but we are able to do work.”

You can reach Staff Writer Robert Digitale at 707-521-5285 or robert.digitale@pressdemocrat.com. On Twitter @rdigit.