Former clients of a Waldo County contractor who got arrested last week made complaints about him to Attorney General Aaron Frey’s office that date back more than a year.
Jake Brown of Palermo, who ran JBRH Excavation and Welding Fabrication, continued to take new jobs last fall as complaints and lawsuits began to filter into Maine’s legal system. In civil court, four people were awarded more than $400,000 as a result of lawsuits that Brown did not formally contest.
Several former clients who said they had not heard from officials for months said the office contacted them after the Bangor Daily News published a story two weeks ago on allegations of shoddy and undone work against Brown. The process has frustrated many who hired him, and a lawyer says it highlights Maine’s antiquated consumer protection laws.
“Until recently, they weren’t interested,” Eric Moran, a Bath photographer who complained about Brown last December, said of Frey’s office. “All of a sudden, they’re interested in it now because everything’s coming out.”
A spokesperson for Frey, a Democrat, declined to comment Friday on the status of an investigation into Brown beyond updating the total count of complaints against him to 18, eight more than a week ago. Based on the volume of complaints, former Maine Attorney General Mike Carpenter said it is most likely that the office is investigating.
Maine does not license general contractors, leaving oversight in the hands of the attorney general. The office is allowed to pursue civil injunctions that can stop contractors or other businesses from taking new work. It has also criminally prosecuted contractors, including one sentenced to three years in prison in 2022 for bilking clients of $130,000.
The process is slow, which has frustrated many of Brown’s clients, including those who say they have no money for a private attorney given how much money the contractor took from them. Frey’s office has “limited manpower, limited hours and limited money,” said Jeffrey Bennett, a Portland-based lawyer representing a businessman with a $278,000 judgment against Brown.
“When we have a builder like in this case, until it grows to the level of substantial and significant, they encourage people to use private attorneys and pursue civil remedies so they can properly allocate scarce government resources,” he said.
After saving for 10 years, Moran bought his first home in Bath and hired Brown to lift it and put in a foundation. He provided a reporter with documentation that he gave Brown nearly $25,000 as a deposit in June 2023 to do the work. After six months, the job had barely started.
When Moran confronted Brown, he said the contractor asked for another $25,000 and a blank check to keep going. He refused.
“It was obvious he was just grabbing for money in any way that he could,” Moran said.
Moran said Frey’s office followed up on his December complaint in January. That same month, Hafner and another one of Brown’s clients filed civil complaints in court alleging he owed them nearly $300,000. Moran hadn’t heard from anyone in the office since March until they reached out again last week.
John Hibbard, 56, of Lisbon Falls, had a similar experience after he filed a complaint last November. He said he used the money he got from his son’s wrongful death settlement to buy land in Troy and pay Brown to do work on it so he could build a house there.
The attorney general’s office offered Hibbard a voluntary mediation process to resolve his complaint, something Hibbard never initiated. The AG’s office never followed up until last Tuesday, the day the BDN’s article was published.
“I think they should have taken this more seriously last year,” Hibbard said.
A third complaint was filed last September by a client of Brown’s who asked not to be identified for safety reasons, but who provided documentation of their complaint to a reporter. This client pursued the mediation process, but a hearing wasn’t scheduled until May 2024. Brown never showed up. In the meantime, he kept taking jobs.
Bennett, the lawyer representing Miles Hafner, who won a judgment against Brown for work on Hafner’s housing development in Litchfield, says the blame shouldn’t lie with Frey’s office, but rather with the Maine Legislature for having some of the nation’s most antiquated consumer complaint laws.
In states including Texas and Pennsylvania, a consumer who is found to have been victimized in commerce can recover their loss plus an amount up to three times that amount. That’s an incentive for a private attorney to take a case for a homeowner who can’t afford legal services. Maine’s key law on the subject allows recovery of actual damages and restitution.
“You can get your out of pocket loss back, and you might get attorney fees, but you don’t get any more,” Bennett said. “You have to incentivize the private attorneys to take the risk of those cases, and unfortunately, Maine has not kept up with the times.”
Brown is being held at the Two Bridges Regional Jail in Wiscasset on $500 bail, an official at the Waldo County Jail confirmed Friday. But clients who say they lost money to Brown want to see him held accountable for more than writing bad checks and not showing up for a court date.
“It would be nice to know if something’s going to come of all of the victims,” Moran said.
