Four Star Plumbing Orange County: Lights On, No One Home

Four Star Plumbing Orange County just ripped me off for $165 dollars. They charged me for a service call that produced nothing of real value. Later, they sent me a bid e-mail that got the facts of our situation completely wrong even though they had sent out their own plumber, Angel, to assess our situation. I'm going to ask the property management lady who recommended Four Star Plumbing Orange County to us to see if she can help us get our money back. 

After we sent Kelli Frank, co-owner of Four Star Plumbing Orange County, photos of our issues and described our problems in a detailed e-mail she charged us $165.00 for the privilege of waiting around for two hours and then watching her plumber, Angel, inspect our kitchen and write out his notes for a bid.

What did I get for the $165.00? Angel looked under our sink and behind our refrigerator. He advised us to save money by buying our own disposer and faucet. He advised us to use another company to fix the angle stops. My wife and I watched him as he did some paperwork. He said that he could not do any work at all that day. 

As I remember it, he said he would not install the disposer unless the water was hooked up to test it. He would not have the water running because he would not use the plastic angle stops used by our PEX installers. He said that we needed to get another company to come in and replace the angle stops and then he would go ahead and do the disposer. 

Angel could have done at least a little work for us for $165.00. For example, he could have taken out the old disposer. 

Even worse, when I finally got a bid back from Four Star Plumbing Orange County it was as if Angel had never even visited our property. The bid made it sound as if the existing angle stops were embedded in dry wall (an extra charge to fix) and suggested we may need to install a refrigerator icemaker outlet box, this is that box between the wall studs that keeps the water valves out of the way yet accessible. This was bizarre. Angel had inspected behind our refrigerator and clearly saw we already had a refrigerator icemaker outlet box. 

Even worse, the bid said that they would charge us $185.00 per hour and that the hours they spent on the project would go from any where from 4 to 8 hours, or $740.00 to $1,480.00. I'm not joking. I have all this in their dated e-mail. The wildly variable bid was due to the supposedly unknowable expenses surrounding the question of whether or not they would need to remove drywall or, I suppose, install a refrigerator icemaker outlet box, and tear out some drywall back there too. 

I called Kelli up the next day to see if we could get a more detailed, precise bid. 

Once I'm on the phone she explains to me that the e-mail containing their most recent, widely ranging bid, was created with the knowledge of Angel, another lady and Kelli. I pointed out, innocently enough, that their email bid didn't really show any signs of the benefits I imagined we would be receiving after paying Angel $165.00 to inspect our situation. 

After all, there were no dry wall issues at all, and we already had a clearly visible recessed ice machine water supply box. At this point, Kelli reacted with surprising anger and didn't seem to even want me to have an opportunity to talk back. She seemed especially concerned that I was suggesting that she did not know her own internal procedures or business. She also suggested that my comments where somehow due to the fact that she was a female. (Trust me, if she recorded this conversation, then this is all on their audio tapes.)

I can see that from her perspective she wants to make sure she makes $165.00 every single time one of her Four Star Plumbing Orange County plumbers goes out into the field. 

From my perspective, however, I think that is a huge rip-off. Frankly, if I thought there was a chance a guy would come out and charge me $165.00 and not even remove the old disposer, I would have said to forget it. I only paid Angel the $165.00 in the first place because I thought - erroneously - that this bill would be deducted from future work he performed for us. It is interesting to me that at least another person writing at their Yelp site - Jon C. - had a somewhat similar experience with Four Star Plumbing Orange County.

I feel cheated. I can't believe that they charged me $165.00 for an inspection and then produced a bid that was so negligent and sloppy that it failed to reveal that I already owned a refrigerator icemaker outlet box.  

I will send Four Star Plumbing Orange County a formal letter asking for my money back since Angel didn't do any work at all and because the results of the inspection we paid for were not accurately incorporated in their later bid. I'll let you know how that works out. 

Meanwhile, it would have been nice for Angel to let me know that it was probably a bad idea to work with Four Star Plumbing Orange County. After all, if they can't get three people together to create an accurate bid, one which reflects the facts of the situation, then what else is going wrong at their second generation, family-run plumbing business?

