The Melbourne, Florida, area is one of the premier areas in the country for all kinds of interesting building projects. Attracted by the weather, the nature and the opportunities, people from across the country and across the world flock to Melbourne to build homes and businesses. The sheer volume of construction that is underway each day inevitably results in construction disputes.
Those disputes affect high-income clients, like developers of condominium buildings, and they also affect low-income clients, like the owners of a day care center and private kindergarten in Orange Park. Those owners have been dealing with roof problems for a very long time. Parts of the roof were physically ripped off by Hurricane Irma, and now the owners say that they are being financially ripped off by the company they paid to fix the roof.
The child care center got a disaster loan after their roof was damaged by Hurricane Irma. They then paid $16,132 to a Jacksonville-based roofing company to fix the roof. That company does business across Florida, and is the subject of complaints from multiple people across the state. The child care center director is one of those, saying that the roofing company took the money but didn’t do the work. It has been several months since the payment was made. They were supposed to start working about five weeks after the payment was made, but did not, and even stopped returning the child care center director’s calls. Reportedly, they didn’t even apply for the permit that they would have needed to start work on the roof, indicating that they never had any intention of starting the work. All they wanted, according to the child care center owners, was the money.
An office of the roofing company was all locked up and appeared to be empty. The boss of the roofing company started a different construction company recently, which those who feel they have been taken advantage of view as a bad sign.
Source: News4Jax.com, “Day care damaged in Hurricane Irma paid thousands for roofing work that has not started,” Tarik Minor, Jodi Mohrmann and Eric Wallace, March 09, 2018
