After Matt Banks furor, Sen. Broxson seeks to streamline contractor complaint process
State and local officials met Thursday afternoon at the Gulf Breeze campus of Pensacola State College to discuss streamlining the process of taking complaints against contractors.
State Sen. Doug Broxson asked for the meeting between officials from the Department of Business and Professional Regulation, the sheriff's offices of Escambia, Santa Rosa and Okaloosa counties, Escambia County Commissioner Robert Bender and First Judicial Circuit State Attorney Ginger Bowden Madden. The meeting was not open to the public.
"What's happening is there's eight different agencies that deal with a complaint," Broxson said after the meeting. "What we were doing in there was funneling down what people could expect when they file a complaint."
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The meeting came after a rash of complaints involving former Pensacola contractor Matt Banks, who had his license revoked and is under investigation in connection to customer claims he took 50% down payments for remodeling projects he never finished.
Banks had both his Escambia and Santa Rosa contractor licenses suspended in August, and he was arrested by the Okaloosa County Sheriff's Office on a Pensacola Police Department warrant for failing to provide a refund.
Along with these complaints and arrest, the Office of Agricultural Law Enforcement is investigating Banks for fraud concerning over 70 individuals in the Escambia and Santa Rosa counties area.
Lt. Col. Daniel Williamson, an officer with the Office of Agricultural Law Enforcement, attended Thursday's meeting and told the News Journal that the department is still investigating the fraud claims.
"We do have an active investigation and we are working in conjunction with the State Attorney's Office," Williamson said. "We've got roughly 70 victims in a large-scale consumer protection investigation, and because it is active I have no further comment."
After the meeting, Broxson commented on the difficulty of accessing the Florida Homeowners Contractor Recovery Fund, a state fund that pays restitution to claimants who have been harmed by contractors. There are limits to who can access the funds, as well as strict guidelines about what steps have to be taken to verify a claimant was actually wronged.
"The real challenge they have is that all this is a process, a due process," Broxson told the News Journal. "No one's been found guilty. There's been an allegation. They talk (through) all this information, and that's what they're doing in this investigation."
While this meeting was meant to discuss ways to streamline the complaint process, there were no immediate changes related changing the contractor competency process for Escambia County of the state.
Escambia County officials said in mid-August they would be taking a closer look at a board charged with oversight of construction contractors in the county after it took several months and an "unprecedented" amount of complaints before Banks' license was revoked.
Another contractor, Jesse LaCoste, who owns LaCoste Construction Group LLC and is Banks' brother-in-law, also had his license revoked in both Escambia and Santa Rosa counties for failing to pay restitution to former clients.
Commissioner Bender said contractor woes could be avoided if the county worked on citizen education when it comes to finding contractors.
"This has had us come up with better ideas for how we can inform the public, and that's the one thing we really want to get out of this," Bender said. "This really didn't become prevalent in our eyes until a couple months ago, so we'll go back and review and I think that's part of what this was — how could we have caught this earlier?
"Benjamin Johnson can be reached at [email protected] or 850-435-8578.
This article originally appeared on Pensacola News Journal: Doug Broxson discusses contractor complaints after Matt Banks debate.
