First, looking at the news of the week.
Temporary housing and free building permits were among the issues addressed by the Butte County Board of Supervisors on Tuesday.
After some debate officials removed at least one impediment to rebuilding in the wake of the Camp Fire: steep building permit fees.
Building permits for a single family home in unincorporated Butte County run $4,000. Add in ancillary permits for things like wells, septic tanks and land surveys, and the figure exceeds $6,300.
Moving to eliminate one of the burdens shouldered by fire victims, the board voted to waive permit fees. But there’s significant fine print: your fully permitted home was destroyed in the Camp Fire, it was in an unincorporated area, the home was uninsured or underinsured, fire debris must be properly removed and perhaps the biggest hurdle, the county must find an amount equal to what it would have collected from building permits.
Officials said they have applied for $1.7 million to cover the total from the North Valley Community Foundation, which has been collecting donations on behalf of fire victims.
Nearly 12 weeks after the fire, county officials have thus far received just three building permit applications from fire victims seeking to rebuild.
Officials also weighed in on manufactured homes, closing a loophole and prohibiting units more than a dozen years old in a fire zone. While concerns about affordability loom large, Supervisor Bill Connelly agreed with colleagues that’s built under older building codes were simply too dangerous.
“I know how they are constructed, they are fire traps, they don’t have sheetrock in them, many of them are just panel and they’re just flat dangerous” Connelly said.
Eric Lamoureux, a CalOES spokesman said 1,500 people are still in need of temporary housing. He said officials are still assigning evacuees to about 400 manufactured homes placed in Gridley. Several smaller sites, each with 60 units in Chico, Oroville and elsewhere are still in the works.
Officials also heard that household hazardous waste clean-up, the so-called phase one clean up concluded Tuesday and workers are set to ramp up the more intensive phase two Friday. Phase two involves removing the remnants of roughly 19,000 structures from 15,000 properties.
CalOES officials said concrete debris will be processed at Granite Construction’s yard in Oroville and at Franklin Construction on Neal Road. Metal will be processed at Open Solutions in Oroville. Officials confirmed that the Koppers site in Oroville will not be used.