Ex-PID head steps up as town manager
PARADISE » Paradise’s ongoing rebuilding and water issues gained a champion when Kevin Phillips started his new role as town manager on Monday.
Phillips has lived in the area since 2000 and joined Paradise Irrigation District in2007. He served as the interim district manager in 2017, remaining the manager in a “difficult but exciting” position after the Camp Fire.
He claims he never thought the position of town manager would be his, but it’s “an exciting step in my career” and he hopes to bring a knowledge of what Paradise residents are going through to the job.
Paradise Mayor Greg Bolin said Phillips was a natural choice for the position— “He’s shown real leadership through the Camp Fire.”
“Just having been in the trenches up here, he knew the people that we’ve been working with,” Bolin said. “He knew exactly what we needed … he knows what our issues are and knows all of our goals.”
Re-imagining a town
Phillips says one of his main concerns, besides focusing efforts on bringing homeowners and builders to the rebuilding effort, is to help manage funds from the PG& E settlement well, while “working through issues with FEMA.”
With his background in the irrigation district, Phillips is also looking forward to reviewing multiple options for the future of Paradise’s water, with public input through a number of meetings around a sustainability study.
There are multiple options for each category the public might consider, he said. For example, the district could consolidate within the town as a department, use a shared resources model, or use a private agency, as the city of Chico does.
Within those options are even more possibilities, he added.
“It’s going to take lots of community input,” he said, citing examples of towns changing their water district in the state, including Biggs and Santa Rosa.
While the community faces many challenges with rebuilding and removing fire hazards, there’s “a lot of exciting things moving forward,” Phillips said.
He says he prefers to see the town as a “checkerboard” of preexisting ideas and properties — “It’s not a clean slate.”
“Thinking outside the box will be critical,” he said. Rather than treating the town and its development as a blank canvas, he would prefer to see “what is already in there and reestablishing it” while thinking of new strategies for safety and community development.
Getting many dead trees out of town first is key, with help from the California Governor’s Office of Emergency Services tree removal project, which Phillips hopes tomove along “as efficiently as possible.”
As far as economic development, he is excited for a study of expending broadband Internet speeds for “the new normal” — “With working from home and telecommuting, we want to support that life style up here.
“For people who are wanting to work up on the hill, we want to offer homeowner assistance as well,”
he said.
Fire management
In the midst of a hot, dry season, Phillips said “everyone’s on high alert,” about how high new fire danger is this year.
“The original (Paradise) evacuation plan was a good evacuation plan for what it entailed,” he said. “Never did they think of a fire … that would move as fast as it did.
“There is a need to look at that as a living document as we move forward to tweak it andmake it safer,” he said, such as segmenting areas of town that are bottlenecks when it comes to evacuation routes.
However, he reiterated the importance of residents taking ownership of their parcel of land even when they no longer live on the ridge. The new major fire hazard in Paradise is the broom weed problem, which Bolin said is worse this year than ever before.
“I can tell there’s a few ( lots) that people are not taking ownership of,” he said, praising Cal FireButte County for consistently communicating with residents and landowners about lot maintenance.
Phillips said he wants to “impress onto the owners of these lots, it’s their responsibility to clean it up.” Cal Fire-Butte County cannot address all broomweed threats, he said.
“It can happen overnight … and is hard to see if you’re not driving up here on a daily basis,” Phillips said. “I hope they’ll keep doing their part to make the ones that are living up here safe.” He added maintaining properties is not only a town aesthetic practice, but to help preserve the safety of the town, “so we show the example of what it looks like to take ownership.”
Bolin added he is excited to work with Phillips and the current town staff after a year full of changes.
“It’s sometimes difficult for people to see what is possible in Paradise,” Bolin said. “But our people can see the possibility in Paradise. Not the debris, the dead trees. They see paths that we’re going to get through this. This team is able to adjust to those things that come up.”