Besides saving all the Batchelder tile — which of course survived because it’s already been fired — and passionately resolving to patronize to the max every Altadena restaurant that manages to reopen, from the diners to the fine-dining gems that have miraculously opened in the formerly high cuisine-absent town, one of the most important, and most talked-about, hopes for the rebuilding process that will take a decade is the streamlining of plan check.

Planning departments’ paper work has increased to the point of absurdity. And a lot of that paper is in the form of gigantic checks written to the city or county for the privilege of putting a better roof over your head.

Plus I don’t believe I am the only one who, while reading Eaton fire aftermath stories in all three of my morning papers, which still fill the front and inside pages five weeks on from the fire, worries that all the calls for dramatically improved fireproofing requirements in building codes is going to make a hideously expensive and time-consuming process even more so.

As with CEQA statewide, pre-fire, everyone talked about reform and simplification, and no one did anything about it.

And now, when we have a need for speed and economic efficiency, we may slow matters down, and make them more expensive, once again.

I have nothing against making homes more fireproof than they used to be. Build ‘em like those Malibu bunkers where you just batten down the hatches as you evacuate if you’ve got the scratch to, says I. But I will offer as anecdotal evidence the experience of a friend. She bought one old wooden Altadena cottage a few years ago, and then built on the subdivided lot a second brand-new home billed as “fireproof.”

Both burned down entirely in exactly the same manner after being hit by the basketball-size white-hot embers blowing in a crazy Santa Ana easterly that was the unprecedented storm we call the Eaton fire.

Anyway, back to simplifying plan check. I’ve seen spot-on communications from Altadena architect Alan Zorthian, who lost much of the famous ranch up at the top of Fair Oaks, and Altadena builder and former Town Council Land Use Committee Chair Steve Lamb, urging county Supervisor Kathryn Barger to push for changes that would allow local licensed architects and engineers to sign off on plan checks for Altadena rebuilding rather than having to go through the tortuous county bureaucracy.

Right on.

Plus Steve, who knows how to build stuff, goes steps farther: “We will have to lay our own rebar, set our own forms, pour our own concrete, set our own sills, do our own framing and shear paneling, run our electrical and plumbing and do our own sheet rock,. Set our windows do our insulation and siding do our own roofs or we will have to sell to developers be dispossessed and Altadena will look like Riverside. Let the contractors have the Palisades. We must all be Amish or perish.”

You have to dig that last line.

We shall have to see the extent to which the loving hands at home approach to rebuilding will be allowed by the powers that be. But there’s no time like the present for people of all political persuasions to understand the need to cut red tape.

And, while there are still some good parts to Riverside — the surrounding tract houses not among them — I, too, don’t want this Altadena Strong optimism and Altadena is Not for Sale activism to allow the Phoenix that properly rises from the ashes here to be ... Phoenix.

Ever been to Phoenix?

It’s not a place that the Altadena to come wants to be.

Wednesday at random

Realtor Rosey Bell and many friends put on a great bash Sunday at Abel Ramirez’s El Portal restaurant in the Arcade to benefit fire victims.

In the most practical way possible: To offer a bunch of nice-looking clothes hung nicely on racks rather than dumped into piles. Nice shopping bags on hand.

Take what you need, and people did, plus margaritas.

And, ceramicist Joan Takayama-Ogawa had a really good suggestion about a fine, fireproof place for artists to store their important papers in case of wildfire: in the kiln.

Write the public editor at lwilson@scng.com