Clear skies. Low 69F. Winds NNW at 5 to 10 mph..
Clear skies. Low 69F. Winds NNW at 5 to 10 mph.
Updated: August 22, 2022 @ 7:12 pm
Roland Burgess shows off his “spool” (combination pool/spa).
Brian Butterfield’s finished product.
Riverside County Fifth District Supervisor Jeff Hewitt addresses the PassEDA during a breakfast meeting in May at Noble Creek Community Center in Beaumont.
Roland Burgess claims that the equipment he stands next to had to be relocated after initially being installed by Champagne Pools.
A sign posted in the front yard of Roland Burgess’s home.
Staff Writer
Brian Butterfield’s finished product.
Brian Butterfield has a gorgeous 35 x 15 square-foot pool that graces the backyard of his Stadler Street home in Beaumont.
He contracted the former Calimesa-based Champagne Pools to build it.
More than $70,000 later — twice what it was contracted to have cost — it was finally finished, but not by Champagne Pools.
The company, at the time, was owned by Riverside County Fifth District Supervisor Jeff Hewitt, but Hewitt never visited his property during the time the pool was being installed, Butterfield said.
Hewitt faces a runoff in November to retain his Fifth District county seat against challenger Yxstian Gutierrez, Moreno Valley’s mayor who finished ahead of him in the June primary, but did not garner a majority vote.
According to documents, Hewitt’s firm left Butterfield with a $50,000-plus gutted hole of rebar and dirt in the ground for several months.
According to Hewitt, once he was elected, management of the company was turned over to his son Taylor Hewitt in 2018 and the business fell into bankruptcy in September 2021, leaving some projects incomplete.
Riverside County Fifth District Supervisor Jeff Hewitt addresses the PassEDA during a breakfast meeting in May at Noble Creek Community Center in Beaumont.
Jeff Hewitt told the Record Gazette in a statement, “I had been a pool contractor since 1986. During that time I had to weather economic downturns and many other challenges of being a business owner.”
“In the decades of doing this work I never had one complaint out of the thousands of projects I completed,” Hewitt stated. “During the time of the complaints against Champagne Pools I was not an owner or a participant in any way. I feel for the families that have been affected by the bankruptcy of Champagne Pools. We lost thousands of businesses during the lockdowns, and the economic storm that followed. It breaks my heart that my reputation and the businesses that I built over decades, have also fallen victim.”
Several property owners in Beaumont alone have had to seek help and direction through the city to get referrals for other subcontractors to help finish pools that they paid Champagne Pools to install, only to have the company abandon their projects after collecting thousands of dollars.
According to Butterfield, after signing a contract in December 2020, subcontractors eventually showed the following August; and prep work began Sept. 29.
They started work Oct. 1 with excavation. Dec. 16 came and they put concrete in.
It still needed plastic, tileworks, wiring and pool equipment installation.
By February 2021, Butterfield was forced to get a new permit on his own, in order to have his pool completed.
Butterfield is one of two Beaumont property owners among 25 listed as creditors in Champagne Pools & Electrical Inc.’s bankruptcy filing that was initiated in September 2021.
Roland Burgess shows off his “spool” (combination pool/spa).
Several civil lawsuits have been filed against Jeffrey Francis Hewitt and his former Calimesa-based Champagne Pools & Electrical, Inc. through Riverside Superior Court, correlating to alleged breaches of contract.
Property owners who were interviewed for this story say that Hewitt claims Taylor was technically the owner of the company since 2018 (the year his father was elected to the Riverside County Board of Supervisors) theoretically absolving Jeff since he was a political figure.
However, the contractor’s license was still under Jeff Hewitt’s name, which was current through November 2021, according to the state.
According to those familiar with the industry, contractors who work on a project are required to be on site — or within easy access — while the project is in process.
Those interviewed for this report claim that Jeff and Taylor Hewitt rarely, if ever, visited a project once it was started.
The Contractors State License Board stipulates that one of the Hewitts, since they were employed by the applicant, must be “actively engaged in the operation of the applicant’s contracting business” for at least 80 percent of the time each week that the project is under construction, and requires contractors to provide “direct supervision and control” over any construction site.
Jeff Hewitt explained in a statement to the Record Gazette, “When I was running for county supervisor, I completely stopped working in the pool industry. I turned my business over to my son completely in June of 2018, after he had been running day-to-day operations for a number of years.”
Hewitt acknowledged that, “I was not on site, I was not bidding or receiving any payments for the work being done. I was not aware of who he [Taylor] was working for, or the nature of the jobs he contracted.”
According to those affected, it seemed then that Taylor Hewitt would sign people up for contracts and then move along to sign up the next.
As of last April, 13 property owners in Beaumont had building permits pulled via Champagne Pools between 2018 through 2020.
Four of those projects passed inspections while under the auspices of Champagne Pools; but at least one permit expired with no project completed; one project was incomplete and failed to pass inspection by the city, and five had to be re-permitted to other builders.
A number of the cases against Champagne ppols seem to have been dismissed, barring no alternative solutions to resolve issues having been brought up, or those filing complaints failed to show for hearings, for instance.
Beaumont homeowner Roland Burgess approached Champagne Pools to do a project at his home, in order to support his friend’s business.
