[W]hen he found a contractor to add a deck and replace a roof at his Williston home, David Glickman felt as though he had done his due diligence.
After connecting with the contractor on Front Porch Forum, Glickman checked three references the St. Albans builder provided, looked at photos of his work on a Google account, and searched for his name online.
“I saw he might have been trouble with a DWI, but obviously people deserve a second chance,” said Glickman. “His pictures showed some great work.”
After some conversations at his home, Glickman said the two signed a contract and he paid the contractor $11,820 as a 60% down payment on the work. The builder promised to finish the project within a week, and Glickman watched him start digging holes on a Saturday in late July, and then waited for him to return.
And waited.
“That was the last I ever saw of him,” said Glickman, who this week called the police in Williston and plans to sue the contractor himself. “It leaves me with a phone number I can text, and he doesn’t text back.”
Glickman is one of many people who would like to see some kind of registration system for building contractors. Vermont’s one of only a handful of states that doesn’t require contractor registration or licensing, according to the state’s Office of Professional Regulation, which said in a report in 2017 that only Vermont, New Hampshire, Maine, Oklahoma, Wisconsin and South Dakota don’t regulate residential contractors. The rest of the states use licensing, registration or certification, the report said. Twelve states require a background check, and 14 require contractors to enroll in continuing education.
The issue of contractor registration came up in last year’s legislative session, promoted by the Vermont Builders and Remodelers Association, or VBRA.
Right now, if a contractor disappears with a deposit, performs low-quality work or doesn’t finish a job, the homeowner’s recourse is a complaint to the Attorney General’s Office or small claims court. The AG’s consumer complaint division reported it received nearly 600 complaints detailing losses of $3.1 million between 2012 and 2017.
A registration process would enable the state to ensure that contractors hold liability insurance and have created a written agreement with the client, said Ward Smyth, the owner of Turtle Creek Builders in Waitsfield and former president of the Vermont Home Builders and Remodelers Association, now the VBRA.
“I want to see the industry bettered,” said Smyth, who has been working on the issue of contractor registration through the homebuilders association for 13 years.
Smyth came up with a registration process through the association, but when the recession hit in 2008, that effort foundered. The latest statewide conversation about contractor registration started in 2017, when the Senate Government Operations Committee asked the Vermont OPR to study the issue of regulating home-improvement and construction contractors.
“During the past couple years there have been a number of serious complaints about this group,” the Senate committee said in its letter to the then-head of OPR, Colin Benjamin. “Most are related to financial concerns but many could rise to the level of safety.”
Many small building contractors testified against contractor registration in the Statehouse last year, said Jim Bradley of Hayward Design Build, the president of the homebuilders’ group. The proposal would have required builders who do jobs valued at around $2,000 – a number that was raised to $5,000 during discussions in the Legislature – to register with the state and provide a written contract. The registration fee was proposed at $70 every two years.
“They basically were saying this is an onerous burden upon your smaller contractors,” said Bradley on Friday. “The irony is that the smallest contractors had the largest level of complaints against them through the Attorney General’s Office.”
But the idea also has its supporters, and Bradley expects it to resurface next year, probably as part of a bill that sets up an enforcement mechanism for residential building energy standards, or RBES.
Rep. Scott Campbell, D-St. Johnsbury, set up four informal meetings this summer to gather information on RBES; training for weatherization workers; and contractor registration. He said a registration system would enable the state to contact all of Vermont’s building contractors about upcoming trainings and other information that is relevant to them.
“It’s all part of the general purpose, which is to raise the standard of performance of the construction industry, especially the residential construction industry,” said Campbell. The two remaining meetings are scheduled for 1 p.m. on Aug. 22 and Sept. 12 in the Ethan Allen Room in the Vermont Statehouse.
Glickman said he supports a registration system that would hold builders more accountable.
“If they have to be registered and there is a case of fraud, the state can pull the registration,” said Glickman, who built the deck himself and hired another company to replace the roof. “Electricians have licenses; plumbers have licenses, why shouldn’t a contractor have a license?”
