If this is how County Employees perform their duties, it's time to truly re-evaluate our leadership.
Homeowner says builder, inspectors did poor job
By Stan Welch
A homeowner in one of Anderson County’s finer neighborhoods has serious problems with the performance of the county building inspectors.
Bill Chandler, who recently built a home in the Chestnut Springs development, says that the County inspectors routinely signed off on work which was done improperly, did not meet county codes, or simply wasn’t done at all. He contends that the county’s failure to enforce standards resulted in tens of thousands of dollars worth of repairs that are needed on the house; repairs that will almost certainly have to be made at Chandler’s expense, since the builder in question recently declared bankruptcy.
“He did that to avoid being held accountable for his miserable performance,” said Chandler. “I have a civil lawsuit filed against him, and there is a hearing scheduled with the state licensing, labor and regulations board (LLR) at which I fully expect that his contracting license will be revoked. But I have virtually no chance of recovering my losses, and I firmly believe that the county failed to do its job.”
Chandler, who owns an engineering company in Powdersville, says that he is certainly qualified to make the allegations he is making, both against the builder and the county.
“But really, it doesn’t take any special expertise. I mean, if you’re standing on a porch with no screen installed, I don’t know exactly how you can sign off on it as being a screen porch. But the county inspector did. I have the paperwork to prove it.”
Chandler says he picked H & D Construction of Inman, SC because his lender recommended them. “They did decent work at first, but they got worse and worse.”
The building permit for the house, which is over 5000 square feet, was issued in March of 2007. By September, Chandler was in touch with the LLR office, filing a complaint about the work being done, and not being done, on his house.
By December of 2007, Chandler was corresponding with Barry Holcombe of the county codes department, expressing his concerns about the construction. In a letter dated December 10, Chandler informed Holcombe of structural and other deviations from the international residential code, as well as “of standard engineering practices and standard construction practices. Over the course of construction we were assured by our builder, H & D Construction, that these items would be repaired. To date, none have.”
By this time, the LLR had already been contacted but had informed Chandler that the county had responsibility for the first two years of the structure’s life.
In January of 2008, Robertson –Wade Engineering, issued their independent report, which described the work as substandard. The report went on to recommend hiring a new contractor to repair the deficiencies and even demolish and restore some of the construction. Chandler says the projected costs of the repairs approached $200,000.
“What I can’t understand is how the various phases of work were approved by county inspectors. I mean many of these areas were glaring. I had walls inside the house that had no insulation in them. The area over the front porch was never insulated. Code violations are visible everywhere. The inspectors would catch these things on first inspection, but they never verified whether they had been corrected. The builder would assure them he’d take care of things, but he didn’t. I have a report from a reputable engineer that shows that.”
Chandler says that when he presented the independent engineering report to the builder, citing all the repairs and changes to be made, the builder simply pulled off the job and didn’t return. “He had already hired a lawyer when I got LLR involved. So he just left and has never come back or taken another phone call from me. I just feel like if the county had done its job and made him address the violations at the proper time, this wouldn’t be happening.”
Chandler says to add insult to injury, he recently received notice from the county that he had not yet fenced in his pool and the permit to do so had expired and would need to be renewed. “If I hadn’t been tied up fighting this guy, because the county didn’t enforce their own codes, I would have had the damn fence up by now. So now I have to buy another license. This is absolutely crazy.”
