Coronavirus or not, Coffey Park rebuild marches on

Employees of Windsor-based Snyder Construction recently became the beneficiaries of a certain pandemic-related perk.

“We ordered some deluxe new port-?a-potties with really good hand-washing stations,” said Olin Cohan, the company’s director of operations.

Those luxurious loos are just one of the steps Snyder Construction is taking to keep workers healthy, and their projects moving forward. They’re staggering the arrival of subcontractors, to make sure there’s just a small number of people on a job site at any given time.

Snyder has a strong presence in Coffey Park, the north Santa Rosa neighborhood that lost 1,422 homes in the Tubbs fire of 2017. While Coffey Park recently surpassed the milestone of 1,000 homes rebuilt and occupied, hundreds of houses remain in some phase of construction.

The latest emergency order issued by Sonoma County expressly allows work to proceed on fire rebuild projects. Despite that green light, work has undeniably - and understandably - slowed on many Coffey Park projects. Some workers are choosing to stay home. And those who do show up at the job site must be properly staggered: the finishing carpenters can’t be in the house at the same time as the electricians, for instance. A recent tour of the neighborhood, and conversations with 10 contractors, made it clear that homes are being delayed, but not derailed, by the pandemic.

“We’re only working a couple days a week,” said plumber James Muller, from the garage of an unfinished house on Perk Place. He and his business partner, Jeff Morley, make up M&M Plumbing. Neither seemed thrilled to be at this site, which they were sharing with another group of subcontractors they didn’t know.

“There’s no social distancing,” said Morley. “We’re walking right past each other.”

Toiling just down the street was general contractor Frank Keaster, who noted that, until recently, there had been five crews working on Perk Place. On this day, that number was down to two.

And his crew of three workers was streamlined. “Usually we have three more guys out here,” he said, “but they’re kinda spooked” by the coronavirus, “so they don’t want to come in.”

Eric Runft, likewise, is down two men who’ve chosen to stay home, “even though there’s work,” while standing in the front yard of a job site on Pine Meadow Drive. “You gotta support whatever decision they make.”

The shortage of skilled labor, added Runft, owner of EKR Electric in Santa Rosa, “trickles down through every trade,” with the end result being a delayed completion date.

Runft also does work on commercial projects - which the county has deemed non-essential and banned until at least May 3, an order “that’s really going to be a blow to commercial contractors,” said Keith Woods, CEO of the North Coast Builders Exchange.

Should it drag on long enough, Woods fears, the emergency order could drive some builders out of business.

If you think things are slow now, Runfdt points out, wait a year. The Coffey Park rebuilds, which should be all but completed by year-end, are being paid for with insurance money.

People who want work done after that will be paying out of pocket, he predicted. But, come next year, “they’re not gonna have much money” for such projects.

So Rundt and his fellow contractors “are going to be fighting for what little money’s out there,” he said.

By Wednesday afternoon, business had slowed to a crawl for Armando Coronel, owner of El Coronel Mexican Restaurant in Sebastopol, and driver of the taco truck parked on Mocha Lane, and patronized by scores of laborers daily.

Following the imposition of a lockdown, his business has been down 70%. On Wednesday, customers were even fewer and farther between - the result, he believes, of the stay-at-home order being extended to May 3.

“You can see it on the faces of the guys from the sites,” said Coronel. “They’re afraid their jobs will be shut down.”

Some projects will stop, and most will slow down. But the rebuild will grind on, virus be damned.

At times like these, said Phil Howard, after supervising a concrete pour on Sansone Drive, it’s important for his clients “to see things moving forward” on their houses.

“We need to give people hope right now,” said the owner of Howard Construction. “Because it’s been a sh--storm these past few years, it really has.”

You can reach Staff Writer Austin Murphy at 707-521-5214 or austin.murphy@pressdemocrat.com. On Twitter @ausmurph88.