Ex-minor league hockey player dubbed hardest working contractor in Santa Rosa

The perfectionist behind a group of new Santa Rosa homes bringing tears of joy from their owners is Tom Snyder, 58, a Sebastopol native and ex-minor league hockey player. His small company, Snyder Construction, almost singlehandedly has resurrected Coffey Creek Estates, a 33-home subdivision in the southwest corner of the Coffey Park neighborhood almost entirely leveled by the 2017 Tubbs fire.

Between his designing, consulting and hands-on labor, his workweeks often balloon to 70 or 80 hours, earning him the unofficial title: Hardest Working Man in the Rebuild.

Snyder ended up in Coffey Creek almost by accident. He'd spent the previous 30 years building high-end custom homes around Sonoma County. Then came the devastation of the October 2017 Tubbs fire. Billy Adams, a friend and one of his carpenters, lost his home on Towhee Drive in Coffey Creek. Desperate, he couldn't find a builder.

“Don't worry about it, I'll do it,” Snyder told him.

“Thank God for Billy,” said Joan Mortenson, treasurer of the Coffey Creek homeowners association and another of Snyder's satisfied customers.

His original plan was to finish a house for Adams and then go back to building larger, pricier homes that had long been his bread and butter. But Adams, an old hockey buddy, spread the word about Snyder's construction prowess to his fire-ravaged neighbors, also struggling to find contractors. When they came to him, Snyder couldn't say no.

“Nobody was quite right when they walked into the office,” he recalled. “It was too soon after the fire.”

But Snyder would show them 3D images of what their completed house would look like. “They'd see what was possible,” he recalled, “and leave with a glimmer of hope.”

Eighteen of the subdivision's 33 houses burned in the blaze. Snyder signed contracts to rebuild 15 of them.

Work on those homes - and hundreds of others in Coffey Park - was initially stalled, the result of permits containing strict setbacks that required contractors to build in the identical footprint of the previous home. When the city relaxed those rules, Snyder faced a daunting customer backlog. According to clients and colleagues, he never allowed the pressure of those deadlines to affect the quality of his construction work.

The massive wildfire rebuilding has yielded a bumper crop of horror stories: accounts of builders behaving badly, taking money upfront, then doing slipshod work, or in some cases, no work at all.

Snyder resides at the opposite end of that spectrum, where his customers strain for superlatives, rave about and are sometimes moved to tears by his craftsmanship and attention to detail.

Upon popping into his Coffey Park home in progress, Steve Rahmn noticed that Snyder's framing carpenters were planing the wooden studs to make sure that the sheetrock, when hung, will sit perfectly flat.

“That house is so tight,” Rahmn said, “I don't think an ant could get in.”

Whether he's working on a $5 million mansion or a 1,100-square-foot tract house in Coffey Creek, “we do it all the same,” Snyder said. “It doesn't matter if the materials aren't as expensive, the quality of the work needs to be the same. I don't know any other way to do it.”

This reliability and emphasis on fundamentals were hallmarks of his brief hockey career, as well. After discovering the game as a 10-year-old at Snoopy's Home Ice in Santa Rosa, he fell hard for it. He spent several seasons in the early 1980s playing for the Fresno Falcons of the Pacific Southwest Hockey League. He's got the scar tissue, a severed tendon in his left hand and roughly 75 stitches in his face to show for it.

Snyder was not a flashy player, not a goal scorer. Befitting his future occupation, he was known as a “stay-at-home” defenseman, rarely out of position, adept at clearing opponents from in front of the net. Once he possessed the puck, he'd make a crisp, accurate outlet pass.

A fine linebacker but indifferent student at Cardinal Newman High School, he'd gone into construction right out of high school. During his time as a Falcons hockey player, Snyder would work all week, catch a ride to Fresno with a friend on Friday afternoon, play a game that night and another on Saturday night. “By about Thursday,” he said, “my body would recover. It was a rough league.”

Realizing, after three years in the minors, that the National Hockey League was beyond his grasp, “I decided I'd better focus on a real job,” he said.

After starting in the trades as a framing carpenter, Snyder got his contractor's license in 1989. Eventually, he branched into designing and building homes. Olin Cohan, now his right-hand man and director of operations, noticed long ago that Snyder is far more focused “on the end product, on the happiness of the homeowner, than he is on the money.”

That's why Snyder told the Christine and Paul Mathisen not to sweat it when they informed him, after he delivered the estimate to build their new home on Sansone Court in Coffey Park, that they were $80,000 short.

Instead of backing out, Snyder told the couple he'd work with them, and suggested ways to bring the price down. The couple saved money by purchasing their own appliances, and putting in their own patio out back. When searching for materials for their house, Snyder shopped for bargains.

“He spent my money like it was his money,” said Paul Mathisen, who marvels at the quality of the work in his new home. He recently stopped Cohan on the street to thank him and Snyder, and share the story of his wife's happy tears.

“You picked the two brokest people in the neighborhood, and delivered a perfect product,” Mathisen said.

Passing the torch

Jeff Okrepkie announced that, as of October, his tenure as president of the neighborhood support group he founded would come to an end.

Okrepkie, an insurance agent who has a 1- and 3-year-old with his wife, Stephanie, has been Coffey Strong's president for all but three months of its nearly two-year existence.

Explaining his decision, he cited a desire to spend more time with his family and “keep an eye on my builder” - which brought a gale of laughter at a recent Coffey Strong board meeting. Okrepkie's house is being built by APM Homes, whose CEO, John Allen, sat during the meeting to his immediate left.

Okrepkie is winding down his tenure at a time when some 87% of the more than 1,400 Coffey Park homes destroyed by the October 2017 Tubbs fire have been rebuilt, permits have been submitted for construction or somewhere in between.

Allen quickly nominated Steve Rahmn to succeed Okrepkie, and the nomination was seconded. Rahmn, a board member who served as project manager for the $650,000 razing and replacement of Hopper Wall, will stand for election at the group's next board meeting on Monday. If voted in, he will take over in October.

Update on park

Jen Santos, deputy director of Santa Rosa's parks, recently provided an update on the 5.85-acre park within Coffey Park, which sits fenced off and unusable, 22 months after the fire.

At a Coffey Park neighborhood meeting on Aug. 19, Santos announced that construction plans for the park have been approved by the city and put out for bidding, which is expected to open by Sept. 12.

Once a “responsible low bidder is determined,” said Santos, the contract must be approved by the Santa Rosa City Council, after which a construction start date will be set.

The city intends to open the playground area, in the southwest corner of the park along Moose Lane, by the end of 2019, although Santos said that is a very aggressive timeline.

The rest of the park will be under construction until the summer of 2020.

You can reach Staff Writer Austin Murphy at 707-521-5214 or austin.murphy@pressdemocrat.com. On Twitter @Ausmurph88