County’s commercial sector struggles with sluggish fire recovery

Sept. 28--An anniversary reunion is in the works for the cooks and crew of Willi's Wine Bar, a Santa Rosa restaurant that suffered fiery destruction last October, then a year in limbo.

The 16-year-old Willi's burned to the ground in the Tubbs wildfire, closing the popular restaurant. It is expected to reopen early next year in the Town & Country shopping center. The upcoming reunion will bring together those who worked at the Old Redwood Highway eatery and who intend to work at the new Terrace Way location. The gathering could turn emotional, because a comeback was far from certain.

"We went through months of not knowing if we were going to do another Willi's," said co-owner Terri Stark. She and her husband, Mark, operate six restaurants in Sonoma County.

The Starks are enduring an experience typical of area entrepreneurs whose businesses burned in the most destructive fire in state history. Even as the county's economy has rebounded after the disaster, the affected business owners have found themselves bogged down by unpaid insurance claims and questions of whether and how to rebuild.

In comparing the business recovery with that of the residential rebuilding, two sets of numbers stand out:

*bul Insurance companies, as of this spring, had paid more than 70 percent of the $6.99 billion in damages claimed by residential property owners in the county.

For businesses, the payout for the same period amounted to only 43 percent of the nearly $793 million of claims, according to the most recent numbers available from the state Department of Insurance.

*bul Homeowners have begun construction on more than 1,000 of the 5,300 homes destroyed countywide by the October 2017 fire.

Indeed, fire-damaged commercial properties here are undergoing repairs. But of the approximately 40 businesses, excluding home-based firms, that were destroyed, property owners have started reconstruction on only one site: the Villa Capri senior care home in Santa Rosa's Fountaingrove neighborhood.

The North Bay wildfires proved an unprecedented disaster for businesses in and near Santa Rosa. The fires, which took 40 lives and caused nearly $10 billion worth of damage across the region, brought commerce here to a virtual standstill for a few days. Some companies lost power and nearly all suffered from the disrupted lives of workers who were forced to evacuate by the thousands from large portions of Sonoma, Napa and Mendocino counties.

In Sonoma County, more than 1,800 businesses filed insurance claims, including 152 that reported a total loss. The latter group includes farm structures, home-based businesses and commercial properties not then in use.

In assessing the devastating effects, the city of Santa Rosa and the county count at least 55 businesses, excluding in-home firms, that suffered damage or destruction. Among them were the Fountaingrove headquarters of Keysight Technologies, the Paradise Ridge Winery, seven hotels and inns, nine restaurants and fast-food eateries and eight entities operating out of the Burbank Center for the Arts.

Affected retailers included national chains like Kmart, Kohl's and Trader Joe's, as well local owners of a bridal boutique, a firearms store and a bath and kitchen outlet.

Even owners and executives of partially-burned businesses faced plenty of obstacles to recovery. Cleanup crews at Keysight hauled away more than 1 million pounds of debris from the Fountaingrove Parkway site, while the company leased temporary research and manufacturing quarters for months in Rohnert Park and Petaluma for 1,200 workers. Kohl's took until mid-March to reopen its Airway Drive department store, and Trader Joe's said in a recent statement the reopening of its Cleveland Avenue store was expected sometime before the end of 2018.

___

(c)2018 The Press Democrat (Santa Rosa, Calif.)

Visit The Press Democrat (Santa Rosa, Calif.) at www.pressdemocrat.com

Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.