Coffey Park rebuild permit applications triple over span of four months

Coffey Park is humming with construction this summer, even as more neighbors there struggle to join the recovery.

Fire survivors working to rebuild said they’ve faced a variety of delays as an increasing number of them seek to hire builders and take the many steps needed to break ground. As an example of the busyness, the number of permit applications to rebuild burned homes around Santa Rosa tripled between April and July.

“They’re hitting rush hour,” Coffey Park landowner Christina Pozzi Westphal said of her neighbors.

City planning officials have responded by greatly increasing the number of staff members assigned to process building permits and inspections. The monthly staff time spent on rebuilding doubled between March and July to 5,147 hours.

The city also recently brought in a dozen planners from around California to spend a long weekend reviewing about 100 plans for rebuilding homes and businesses.

By last week, Coffey Park had 396 homes under construction, compared to 325 a month earlier, according to city records.

Property owners there have applied for a total of 707 building permits. That represents more than half of the 1,300 single-family homes that burned in the neighborhood.

Coffey Park remains the most concentrated area for rebuilding this summer in the county’s fire recovery areas. But for many neighbors, the effort to rebuild often involves a fair amount of frustration.

Some said it took longer than expected to get a building permit. Others said the builder they first selected made little progress and seldom communicated them.

Some Coffey Park residents, like David and Mellissa Edney, have since let go their first contractor. The couple this summer switched to Urban Equity Builders of Santa Rosa.

“What they’ve done for us in two weeks is more than what our previous building group had done in seven months,” Mellissa Edney said.

At City Hall, planning officials acknowledged permit processing times temporarily lengthened in May when a wave of rebuild applications came in. But after a significant increase in staffing, the city is striving to meet the turnaround times listed on its rebuild website, Planning Director David Guhin said.

Also, the city plans to soon unveil an online tracking system that can easily provide property owners details on exactly how long rebuild plans were reviewed by the city and how long they were in the hands of architects or others for needed revisions. Observers noted that with such a system, the city is less likely to get blamed for delays if a builder or architect takes weeks to revise a plan.

Here is a recap of other Coffey Park news for August:

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Money for a wall project

The cracked and burned walls that line Hopper Avenue are slated to get replaced after a Florida debris removal company agreed to make a substantial contribution to the effort.

AshBritt Environmental will donate $450,000 in cash for the rebuilding of 2,900 linear feet of walls along each side of Hopper. Local contractors will provide up to $200,000 more in in-kind contributions to demolish the old wood-and-concrete structures and dispose of the debris.

After the walls were scorched in the October wildfire, the property owners who back up to the structures were surprised to learn that they, and not the city, own the structures.

An initial estimate put the cost of new walls at $300,000, not including demolition. Many of the roughly 40 property owners said they couldn’t afford to pay such an expense and they lacked the ability as individual landowners to find a solution.

The rebuilding of the walls will be undertaken by the Coffey Strong neighborhood group in partnership with the nonprofit Rebuild North Bay and AshBritt. The Florida company conducted debris removal for upward of 2,000 North Bay properties burned in the October fires.

“AshBritt is proud to partner with Rebuild Northbay and Coffey Strong to make this happen,” Brittany Perkins, the company’s CEO, said in a statement.

Coffey Strong has now gained needed permission to conduct the work from more than half the affected property owners, Chairman Jeff Okrepkie said last week. The demolition of the wall could begin as early as September.

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Underground progress

PG&E has completed roughly 15 miles of trenching in Coffey Park, or about 80 percent of what must be dug in order to install new underground utilities in the neighborhood.

The utility has logged 55,000 hours for crews and outside vendors building new natural gas and electric lines, spokeswoman Deanna Contreras said.

The new underground system, which also will include telephone and cable TV service, remain on track for completion in Coffey Park by the end of the year.

Already one of the new underground service lines has been damaged in the recovery efforts. Contreras reminded both builders and home landscapers to call 811 two business days before digging so a utility technician can mark the location of underground lines. Another way to notify utilities is online at http://usanorth811.org.

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A stranger’s creative gift

Colleen Thill was at a low point emotionally this summer when a stranger sent an unforgettable gift.

The stranger, Benicia artist Wendy Anderson, had walked the fire-scarred streets of Coffey Park in February. A sign on a tree, written to alert debris workers, caught her eye: “Please do not cut my trees ... Thank you Colleen and John Thill.”

Anderson found a charred pine cone from one of the Thills’ trees and determined to making the couple a gift.

“I was struck with sadness by their sign, wondering what special memories the trees had, and how they were the only things left of their life on Dogwood Drive,” Anderson wrote in an email.

What Anderson sent the Thills were nine pendants, each hung on a ribbon and imprinted with portions of the pine cone she had collected. In creating the art, she placed the pine cone in a latex mold and used the mold to make the pendants with a two-part clay epoxy.

An accompanying note read in part, “My heart goes out to you all for your loss, and hope things are looking up ... May you all stay safe and fire-free forevermore. Wendy Anderson.”

Colleen Thills said the gift from a stranger was just what she needed. Her thank you note was intended to be for Anderson a little like a “Purple Heart award. And she deserved every bit of it.”

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