Rebuilding after the Mountain Fire, and what the permit counter asks for first
SOS Restoration of Ventura County rebuilds houses lost in the Mountain Fire, which burned through Camarillo Heights and Somis in 2024. This guide walks the paperwork in the order the counters ask for it: which office holds your file, what the fee waiver covers, and what quietly eats the schedule.
Which counter is mine, the county's or the city's?
It depends on whether your parcel sits inside a city limit, and most of what burned did not.
The fire started on Balcom Canyon Road above Somis. Cal Fire closed the incident at 19,904 acres with 243 structures destroyed and 126 damaged, cause listed as equipment. Camarillo Heights and Somis are unincorporated ground, which puts your application with the Ventura County Resource Management Agency and its Building and Safety division rather than with a city hall. County figures put 182 homes destroyed in unincorporated Camarillo and the ranch country around it.
If your lot sits inside the Camarillo city line, everything below about the county process stops applying to you, because the city runs its own counter, its own portal and its own surcharges. Somis is open ground between Camarillo and Moorpark, so two neighbors a mile apart can end up filing in two different systems. Confirm the parcel before you confirm anything else.
Are the permit fees waived, and does that include me?
They are waived for whoever owned the property when it burned, and the waiver expires.
The Board of Supervisors approved it in 2024. It covers building permits, wastewater, grading, floodplain, defensible-space landscaping and the administrative charges that ride along with them, all under a ceiling on what the county is willing to give up in total. The county’s own estimate of what that spares a household runs into five figures. The window shuts at the end of 2026, with room to extend it.
The catch is the eligibility line. It follows whoever owned the property at the moment of the fire, so anybody who bought a burned lot afterward bought it without the waiver attached. If a property changed hands during 2025, settle that question with the county before the application goes in, not after.
Is there a recovery center I can walk into?
No, and there has not been one for a long time.
The building people remember was a Local Assistance Center. It opened days after the fire and shut nine days later.
What stands in its place is a team rather than a storefront. The county assigned four planners to these files as the Mountain Fire Planning Rebuild Team, reachable on the county planning line at (805) 654-2888. Applications are filed online through Citizen Access, and the county’s 2026 permitting reform added a One-Stop portal over the top of it. Nobody is handing a folder across a desk anymore, so the person who knows the online system is the person who should be filing.
What did the county drop from the process to move it along?
Zoning clearance. On a rebuild after fire the county deleted that step, and the application goes straight to Building and Safety.
Zoning clearance is the review where a planner signs off on the use, the setbacks and the lot itself before anyone opens a structural sheet. Deleting it takes an entire queue out from in front of you. What it does not do is shorten plan check, and the county publishes approximately up to four weeks for new projects and the same window again for rechecks. Read that second half twice. Two rounds of corrections is where a rebuild schedule quietly disappears, and the defense against it is a complete first submittal rather than a fast one.
Something else about the unincorporated side catches people out. The exemption list in Section 105.2 of the Ventura County Building Code, ordinance 4655, effective in 2026, runs seventeen items, and not one of them is a drywall or roofing threshold. The closest is finish work, meaning painting, papering, tiling, carpeting, cabinets and countertops, with no square footage attached to it. Putting board back on a burned wall out here has no written exemption to stand on. Section 1505.1.2 adds another: replace more than half a roof inside one year and the whole roof has to come up to a Class C covering at minimum.
My lot is inside Camarillo. What is different at that counter?
Paper is gone, two surcharges ride on every fee, and the city publishes no review time at all.
Camarillo has accepted no plan sets on paper since 2025. Everything moves through OpenGov. Fees carry a General Plan Maintenance charge of 17.89 percent and a Technology charge of 11.34 percent stacked on top. Building and Safety is contracted out to Charles Abbott Associates instead of staffed in house, and Moorpark hires the same firm, so a contractor who has filed at one counter has already met the other.