John C. Drew, Ph.D. is an award-winning political scientist.

Feeling Blue About Amber Property Management in Mission Viejo

I guess I had an intuition this year that I needed to get more involved in politics at the local level, the extremely local level. I'm running for one of the worst jobs in America - a spot on my HOA board of directors.

I'm running for a position on my HOA's board of directors, in part, because I got fed up with the way that Amber Property Management was picking on me. They have been driving me nuts with their arrogant attitudes, their barely disguised contempt for me and my neighbors, and a level of sloppiness and careless that I find to be both disconcerting and potentially dangerous. A quick Google search reveals I'm not the only one fed up with their bizarre behavior, and their inadequate attention to procedures and details.

One of the most disturbing mistakes occurred this month when I got a letter dated March 13, 2013 asking me to take out the safety lighting sensor on my building. Since this sensor - which controls the building's outdoor lighting - was near my front door, they concluded that it was some sort of spy camera or other device I had installed without their permission. See their letter below:




Letter from the HOA Board of Directors asking me to remove the
building's safety lighting sensor dated March 13, 2013.

I, of course, immediately fired off an indignant complaint daring them to touch even the tiniest cord in this lighting sensor without my express permission. Even so, it took them a couple of days to figure out their foolishness and to send a follow up letter to letting me know that the safety light sensor was safe.



New letter from Jamie Hackwith of Amber Property Management indicating
that my safety light sensor was now safe from destruction at the hands of the HOA.

Sadly, the list of errors caused by Amber Property Management goes on and on. Just this month, they failed to properly notice the board of directors meeting. They put up a sign that indicated the date of the meeting was in the previous month, not the current month.

In 2016, I caught our Amber Property Management representative, Jamie Hackwith, sending out violation letters that violated our own rules. These rules call for the violation letter to indicate the exact rule broken by the homeowner or their tenant. Instead, the letters coming from Amber Property Management made only vague charges against the homeowner or tenant.

One of the most disgusting things about Amber Property Management is that when I have complained about them to the Better Business Bureau or some other agency, they have routinely sent a letter threatening legal action against me. 

Clearly, their aim is to intimidate me into silence. I talked to two homeowners just this month that cannot stand Jamie Hackwith. One called me in tears to report that Jamie insulted her by saying he understood she had an "angle" when she called to get information. Another homeowner just shared with me that when he speaks to Jamie Hackwith, Hackwith makes him feel like the homeowner is working for Amber Property Management rather than the other way around.

Luckily, there are now many avenues available for complaining about your HOA or property management company. I found, for example, that you can read the complaints of others and add your own at www.yelp.com. In addition, Google+ also gives you an opportunity to tell the truth about your HOA services. In my case, I'm lucky enough to have this blog and about 100,000 thousand followers on Twitter. All of this means that consumers have more power to fight back when they are mistreated or, as in my case, mistakenly blamed for an eyesore that was installed two years earlier by their own HOA.

I should probably add in the end of the story. We had a terrifying brush fire on our Del Prado property on June 29, 2017. Personally, I blamed Jamie Hackwith and the landscaping company, Douglas Landscaping. As far as we know, this fire was caused by a spark coming off the mower used to do a fuel reduction project on our western slope. Ideally, this work should have been scheduled a month earlier when the fire danger would have been lower.

At any rate, on-line court records show that Jamie's wife, Tracey, filed for divorce on July 13, 2017. Tracey is the daughter of the owner of Amber Property Management. We got the news that Jamie would no longer be our property manager at Del Prado through an e-mail from Tracey Hackwith that was dated August 14, 2017.

All in all, this experience reminded me of why it is important to avoid smaller companies that are rife with nepotism. Virtually no one knows how to deal with employees who are family members. In general, they are poor performers and difficult to fire. In fact, in this case, they may have been easier to divorce than to fire.

John C. Drew, Ph.D. is an award-winning political scientist.