With Contractors, Inquire Before You Hire

Small tight sites require skilled landscape contractors to ensure all the details are covered without confl icts.

Photos courtesy Maureen Gilmer/TNS

Los Angeles is full of unlicensed contractors and their crews who come to know your family and home site intimately.

By Maureen Gilmer

When everyone starts relandscaping for drought, the crooks come out to play. Such widespread demand makes the good contractors impossible to get, so the fi eld becomes populated with a lot of fl y-by-night “landscapers.” What you don’t know about this situation if you’ve never hired a landscaper before could come back to haunt you. So here are some tips important for everyone who hires someone to work or build or plant for them.

In California, for example, a landscape contractor’s license is required for all installations. The law is designed to protect consumers from unscrupulous landscapers. The license requires a contractor to know the law concerning business practices, liability and other important details. It also requires the contractor carry insurance and a bond. This separates landscape contractors from all other “landscapers” or gardening services.

Here’s why it’s important. When they bring heavy equipment, unskilled workers and vehicles onto your property, there is a risk of damage or accidents. For example, a crane used to set a big boxed shade tree could fail and drop it on your house. If there’s damage, the contractor’s insurance policy and bond help resolve the problem. When things go bad with unlicensed landscapers, they often just disappear with your money, leaving the yard in disarray. Some leave the country entirely so they can never be found. And there is no bond fund to repair or replace the items and damage they cause. For this reason alone, hiring unlicensed landscapers

can result in serious litigation and fi nancial problems down the road.

Installing a landscape is not like remodeling your house. A garden is composed of living things moved to your yard where they must adapt to this new situation. Sometimes they can’t take the transition or transplanting may shatter the root ball or the soil won’t drain. When it’s a $500 boxed tree or a pricey specimen succulent, you can’t afford the unanticipated losses. For this reason, your contract for landscaping must include a designated maintenance period for an insurance policy. If a plant is jeopardized, it may not show it for a few weeks. This period can be 30, 60 or 90 days long, depending on how the contract is written. During this time the contractor must guarantee the success of EVERY plant in the project. Those ailing, dying or dead must be replaced within the maintenance period. This is the most commonly ignored aspect of landscape contracts, yet it is by far the most important.

When going over your contract, make sure you schedule your payments in such a way that you don’t hand over large sums all at once. Incremental payments are the only way to ensure the project goes smoothly as the contractor is always working toward the next payment. Because landscapers often ignore the responsibilities of the maintenance period, structuring the fi nal payment is crucial. Do not pay until the maintenance period is over, so you can deduct what you need to fi x things and buy replacement plants if he bugs out on you. Make that fi nal payment too small and he might leave anyway, knowing the fi x costs more than you owe him. The larger the fi nal sum, the better incentive to fi nish properly and on time.

The propensity for unlicensed contractors to fl ee problem projects is well known. Even licensed contractors do this if the problems are too big to fi x and they aren’t large enough to handle it. When issues of liability crop up and someone is hurt, often uninsured workers, possibly undocumented as well, can cause the whole operation to be shut down. That leaves no opportunity for future litigation against the contractor for reimbursement ... if you can still fi nd him.

Because every state has different laws for licensing landscape contractors or not, inquire before you hire to make sure you’re protected.

Maureen Gilmer is an author, horticulturist and landscape designer. Learn more at www.MoPlants.com. Email her at mogilmer@yahoo.com

In the desert, new landscapes die out over the summer due to inadequate irrigation or improper plant choice in full sun.

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