The city publishes no plan check timeline, no drywall threshold, and reroofing there needs a permit. That is the exact answer, and it beats a comfortable guess: anybody quoting you a number of weeks for the Camarillo counter is quoting some other city’s figure. Close to half the town also predates 1980, and on a house that old the demolition permit waits on a laboratory result, which is why what gets sampled before anybody opens a wall sets the date the machines can show up.
What holds a rebuild up once the drawings are in?
Corrections, the season, and the parts of the lot that are not the house.
Ground under a burn scar behaves differently for years afterward. The USGS ran the numbers on this scar twelve days after ignition and set the median basin trigger at roughly 0.42 inches of rain inside fifteen minutes for a one-in-two chance of a debris flow. That is an ordinary winter cell crossing overhead, not a named storm. Camarillo has already lived the far end of that sequence: the Springs Fire burned in 2013 and the mud arrived nineteen months later, damaging sixteen homes at Camarillo Springs and leaving ten of them red-tagged, meaning placarded so nobody could sleep in them. FEMA holds the raised flood risk open for as long as five years after a fire, until the vegetation grows back.
Which is why grading, drainage and floodplain work are not filler on a burned lot, and why those fees sit inside the waiver next to the building permit. It is also the argument against being the house with an open roof going into a wet season. By 2026 the county reported 72 properties in the rebuild pipeline, 39 of those permitted and every permitted one under construction, more than 170 lots cleared of debris, and a first certificate of occupancy signed.
What should be signed before anyone touches the lot?
A written contract carrying one total price, signed before the work it covers begins.
California Business and Professions Code section 7159 requires the home improvement contract, and every change order made to it, to be in writing and signed by both sides before the covered work starts. The figure inside that contract is closed, and no clock runs against it. That is exactly why the rebuild half of a loss reaches you as one agreed number while the drying and cleaning half is billed hourly: the statute will not accept a home improvement contract without a total in it.
Three more lines are worth knowing before a pen moves. Civil Code section 1689.6 allows seven business days to cancel a contract to repair a residence damaged in a disaster, against three in an ordinary door-to-door sale and five where the buyer is a senior. Inside a declared disaster area the court has no discretion on penalties: it must impose the maximum fine on a contractor who breaks the contract and down-payment rules, plus full restitution on anyone running a scheme against a burned-out owner. And the state’s Residential Remodeling classification is barred from contracting for structural changes to load-bearing portions of a building, footings, foundations, load-bearing walls, partitions and roof structures among them, which leaves a total loss outside its scope entirely. SOS holds CSLB #1131134 on the construction side and IICRC #70194273 on the mitigation side, and state law puts those numbers on the contract and in the advertising alike.
What happens after you leave?
Somebody sleeps in that house again and our part is over. Four things on that lot were never ours, and each has its own number to call.
- Past putting back what stood there: a structural engineer. A moved footing, a new bearing wall, a roof frame carrying more than the old one. The county will not accept the plan set without an engineer’s signature, and our framers work to what comes back.
- What a material is: the laboratory. Sampling a suspect material belongs to whoever pulls it and the lab reading it. Their report is what the air district goes by, and so do we.
- The sign-off: Ventura County Building and Safety, on (805) 654-2791. The inspector holds the pen and the calendar. Inside the Camarillo city line, that call goes to the city counter.
- What the policy pays: the company that wrote the policy. The claim number sits on your declarations page, and that conversation is yours. What we hand you is the folder underneath it, the thing their people actually read: dated photographs, a line for every truckload that left, and a scope anyone can check.
The bigger kitchen you had in mind before the fire is ours too, on separate paper with its own figure.
Musty Garage Smell in Oxnard: Marine Layer or a Real Leak
Who Closes the Wall After Drying? A Ventura County Guide
Smoke Odor Comes Back With the Heat: The Attic
If the Mountain Fire took your house in Camarillo Heights or Somis, call SOS Restoration of Ventura County at (805) 427-9039 and somebody who has read the county filing requirements will walk the lot with you. What you are working toward is a certificate of occupancy and a door you can lock behind you.