The relationship between the Burgess and Hewitt families was great, until Burgess contracted to have Jeff Hewitt’s company install a “spool,” a combination spa-pool, at his Beaumont home, Burgess says.
And, as happened to others before him, subcontractors approached Burgess demanding to be paid, despite Burgess already having paid Champagne Pools to perform that work.
Or so he thought.
He and Butterfield are among 25 creditors attached to the Sept. 27, 2021 bankruptcy filing of Champagne Pools & Electrical.
A few residential property owners joined them, but most appear to be businesses and organizations, such as the Franchise Tax Board in Sacramento, Pacific Star Shotcrete in Garden Grove and Temecula, Poolcorp SCP Distributors LLC in Phoenix, and the IRS in Pennsylvania, for instance.
Roland Burgess claims that the equipment he stands next to had to be relocated after initially being installed by Champagne Pools.
There’s also All American Pool & Spa in Redlands, Aaction Rebar in Bloomington, and a few insurance companies, and US Bank in Cincinnati.
In an April 27, 2021 breach of contract letter to Champagne Pools & Electrical, Burgess outlines several reasons for terminating the agreement with Hewitt’s firm.
Among them: according to Burgess, the contract from Champagne Pools “clearly states 60 working days to complete project upon excavation,” which started Dec. 30, 2020, though 90 days later the project was still “far from complete.”
Burgess’s letter states that the company’s contractor’s license had been suspended as of March 5, 2021 due to bond suspension.
The letter claims a “lack of progress” and “unnecessary property damage,” particularly as his front yard was torn up from construction equipment and left that way.
Further, Burgess, in his letter, accuses the company of receiving nearly $44,000, including $1,500 paid to Aaction Rebar for work that was not compensated by Champagne Pools, for a job that was not completed.
He ended up paying another $6,000 to Riverside company Paul Bogner Pools to reinstall existing plumbing, pour concrete slab, reset gas utilities, reset four defective pool jets, add auto fill to the spa and install a copper bond grid in order to finish the project; more than $300 to Cherry Valley Nursery for salt rivers stone, and $9,643 to San Jacinto-based Gomez Construction and Masonry, Inc. to clean up and rehabilitate work that was not done correctly, or not done at all.
While Champagne Pools purportedly relied on subcontractors to pour the shotcrete, install rebar and apply tiling, several of those subcontractors were apparently never paid by Champagne Pools, according to Butterfield and others who experienced similar dealings with the company.
It was a shock to homeowners who discovered the hard way when irritated subcontractors approached them asking to be paid.
Homeowners assumed that, after paying thousands directly to Champagne Pools per their contracts, that the company would pay its own subcontractors or employees for doing the work.
Butterfield paid $10,000 for pool equipment that he never received, and shelled out an additional $16,700 to Champagne Pools for tile and a dream of paradise in his backyard. He disagreed that he should also pay the subcontractors when he had assumed Hewitt’s company should have handled those arrangements.
Butterfield thought he had paid for installation of the gunite (a sprayed concrete or mortar applied to the surface of a pool), but Champagne Pools didn’t pay the subcontractor who actually did the work.
Since Butterfield was unable to pay the subcontractor, he has now been left with a $24,000 lien on his property.
Butterfield says that he did not know Hewitt prior to picking Champagne Pools to install a pool at his home.
“I wanted a place that was local and had a physical address, so I could drop in if there was a problem,” Butterfield said, “and I liked the fact that it was owned by Hewitt. I figured it would be a reputable business.”
Butterfield approached the city of Beaumont seeking help. He says that the city seemed to understand that there had been “problems with Champagne Pools” and guided him through the process of getting his own owner-builder permit so that he could hire different subcontractors to perform the various tasks of completing his pool, which tacked on $41,000 in additional costs, he says.
Lost was the money he paid to Champagne Pools.
A sign posted in the front yard of Roland Burgess’s home.
According to Burgess, the city of Beaumont was “delicate and careful by telling us they were aware of the misdeeds perpetrated by Champagne Pools. The city advised the homeowners that hiring another contractor to assume responsibility of the existing permit, or the homeowner to assume responsibility as the [owner-builder] contractor were our only options.”
“I had no contact with Jeff during this whole thing. I figured, out of conflict of interest, he had nothing to do with it, totally left him out of it, and was respectful. But all along I knew that Taylor was running the company, but without a doubt it was Jeff’s company,” Burgess says.
Burgess told the Record Gazette, “This is not about revenge. I was stupid. My wife and I wanted to support them. You can’t put a price on friendship, but I’m over the shock of it. I don’t want to see anyone hurt. I do want to see justice done. The [Contractors State Licensing Board] and bankruptcy is a lot of noise. He can’t control our money and his son, but he’s controlling the public’s money. I’m never going to get my money back. I know that, and that’s not the issue. But there are others out there that this has happened to, who can’t afford to recover” from such dealings.
Burgess says, “Not once did Jeff reach out to me. I considered him a really good friend, and I would’ve thought he would have reached out and apologized, but none of that ever happened.”
Staff Writer David James Heiss may be reached at dh****@re***********.net , or by calling (951) 849-4586 x114.
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Brian Butterfield has a gorgeous 35 x 15 square-foot pool that graces the backyard of his Stadler Street home in Beaumont.
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