The Santa Cruz Recovery Group Helping Fire Victims Rebuild Their Homes

Here are the morning’s top stories on Friday, August 28, 2026

• It’s been six years since the CZU fire burned nearly 700 homes in the Santa Cruz Mountains. Less than a third of those have been rebuilt. KAZU’s Erin Malsbury reports on one recent success story. The Santa Cruz County Long Term Recovery Group is a local nonprofit helping fire victims rebuild from the ground up.
• Palm Springs is the latest city to approve a temporary ban on large-scale data centers… as more communities across Southern California consider their impacts on infrastructure and the environment.
• California Attorney General Rob Bonta is responding to concerns that the $17 billion dollar settlement deal he and other attorneys general just reached with Meta is too weak.

Tonia Weakland-Wilhelm lost her family home in the fire and says Covid supply chain issues—and now tariffs—have made rebuilding expensive.

“ That’s part of why I almost gave up… I put all my insurance money into the pre-clearances, the septic, and geotechnical and stuff like that, and then it came to a point where I wasn’t gonna be able to do it,” says Weakland-Wilhelm.

She was about to put her land on the market when she learned about the Santa Cruz County Long Term Recovery Group. The local nonprofit helped her rebuild from the ground up.

“It made my life so much easier,” she says. “ I can’t even explain or put a number on the value of them doing all of the paperwork and everything for me, you know?”

Executive director Tonje Switzer formed the long term recovery group after rebuilding her own home, which burned down in the CZU fire. She still remembers the kindness of a neighbor whose house had not burned. He ran PVC pipes from his well to his neighbors.

“I just came back on my property one day, and I had water,” says Switzer. “And that is sort of the impetus of this, right? That community effort, the barn raising of it.”

That helped inspire the nonprofit, which works with people affected by fires and major storms. It’s the only group in the county doing that kind of case management.

“They’re financially vetted and also vetted for vulnerabilities, and of course, to make sure that the damage to their homes is disaster related.”

Switzer says because of careful groundwork, they have a high success rate. Volunteer work and donations keep the projects well-below market rate. Weakland-Wilhelm’s house would have cost around $700,000 dollars to rebuild, but the long term recovery group brought costs down to $250,000.

Still, Weakland-Wilhelm, like many homeowners, had to borrow. Switzer says the group is happy to talk to hesitant lenders.

“When Tonia presented the budget, they looked at her like, ‘What do you take us for? Nobody can build for that amount of money. It’s impossible to build what you’re proposing.’ “

So the Recovery Group sat down with the bankers and explained what they do.

“And with that, she was able to achieve a construction loan, to build the home to bridge that gap.”

Most of their projects have been renovations. Weakland-Wilhelm’s house is the first the Long Term Recovery Group has completely rebuilt from architectural plans.

Standing in the newly completed home, construction project manager Dylan Childs says the project would not have been possible without committed volunteers who spent weeks working on the foundation, framing, and walls.

“The dedication they have, the willingness to come out on this hill to do this hard work with me has just been tremendous, and I can’t thank them enough,” says Childs.

He worked at Habitat for Humanity for years, and brought some of the volunteers—and traditions—over. That included a special gift for Weakland-Wilhelm’s house dedication.

“One of our volunteers was a high school wood shop teacher for a career. He made sure to build very detailed jewelry boxes for each homeowner, and we gifted them their keys inside the jewelry box,” Childs said. “John Reisdorf isn’t with us anymore. He made a few extra boxes. This one’s for you. Welcome home, Tonia.”

Childs says the old growth redwood of the box was likely milled from some of the same trees as Weakland-Wilhelm’s original home. The new house also includes redwood from some of the trees cut after the fire. That was important to Weakland-Wilhelm.

“I had to find someone to mill them, and that was an expense. But, you know, I’m so glad I did that.”

She says one of the best construction moments was raising the first wall with family and volunteers.

“ Hopefully this story will inspire people to keep persevering through their hardships and to support people that need it.”

As soon as she has final clearance from the county, Weakland-Wilhelm will move back in, along with her mother, who owned the land before her.

The Palm Springs city council voted to enact a 45-day pause on data center approvals. Officials say its city laws currently do not mention data centers.

Councilwoman Grace Garner, who proposed the moratorium, says it will allow the city to study their impacts on jobs, infrastructure and the environment

“And as we’ve seen in other communities across the country, who have not had that happen, there are really huge detriments,” said Garner.

Meanwhile, Coachella’s city council finalized its ban on data centers. Coachella Mayor Frank Figueroa says they acted on the will of the people.

“You guys made this happen. We are the policymakers fixing what we did wrong, and you told us that day in and day out.”

Coachella’s citywide ban is set to take place a month from now.

Critics point out the billions in settlement money is paid over ten years, and five billion of it is contingent on TikTok and YouTube agreeing to the same rules.

Bonta says the price tag is still historic, but not what he considers the most important part of the settlement.

“The lead here is the injunctive relief, the changes that will be required of Meta … different business practices, different approaches, restrictions, and parameters that help reduce harm for kids. That’s really the headline,” said Bonta.

Over the next six months, Meta will be required to institute a default daily time limit of two hours for users under 18, a nighttime block between midnight and 6 a.m. and a notification block overnight and during school hours. Those default settings can only be changed by a parent, and some would be expanded if other social media companies commit to similar terms.

Their apps will also ban displaying the number of likes or reactions that users under 18 get on their posts, and ban image filters that imitate cosmetic procedures for those users. 

Bonta says he expects the owners of TikTok, YouTube and Snap to follow, if not the easy way, then through the courts.

“We expect that other members of the industry … will adhere to essentially a similar set of remedies and protections for kids,” Bonta said during a press conference on Wednesday morning. “Whether we do that through litigation, through conversation and resolution, is really up to the other members of the industry.”

Meta also committed to creating enhanced parent supervision tools, instituting more robust measures to detect users’ ages and bringing on an independent auditor “with expansive access to information and resources, regular reporting and the right to communicate concerns to the attorneys general.”