Home rebuilding ramps up in Santa Rosa’s Coffey Park neighborhood

Hillary Court was once a serene and picturesque cul-de-sac, and will be again someday.

But not anytime soon. These days, like most of Santa Rosa’s Coffey Park neighborhood, it is a bustling, boisterous, borderline anarchy of contractors and suppliers, inspectors and utility workers, all doing their best to not inconvenience the handful of residents who’ve already moved back in.

“It’s tough for us in the winter, ‘cause we can’t really work if it’s raining too hard,” said carpenter Dylan Johnson, eating a Clif bar in the bed of a pickup during a recent midmorning break. “But now that it’s drying out, it’s going to be nonstop.”

Atmospheric rivers had been replaced, on this day, by sunshine and a steady stream of pickups, cement mixers and heavy equipment up and down Hopper Avenue. With the advent of a new building season, reconstruction in Coffey Park has ramped up to a level unseen since the start of the rebuilding, following the October 2017 Tubbs fire that destroyed 1,422 homes in this working-class community.

A full 70 percent of the burned Coffey Park properties are “either under construction or have reached completion,” said Gabe Osburn, Santa Rosa’s deputy director of development services. And more owners have been issued permits, but not yet begun construction.

“We are definitely running at full throttle out there,” said John Allen of APM Homes.

That wasn’t the case last year. By October 2018, a year after the fire, only 21 houses had been rebuilt and 520 were under construction. Today, 17 months after the disaster, 191 homes in Coffey Park have been completed, while another 689 are under construction.

Jeff Okrepkie, president and founder of neighborhood support group Coffey Strong, expects some 700 rebuilt homes to be occupied by midsummer.

More than one builder mentioned a labor shortage as an impediment to the rebuilding effort.

“But there are signs of the labor market loosening up,” said Andy Christopherson, a partner at Synergy Communities. Plus, he said, “We all have a year of experience working through the unique dynamics” of rebuilding in crowded Coffey Park, “which should lead to more efficiency.”

“Right now, I do believe we are seeing probably the highest level of (construction) activity,” said Osburn of the city neighborhoods torched by the infernos, “especially in Coffey Park.”

Since November 2018, the city has been getting 60 to 90 new building permit applications per month. In many cases, said Osburn, the permit was ready to be issued, but the builder wasn’t ready to start - a fairly common occurrence during a wet winter, when moisture in the soil prevents contractors from developing homesites. As a result, Osburn said, “we had a lot of permit volume stack up.”

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Insurance benefits expiring

Many have been inspired to act by the increasingly loud ticking of a figurative clock. A lot of fire victims will stop receiving insurance benefits for temporary living expenses as of October. The coverage they’re using to pay their rent typically expires two years after the fire.

That deadline has forced many “fence sitters” - who took their time deciding whether to sell their burned lot or rebuild on it - to get off the fence. As Keith Woods of the North Coast Builders Association said, the prospect of “paying rent and paying the mortgage on a house that burned down” tends to have a highly focusing effect on people.

The conspicuous absence of red tape has provided a huge boost to the rebuild. In the wake of the fire, the city dramatically streamlined the planning review and permitting processes. “Frankly, they’ve been outstanding,” Christopherson said.

Santa Rosa’s Resilient City Permit Center abides by a “24-hour request with no cap,” Osburn said. “That means if you request an inspection today, you get it tomorrow. Doesn’t matter if there are 10 requests or 300 in the queue, we’ll respond to them.”

The city has averaged 150 property inspections a day, “about 5,000 a month,” said Osburn, who presides over a daily 11 a.m. meeting to handle “the daily little issues” that arise, questions about setbacks, shared storm drains, elevation differentials - disputes that can arise when someone wants to build a house taller than their old one. Decisions that would normally take “two or three weeks” are made much more swiftly.

It doesn’t always go like clockwork. John and Amie Sollecito probably would be back in their Hillary Court home by now, if the city hadn’t dropped the ball on their fire sprinkler permit. Once the city approved their plan, they had the sprinklers installed.

“The installer put them in according to the plan,” Amie Sollecito said. “When the city came out to check it, they said, ‘Nope, we don’t like how they’re placed.’ They had us move them all over 2 inches.”

In the end, that delay cost them six weeks.

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‘Yield to the bigger boat’

Four lots north, subcontractor David Jessop looked up from the blueprints he’d laid out on a stack of two-by-six wood planks in time to see his co-worker, J.D. Dockstader, weaving his way down Hillary Court in a forklift bearing a stack of plywood. To avoid colliding with pickups parked beside the street, he had lifted the plywood 12 feet in the air, like a waiter holding a tray of drinks over his head.

“We have a general understanding among construction workers,” Dockstader said with a grin. “If your load is bigger than their truck, they get out of the way.”

“Yield to the bigger boat,” agreed Chris Hislop, who was installing an electric garage door nearby.

“The truth is, we all work with one another,” Jessop said. “For the most part.”

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Pizzeria on comeback trail

Mountain Mike’s, the popular Cleveland Aveue pizzeria destroyed in the Tubbs fire, should reopen sometime in May in a nearby location, said Sonu Chandi, president of the company that owns and manages that franchise.

After weighing the pros and cons of rebuilding on its old site, just north of the Kmart, the Chandi Hospitality Co. decided to relocate.

“Someone reached out and told us, ‘we’ve got the perfect site for you,” he said. The new Mountain Mike’s, at ?3125 Cleveland Ave., will be less than a mile from the old one, just south of Bicentennial Avenue, on the site of the old Los Caballo’s Bar & Grill.

By moving to the new spot, which was once a Shakey’s pizza parlor, Chandi said, the company will be able to open “nine months to a year” sooner than if they’d decided to rebuild on the burned site.

The new restaurant is 40 percent larger than the destroyed Mountain Mike’s, allowing for a full bar, in addition to the restaurant space, plus two separate party rooms.

Of far greater importance to Chandi’s 6-year-old son is the fact that the new restaurant will feature a much larger game room than its predecessor.

“It’s a huge upgrade,” said Chandi of the soon-to-be-opened franchise. “We’re going to make it beautiful.”

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Complimentary compost

To the long and inspiring list of funds, services and materials donated to Coffey Park, add … compost.

When Coffey Strong director Pamela Van Halsema emailed community group members the news that the city’s water department was selling compost at a bargain rate - just $5 a cubic yard, down from its usual price of $16 - she was peppered with questions about where the compost was located (4301 Llano Road), and if the city delivered (No). After Van Halsema called to inquire, the city got back to her the next day with good news.

“They said, ‘we just had a department meeting, and decided everyone in the burn zone will get free compost for the rest of the year’?” - or until the supply runs out, she said.

The city’s compost - a “nutrient- rich, organic byproduct of the wastewater treatment process,” according to the city’s website - is intended to be mixed with topsoil. Van Halsema said that will be especially helpful to residents of Coffey Park, “a flat plain,” whose “topsoil has been scraped away” by the debris removal.

Santa Rosa’s biosolids management program is one of just five in the state, and 28 in the country, to be rated as a “platinum Level” by the National Biosolids Partenership Agency. Which is to say, this isn’t just some garden-variety compost.

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