One Comment for “Bill Summary: Private Cause of Action, HF 712”

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  Mary Forsyth says:

  April 27, 2009 at 1:53 pm

  Finally this bill passed although it does little good for the individual homeowner and shabby contractors know this, all this bill did is help the AG’s office….not the average homeowner.

  Far too long IA homeowners have been scammed by rogue contractors and we do not have a chance fighting them court because no attorney will take the homeowners case. There is no money in it for them, now that the homeowner can sue for attorney fee’s perhaps more attorneys will be willing to plea their case.

  For over 2 yrs I wrote emails, I called and contacted every lawmaker in Iowa many times after I was scammed by a plumber from Indianola who not only caused damage to my home but did not do what I hired him to do. After he became very verbal abusive I fired him and locked him out of my home. I found out soon afterwards that this plumber did the same shabby job to homeowners in his home town of Indianola just before scamming me. So I was told he has to drive to Des Moines to get work and find his victims there.

  We lost our case in court because we had no one to fully ‘represent’ us and since this plumber has a money hungry clever attorney we never had a chance. No attorney wanted to help us and would not bother to take our case we may as well say we went to court without ‘any’ representation so I am out several thousand dollars that I had to pay to this corrupt attorney. Also I had to pay the plumber thousand of dollars that I did not owe him and yet today I have to live with the damage he caused to my home and I have the burden of a heavy debt since I had to borrow the money to pay as this corrupt attorney was licking his chops wanting to foreclose on my home.

  If that nightmare was not painful enough, I was then told by other attorney’s afterwards that I can not appeal because of my attorney that just set in court and did nothing.

  How shameful for Iowa that homeowners experience such terrible injustice and then can not even turn to the AG for help when we file a complaint as we are told the Ag’s Consumers office that they only take multiple case’s as this rogue plumber would have to scam hundreds of homeowners before they can help. I was told they cannot represent just a couple of complaints filed with them as that would take up too much of the AG’s time”….

  But still, shame on lawmakers for dragging their feet for so long and shame on the AG’s office for allowing rogue contractors to continue to be licensed and so they can continue to scam individual homeowners…..one at a time.