Summit County’s Division of Building Standards has sent a letter to a longtime local heating and cooling company threatening to prosecute it for failing to obtain the proper permits and ban it from doing business in the county.
Keith Heating & Cooling, based in Tallmadge, does not appear to have paid for a number of required permits, according to county records.
On Dec. 6, Building Standards sent a letter to company owner Keith Goodwin, saying it could find only 45 permits his firm had taken out since 1996.
Whenever a new furnace or whole-house air-conditioning unit is installed, the contractor must obtain a permit, usually from the county but sometimes from a municipality. Typically, the cost is built into the price of the installation.
A county permit for a new furnace or air conditioner is $85.85. For both, it’s $121.20.
The letter to Goodwin, from Chief Building Official John Labriola, said that if Keith Heating could not disprove the allegations by this Friday, the matter would be turned over to the county prosecutor to “obtain an injunction against your company to prohibit you from working in Summit County.”
Labriola noted that the penalty for each violation is three times the permit fee. In addition, he wrote, each violation could bring a fine of up to $1,000 or a jail term of up to six months.
The investigation was triggered by a disgruntled former employee who either quit or was fired, based on who is telling the story.
Former service tech Ryan Foster, 40, who parted ways with the company in November, said permits rarely were obtained.
A second former employee, Lisa Pharion, 36, of Cuyahoga Falls, said she was a company dispatcher for a couple of months before being fired early this year. She said “probably 90 percent” of the time jobs were done without a permit.
Company owner Goodwin, contacted by phone while on vacation in Florida, disputed the contention that his company has broken the law.
He said he does a lot of work in Tallmadge and Cuyahoga Falls, and that until recently those cities, rather than the county, handled their own permits.
“Where I normally do my work, they haven’t been covered by Summit County until recently,” he said. “Tallmadge, Cuyahoga Falls, which is my biggest area — I’ve been pretty good about taking permits there. Now Summit County covers Tallmadge and Cuyahoga Falls and other areas, but until recently that hasn’t been true.”
Tallmadge came under the county’s umbrella in May of this year.
Examination of permits
However, a Beacon Journal examination of Tallmadge’s records does not show a single permit for Keith Heating from December 2005 to May 2011.
From 1996 until the county took over — a period of 15 years — Keith Heating pulled only 12 permits in Tallmadge out of the 3,254 heating and cooling permits on record.
Karen Brown, senior administrator in the Summit County Building Standards Division, says the county has confirmed at least three recent installations by Keith in Tallmadge for which no permits were issued.
Cuyahoga Falls turned its permitting over to the county in January 2011. At least one recent Keith installation in the Falls had no county permit, and in another case, Brown said, the permit “was pulled after the fact because one of our inspectors popped him working out there.”
Until the past few years, Keith’s permit totals were considerably higher in the Falls. That city’s current computerized records system, which dates back to 2005, shows the company pulled a high of 39 permits in 2006. But in 2009 Keith Heating obtained 15 permits and last year took seven.
A permit also appears to be missing for at least one job in Bath Township. A Bath homeowner told the Beacon Journal she had a new furnace installed in October 2010 and, even though Bath has been under the county’s jurisdiction for decades, the county has no record of a permit for her job.
Goodwin’s lawyer, Keith Pryatel of Akron, said, “You seemed to ... take some kind of presumption that given his years in existence in business and the number of permits he’s pulled, he’s not pulled a permit for every job he’s done, and ... if you had bothered to look at other HVAC contractors, I’ll bet you see the same patterns of numbers and years of existence and the lack of permit pulling.”
The county’s building administrator, Brown, says no other company has been sent a similar letter since she began her current job 13 years ago.
Worker’s departure
Meanwhile, the circumstances surrounding the departure of ex-employee Foster are in dispute.
Goodwin said Foster created problems because “I had people who came back to me and said the guy’s on drugs. I sent him away to [a specialized training] school and he’s smoking dope the whole time.”
Goodwin said he did not fire Foster. Rather, he said, Foster never returned to work after a five-day excused absence for a health issue. “I wanted to deal with him about the drug use, but he never came back.”
Foster vehemently disputes that account, saying he passed a drug test to get the job and “I would pass one today. ... If it were true and Keith had knowledge of such use, why would he continue to let me drive a company vehicle?”
He said he would be willing to take a lie-detector test to prove nobody from the company ever spoke to him about drugs.
Foster says the real reason he was fired was that he accidentally misdiagnosed a problem with a furnace, leading an older man to buy a costly furnace he didn’t need; then, riddled with guilt, Foster said, he went back and told the man the truth.
Goodwin said that didn’t happen.
When asked whether his company had a situation with a homeowner in which Foster went back and said, “You really didn’t need a new furnace,” Goodwin replied: “We’re under a — I can’t talk about that. How’s that?”
Foster said the customer has been attempting to negotiate a settlement with Goodwin.
The homeowner, an 84-year-old man who lives in Kenmore, did not respond to a request for comment.
Goodwin phoned the county last week and said he would address the situation when he returned to town this week.
Bob Dyer can be reached at 330-996-3580 or bdyer@thebeaconjournal.com.
