Oakmont Senior Living awaits state approval to reopen Villa Capri

A Santa Rosa senior care home that burned to the ground in the 2017 wildfires has been fully rebuilt but remains closed while state regulators seek enhancements to its emergency plan.

The state Department of Social Services rejected the initial disaster response plan filed earlier this month by Oakmont Senior Living, which is seeking permission to reopen its Villa Capri facility on Fountaingrove Drive.

The plan, which is designed to ensure all residents are accounted for before and after evacuation, was “missing some pages” and deemed incomplete, said Adam Weintraub, a spokesman for the Department of Social Services.

A state investigation found that staff members at Villa Capri and a neighboring Oakmont Senior Living facility, Varenna, abandoned about 100 elderly and infirm residents as flames enveloped the hills of Fountaingrove on the night of Oct. 8, 2017. Investigators concluded ?20 people left behind at Villa Capri would have perished when the facility burned if they had not been rescued by relatives and first responders.

The state investigation, released last September, also substantiated a complaint that staff failed to inform relatives of the evacuation, citing one case where relatives had to conduct a frantic survey of other assisted living facilities to find a resident more than two hours away from Santa Rosa.

The failed evacuation inspired a new law, authored by state Sen. Bill Dodd, D-Napa, that increased penalties for caregivers who abandon older people during emergencies. Gov. Gavin Newsom signed the bill into law in late June.

Oakmont Senior Living last year settled a lawsuit filed by residents of the two Fountaingrove facilities and their relatives, who alleged they were abandoned the night of the fires.

Oakmont also reached a separate settlement in November with the Department of Social Services, which had started proceedings to revoke its licenses for Villa Capri and Varenna and to ban two top administrators from operating senior care facilities. The settlement, which placed the facilities on probation but preserved Oakmont’s licenses and its administrators’ jobs, required the company to improve its emergency response measures before reopening Varenna and Villa Capri.

Villa Capri’s probation period officially begins when the facility resumes operations, according to a follow-up state report from December. Varenna’s two-year monitoring period started Nov. 19.

Villa Capri secured its certificate of occupancy July 3 following an inspection by the Santa Rosa Fire Department, according to state and local public records. The following week, it submitted an emergency response plan to the state Department of Social Services, Weintraub said.

Weintraub could not say which aspects of the plan were incomplete, stating the plan would not become a public record until it received state approval.

Oakmont filed an updated disaster plan for Villa Capri on Thursday, Weintraub said. It could take up to a month for the department to review Oakmont’s plan.

The plan was filed well after the 60-day deadline imposed by a November 2018 settlement with the state agency.

A state report from March noted that an emergency disaster plan for Varenna had been filed in a timely manner. The plan includes a number of measures to protect residents, including checking every resident’s casita during evacuations, designating at least one “disaster leader” during each shift and conducting monthly disaster drills and two evacuation drills per year, according to the report.

The completion of Villa Capri, which held a ribbon-cutting ceremony last week and has launched a marketing campaign to sign up new residents, is one of the most visible signs of progress in the rebuilding effort underway in Fountaingrove, where nearly 1,600 homes were destroyed by the Tubbs fire.

An employee of Villa Capri on Thursday described the ribbon-cutting as a VIP event and did not comment beyond confirming that “we are reopening.”

Oakmont officials did not return requests for comment left at the company’s headquarters in Windsor and with its North Carolina-based public relations consultant.

The company, founded by developer Bill Gallaher more than 20 years ago, has grown to run more than 20 elder care facilities statewide. Its proposal to develop another assisted-living facility in Fountaingrove, dubbed Emerald Isle, was shelved last year and has since been revived as an 82-unit condominium project for tenants 55 years and older. It needs several levels of city approval before construction can begin.

You can reach Staff Writer Will Schmitt at 707-521-5207 or will.schmitt@pressdemocrat.com. On Twitter @wsreports.