[C]arina Driscoll, a candidate for mayor of Burlington, stiffed a local contractor and aggressively pursued him in court for four years over a $3,000 bill for services. She ultimately lost the case and drew the ire of a local judge.
Polli Construction sued Driscoll in 2007, in an attempt to recoup money owed for the rehab of a house she and her husband, Blake Ewoldsen, planned to flip. Instead of paying the bill, the couple countersued in a $96,000 consumer fraud claim that ultimately failed. The court ordered the couple to pay Steven Polli, the contractor, $25,000 for legal costs, interest, penalties and the amount owed.
Twelve years later, Polli is still stunned by the experience. He says the Driscoll lawsuit and another case brought by an acquaintance who also happened to be a client of Polli’s dragged on for years and nearly drove his home remodeling company out of business.
Polli v. Driscoll was filed in 2006; the case wasn’t resolved until 2010. Driscoll was represented by Ian Carleton of the firm Sheehey Furlong and Behm. Carleton represented another one of Polli’s clients and lost that case, too. Polli won a $300,000 settlement, including attorney’s fees, penalties and interest and $70,000 owed for construction work.
Most contractors give up on disputes with clients, Polli said, because they operate on thin margins and an unpaid bill in the thousands of dollars can put most out of business. Back in January 2006, when Polli took the job with Driscoll, he was a solo contractor working out of his house and could ill afford to hire lawyers to recoup what he says he was rightfully owed. But he wasn’t about to give up, he says, even though Carleton used intimidating legal tactics and Driscoll openly badmouthed him to his other clients and vendors.
Carleton, who was chair of the Vermont Democratic Party during much of the time the cases went before the court, tried to subpoena Polli’s emails. The attorney also filed a motion to attach one of the contractor’s properties. “It was harassment,” Polli said. Carleton did not respond to a request for an interview.
“They didn’t know they were dealing with a stubborn Scot,” the contractor said. Polli emigrated from Scotland to the United States when he was 21 and landed in Vermont to work as a ski bum at Stowe Mountain, eventually settling down in Chittenden County.
Polli says he doesn’t have hard feelings — he describes the court cases as a graduate school education in contract law — but he says his dealings with Driscoll, who is challenging incumbent Miro Weinberger in the Burlington mayor’s race, “shows her decision-making was flawed.”
“It cost her a small fortune,” Polli said in an interview last week.
Driscoll declined to be interviewed for this story. Instead, her campaign issued a statement.
“It is no surprise that 10 days before the election, there is a cynical attack by bringing up an 11 year old dispute with a contractor. … a dispute I can’t speak freely about because the contractor has threatened to sue again if I do,” Driscoll said in the statement.
“The voters of Burlington are onto these well-timed, political distractions and it’s unfortunate that our opposition has decided to go negative. We are going to continue to run this campaign by getting out and talking with the people who live here, about returning political power to Burlingtonians,” the statement said.
Weinberger said he didn’t know anything about the court case. “We’ve run a very positive campaign, and I intend to run a positive race through next week,” he said in an interview.
After the story was published, Driscoll phoned VTDigger to dispute Weinberger’s remark. She says the mayor knew about the Polli case because she warned him about Carleton. “I talked with Miro about the Polli case,” Driscoll said. “I expressed concern about Ian Carleton, as he wasn’t a great attorney as he didn’t tell me what my exposure was.”
Court documents back up Polli’s statements about the lawsuit.
Ewoldsen and Driscoll, the stepdaughter of U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders and daughter of Jane Sanders, hired Polli on a time and materials basis to renovate a house at 20 Scarff Ave. near Route 7 in Burlington. Per a verbal agreement, Polli and his crew were paid an hourly rate, with no markup on materials. There was no written contract, and “it was at no time a fixed price for a specified project,” according to court records. Driscoll told Polli not to spend more than $32,000 on the project.
A month into the project, Polli alerted her that the project was going to run over budget and asked for direction. Driscoll emailed him back saying “Over budget? How far over budget? Oy vay!” She then asks him to reconfigure a stairway and perform other work — beyond the scope of the budget. All along, Driscoll and Ewoldsen were paying Polli on a weekly basis so that he could cover the cost of his work crew.
The owners, however, refused to pay for the final week’s worth of work in January 2006 and when Polli asked for payment, they delayed. Eventually, the relationship soured. In March of that year, Ewoldsen said, “You are not welcome on any of our properties and I won’t hesitate to call the police if you are found trespassing.”
Judge Matthew Katz said the contractor’s job is to carry out the instructions of the homeowner, charge at the agreed rate and keep homeowners informed, all of which he said Polli did.
“Substantial changes were made to the scope of the work as the project progressed,” he wrote in a court order.
Driscoll, who had served as a city councilor and as a member of the House of Representatives, apparently didn’t understand the difference between a fixed price project and payment for time and materials, according to David Greenberg, Polli’s attorney.
“She was acting as if she was ignorant of how contracts work,” Greenberg said, even though she and her husband were actively buying up houses, living in them for a few years and then reselling the properties as part of a money-making scheme. In a bio on the Vermont Woodworking School website where he worked, Ewoldsen described his work experience, listing “property manager” at the top of the list, Greenberg recalled, but when asked about the bio, he claimed not to actually manage property.
Driscoll and Ewoldsen delayed the case by two years with demands for a jury trial and by failing to disclose expert witnesses, according to court records. When they asked to subpoena AOL for all of Polli’s emails from Oct. 1, 2005, to April 1, 2006, which Greenberg described as “nothing more than a fishing expedition,” they incurred the wrath of Judge Katz who denied the motion.
“Are we killing a mouse, even a rat, with a nuclear weapon?” Katz wrote.
In December 2009, they filed a breach of contract and consumer fraud case against Polli for misrepresenting the estimated cost of the project, the time it would take and the quality of the workmanship.
In a final judgment in April 2010, Katz awarded Polli $25,000 in all: The money he was owed, plus attorneys fees, and 12 percent interest and 12 percent in penalties — the highest rate allowed by the court. Greenberg said in order to get 12 percent fees and penalties, a plaintiff has to show that a defendant engaged in “inappropriate” behavior.
Greenberg described the case as some of “the most aggressive lawyering he’d ever seen.”
