Exclusive: Paradise contractor indicted, accused of preying on Camp Fire victims

Butte County prosecutors have accused a building contractor of preying on victims of the most destructive wildfire in California history, filing charges against a career white-collar criminal who, according to his customers, took hundreds of thousands of dollars to rebuild homes without finishing them.

The Butte County district attorney’s office indicted Jay Soderling, 63, the owner and operator of Aurora Ridge Homes, in connection with the work he did after the Camp Fire. The fire killed 85 people and destroyed more than 12,000 homes in Paradise in November 2018.

The charges come four months after a Sacramento Bee investigation revealed that Soderling was a longtime white-collar criminal with a history of fraudulent business dealings. The Bee’s reporting revealed that Aurora Ridge customers in Paradise paid Soderling hundreds of thousands of dollars to rebuild the homes they lost to California’s deadliest wildfire. One of his alleged victims said he paid Aurora Ridge more than $200,000; another paid $228,000. Neither wound up with a completed home.

Officials with the town of Paradise told The Bee that Aurora Ridge didn’t complete any of the homes it started, although a contractor who stepped in for Soderling’s company after it was suspended did finish three properties.

“That’s actually amazing news,” Linnie Wallin, who paid Aurora more than $200,000, told The Bee on Tuesday. “It’s almost making me a little bit emotional.”

He credited The Bee’s investigation earlier this year.

“I think a lot of it had to do with your last story,” he told a reporter. “Because the district attorney basically told me before your last story they weren’t going to charge him with anything. And then all of a sudden, your last story came out, and they contacted me, and now there’s criminal charges going around. And that’s just amazing.”

Another homebuilder under investigation

The district attorney also has been investigating another Paradise homebuilder — Tricia Cohen of Cubic Quarters, another company featured in The Bee’s May investigation.

That company promised customers it would replace their vanquished homes with inexpensive pre-fabricated structures made from steel in China. Several customers told The Bee that Cubic Quarters, like Aurora Ridge, collected payments totaling hundreds of thousands of dollars without finishing their homes. The Bee’s investigation revealed that before she became an unlicensed homebuilder in Paradise, several of Cohen’s former business partners from around the country said she took tens of thousands of dollars from them and never paid them back.

Soderling, a Bay Area contractor with a record of criminal convictions going back decades, was charged with a felony count of contracting without a license in a declared disaster zone and misdemeanor charges of false advertisement and charging customers down payments that exceeded the state maximum of $1,000.

Maggie Corron, who says she paid Aurora about $228,000 for an unfinished home, called the indictment “wonderful news.”

She said the home was supposed to cost about $300,000 to rebuild, but the problems with Aurora have ballooned the cost to more than $400,000. She just obtained a contractor’s bid of $220,000 to finish the job “and that’s just bare bones.”

State seeks license removal

District Attorney Mike Ramsey said Soderling made a preliminary appearance Thursday in Butte County Superior Court and will return Oct. 27 to enter a plea. He was ordered not to perform any contracting work while the criminal case is pending.

Soderling’s defense lawyer, Joseph Hougnon of Sacramento, said his client was released without having to post bail. Hougnon said he doesn’t know enough about the case yet to make a statement on Soderling’s behalf.

The Contractors State License Board, which regulates the building industry, canceled Aurora Ridge’s license early last year and filed a lengthy administrative complaint seeking to permanently bar Soderling, his wife Jessica, their son Colton and another man from the contracting business.

The state’s complaint said Jay and Jessica Soderling had already been permanently banned from contracting because of numerous past infractions. The agency said they hid behind other people who still held valid contractors’ licenses, but in reality they were calling the shots at Aurora Ridge.

However, Jay Soderling was the only person associated with Aurora Ridge who was charged in the criminal case.

The Camp Fire killed 85 people, more than any wildfire in California history, and left billions of dollars in property damage. The Soderlings landed in Paradise months later, in desperate need of cash.

Previous legal issues

The couple owed the IRS nearly $499,000, according to court records, the legacy of a criminal case that left Jay Soderling with a two-year prison term.

In 2011 the Soderlings were indicted on federal income tax evasion charges. Prosecutors said they had pulled off a scheme to hide personal assets in a development company that was doing land deals in Lake County. While Jay was sent to prison, Jessica was placed on probation after a jury convicted them in 2015.

Before sentencing, Jay Soderling’s lawyer asked for leniency. “Mr. Soderling regrets having let down his family and friends, and is determined to right the wrong by using his real estate expertise to make the IRS whole,” his lawyer wrote in a court filing.

Federal prosecutors, though, called him “a long-time white-collar criminal who has habitually conducted business outside the bounds of the law, taken advantage of others, and encouraged others to participate in his illegal conduct.”

It was just his latest run-in with law enforcement. In 1984 he and his brother were slapped with a cease-and-desist order over financial irregularities at Golden Pacific Savings and Loan, an institution they owned in Sonoma County. Authorities said they were taking millions out of Golden Pacific to finance their own real estate deals and personal expenditures.

The savings & loan folded a year later and the brothers pleaded guilty to a pair of felony charges. They received one-year prison terms.

After finishing his term, Jay Soderling then went on a $500,000 personal spending spree, in violation of a court order that obligated him to pay millions in restitution to the federal government. He went back to prison, this time for three years.

In 2006, Soderling tried to start over. He applied for a new license from the Contractors’ State License Board. He was turned down — a direct result of his failure to pay the government the millions he owed from the Golden Pacific collapse.

Soderling “did not meet the criteria for rehabilitation,” the agency wrote.

This story was originally published September 6, 2022 at 8:45 AM.