Attorney General Charity Clark is suing three loggers, alleging that they stole lumber from five different landowners between February 2018 and February 2020.
Clark alleges that David, Paul and Joseph Codling, who own Codling Brothers Logging, have violated the Consumer Protection Act by “making misleading statements about their services and subsequently taking more logs than agreed, failing to compensate landowners and leaving a mess that landowners had to clean up at their own expense.”
In one instance described in the lawsuit, David Codling offered to remove trees from a piece of land after he had gained permission to use it to access another parcel where he was working. He told the landowner he would pay them for the wood he took, according to the lawsuit. The landowner was enrolled in Current Use, a state program that gives landowners tax breaks if they own agricultural land or working forests.
Later, in February 2018, a forester conducted an inspection on the land related to the Current Use program and told the landowners that a wood chip pile was blocking a stream on the property. The landowner inspected the land with foresters from the Vermont Department of Forest, Parks and Recreation and found “cut trees, debris, and wood chip piles blocking a waterway.” The loggers had taken three to four truckloads of logs without providing any payments to the landowner, according to the lawsuit.
In May 2018, the Codlings approached two people who own land together in Plainfield, offering to remove trees that had blown over in a windstorm and allegedly promising to pay the landowners for the resulting timber sales. The Codlings estimated that the lumber was worth between $3,000 and $4,000, according to the lawsuit. By mid-summer, the landowners hadn’t received any money. In January 2019, the Codlings paid them $3,686, but mill slips indicated that the logs were worth more, the lawsuit states.
The lawsuit describes several other instances where landowners were not paid enough, not paid on time, or had to pay to clean up debris the Codlings left behind. In some cases, the suit alleges, the Codlings took trees the landowners specifically asked them not to cut down.
Reached by phone on Monday, David Codling said he became aware of the Attorney General’s lawsuit when he saw a Monday morning story by WCAX on Facebook.
He told VTDigger he believed that he was engaging in trades while performing logging work on the various properties.
“You own 20 acres of land, alright?” Codling said, giving an hypothetical example. “There’s three trees leaning on your house. I say to you, ‘OK, I’ll trade you taking those three trees down for cutting the rest of your property. You say ‘Yes.’”
He said the scenario was similar to work he’d done on several occasions, in which the tree removal was itself the compensation agreed to by landowners for the lumber he cut and sold. He said he had not reviewed the state’s lawsuit and could not say whether that type of arrangement was involved in each of the cases.
Codling also said that the Attorney General’s Office had reached out several months ago with paperwork, but that the office wouldn’t tell him who had made the allegations. The lawsuit does not use the names of the landowners who have allegedly been impacted by the timber theft.
Separately, state lawmakers are working on a bill, H.614, that would make timber theft a type of land improvement fraud. Victims of timber theft have testified before lawmakers, and some have won judgments against the loggers. Still, those who have won judgments reported not having been paid.
Asked how the state’s lawsuit would have a different outcome, Clark said she had not closely reviewed the other lawsuits.
“We seek to hold bad actors who have violated the Consumer Protection Act accountable, and that’s what this case is about,” she said.
While “there’s things you can do to enforce a judgment,” the attorney general said her office is “just at the very, very beginning of the case, and we haven’t gotten remotely to that point where we have a judgment against the defendants.”
The lawsuit asks the court to stop the Codlings from engaging in deceptive practices, to require them to pay civil penalties, to provide restitution to the landowners, to pay damages and profits that the loggers received while selling stolen lumber, and to pay attorneys’ fees.
Patrick Parenteau, professor of law emeritus at the Vermont Law and Graduate School, said the state’s case against the Codlings appears to be strong.
“The real question is, do these defendants have any money?” he said.
If the Codlings can’t pay the judgment, they may be required to file for bankruptcy protection, Parenteau said, “and then you get into all kinds of questions about what’s dischargeable in bankruptcy.” That kind of enforcement, he said, is better carried out by the Attorney General’s Office than by private landowners who would have to pay attorney’s fees and have already lost money from the timber theft.
“My general impression,” Parenteau said, “is the law has not protected these people.”
