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If a town is going to rebuild after a major natural disaster, it needs to get its schools, churches, and businesses reopened as fast as possible. 

That was the message the Federal Emergency Management Agency delivered to Paradise town officials in 2018, shortly after a wildfire destroyed 85% of structures in the Northern California community of 12,000 people. 

“Those are vital for your town to come back,” Paradise Mayor Greg Bolin recalls being told. “If you don’t do that, you won’t come back.” 

Paradise, like Lahaina, had students back in classrooms in a matter of months. Bringing back businesses has proven more complicated.

Businesses can play a vital role in community revitalization. But they also need a certain amount of customers in place to be able to reopen, making business redevelopment a sort of a chicken and egg situation.

Five years after the Camp Fire, roughly 800 businesses are in operation in Paradise, said Mark Thorp, a business advocate with the Paradise Ridge Chamber of Commerce. That’s a little more than half the number before the fire.

Much of the initial focus of the town’s efforts was on residential rebuilding. There’s also been significantly more financial support for nonprofit and cultural groups as opposed to for-profit businesses, said Heidi Elick, president of the chamber. The town has gained some new businesses that saw an opportunity in the construction boom, but the community has lost many of its mom-and-pop shops.

Elick, who runs a financial consulting business, also struggles with getting the support services she needs for her business in town. None of the lawyers she knew before the fire have stayed. She’s only aware of one accounting firm that has reopened.

“Even ones that own property up here still aren’t coming back,” she said.

Though Elick and others in the business community feel more could be done to support commerce in town, getting to the point where 800 businesses have reopened has involved significant work from the town and groups like the chamber.

Successful Efforts

One of the most successful things the chamber did was rent space in the aftermath of the fire and offer it up for free for any business or builder that needed a place for meetings or temporary offices, Elick said.

“The building was packed a lot,” Elick said. “Because there wasn’t anywhere for people to meet.”

The chamber also ran a campaign soliciting input on what the town should look like in the future, and made sure to have a representative from the business community at every town hall and public planning event the city held.

Kevin Phillips, who served as the town manager of Paradise from 2020 to 2023, said community input was critical to deciding where to direct town efforts.

Residents said they wanted a walkable downtown — something that hadn’t really existed before the fires. In response, the town made changes to its business ordinances to try and support the creation of a mixed-use commercial district in an area of town that is still mostly filled with vacant lots. Many businesses are waiting to open there until the town completes a sewage modernization project in the area.

Phillips said that creating an economic plan for the town was one of his first priorities when taking office in 2020. The town lost more than 50% of its revenue as a result of the fires and was in desperate need of a vision for moving back to financial self-sufficiency.

“The only reason why the town is still alive is because they were able to get a lawsuit against PG&E to sustain them through that,” Phillips said.

Putting together longterm financial projects and figuring out how much of the settlement money to save to cover budget gaps and how much to invest into infrastructure and other efforts to draw people and businesses back to town is a difficult calculation to make, he said. Initial projections showed that with moderate growth and economic development, it would take Paradise 20 years to get back to being financially self-sustaining.

To attract businesses back and start rebuilding some of its revenue base, the town created a new economic development office staffed by three people. That office conducted a significant amount of research on the number of people coming back to town, the commercial needs of residents and the economic potential for businesses. Then workers in the office started reaching out to businesses outside of Paradise, sharing information and trying to entice the types of stores the town needed most at the time to open up shop.

“We would court them,” Phillips said, helping to find available space, fast-tracking permitting, walking them through any issues they ran into.

The economic development director would basically tell businesses that if they ran into any problems opening to call her directly and her office would help them.

A big issue is how to encourage businesses to come back to an area before there’s a “green light” for them to know they will have enough customers to make a profit. Anything a town can do to support important businesses in that interim period is critical.

In Paradise, the businesses that were projected to be the biggest economic drivers were in construction and home goods, so those were some of the companies that the economic development office focused on, followed by restaurants.

In Lahaina — tourism aside — it’s important to find out what businesses really matter to locals, Phillips said.

Does it matter to residents if a certain restaurant is able to reopen in the same location where it was before, Phillips said as an example.

“Is that really important to citizens?” Phillips said.

If it is, the next step is figuring out how to support that business in rebuilding as soon as possible.

“If there is an opportunity to encourage businesses to come back before they know they are going to make that money, that’s a good thing to do,” Phillips said.

Civil Beat’s coverage of Maui County is supported in part by grants from the Nuestro Futuro Foundation.