Santa Rosa OKs plan to rebuild park at center of Coffey Park

It was one small announcement from Santa Rosa Mayor Tom Schwedhelm, but a giant leap in the rebuilding and healing process for residents of Coffey Park, the northwest Santa Rosa neighborhood devastated by the 2017 Tubbs fire.

“That is five ayes - passes unanimously,” said Schwedhelm on Tuesday evening. The City Council had just given its thumbs-up to the master plan for Coffey Park, the 6.2-acre recreational space and gathering place that was, and will be again, the heart of the neighborhood of the same name.

The council’s vote took place after presentations by Jen Santos, deputy director of recreation and parks, then landscape architects from Carlile Macy, followed by questions from council members, then public comments.

While the process did occasionally drag on, the time it took to present, discuss, debate and vote on the master plan for the park - a little over an hour and a half - was but the blink of an eye, compared to the months of collaboration it took to get to this moment.

Coffey Park property owners had begun the planning process for the park last August, if not earlier. The project that passed the council’s muster Tuesday night was the result of multiple public meetings, three surveys and voluminous feedback from the community - including an impressively slick slideshow put together by students at Schaefer Elementary School, a quarter-mile south of the park.

“It’s imperfect,” said Coffey Strong founder and president Jeff Okrepkie, “because it can’t be perfect.” When you have 2,000 homeowners trying to decide what they want in a park, “you’re not going to have one cohesive voice,” he noted.

The finished product that emerged from this highly democratic process features a mix of old and new. Like the park that burned, this one will have two playgrounds, a walking/jogging path, picnic areas and barbecuing areas. New flourishes include a wildlife habitat with native plants, fitness stations with parcourse equipment placed along the jogging path, and - more controversially - a dog park.

Santos said the city is pursuing an aggressive timeline at the request of Coffey Park residents, with the playgrounds scheduled to open by this winter. The remainder of the park is expected to be open by the summer of 2020.

The rebuild is expected to cost $5 million, of which the city’s insurance will cover a little over half. FEMA will chip in an estimated $122,000, with the nonprofit Santa Rosa Parks Foundation contributing another $41,000. That leaves a gap in funding of $2.2 million, said Santos.

“It is no longer ?$2.2 million,” Okrepkie announced minutes later, in one of the evening’s most dramatic moments. “It is now $1.7 million, because we’ve received a ?$500,000 grant from Kaiser Permanente that’s going straight to the park foundation.”

The park rebuild “matters a lot to us,” said Alena Wall, a community benefit manager for Kaiser.

Not only will the park encourage the “active living” Kaiser advocates, but it will be a hub of “community connection” that’s an important piece of “mental health and wellness” the company seeks to foster.

Upon learning that Kaiser’s national board had approved the Coffey Park grant, she said, “we were all jumping around. It was a very good day.”

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