My company contracted with W.A. Thomas for two different projects in the past two years. At first things were fine the Superentendant Bill Luce seemed competent and our work was going well, payment was on time and for the correct amounts. This was a three building project and two of the three had been completed. The last building approximately 50% in the total contract was an absolute disaster. Bill told me "This is the point where I lose controll of the destiny of the job" There was little to no coordination of trades, everything was out of sequence and Bill refused to take any repsonsability for scheduling an coordination by trades, we had to do it ourselves. This cost everyone money.
The last straw was that my company was to applly a coating to a surface that had been splattered with fireproofing and left that way for months.in order for our coating to be applied the substrate had to be cleaned. Bill refused to call the company who made the mess to come back and clean up. We in turn refused to apply our coating untill it was clean. The job eneded and the final payments were made but monies were held out for that wall. It took us 6 months to get that money.
That was the better of the two jobs
The other was a disaster from the word go, their Superentendant Mike Barnes, though a good enough fellow was inexperienced could not seem to remember how he scheduled things. We would show up and someone was in our way. Mike released the rooms to be painted when they were not ready and we would have to backtrack to paint them once they were ready. Once we were done other trades with absolute disregard just destroyed our finishes. Mike agreed to pay us time and material to fix the damages, which we did. 5 months later I had to offer W.A. Thomas a dicount to get paid for that work.
Every progress payment got progressive later and for shorter amounts that we had billed. We would call the owner and were told they had been paid. We heard every excuse from I was on maternity leave to we have recieved a check that was mailed on the 11th on the 18th of the month. Now the job is over and it's time for retention to be paid. This is almost August and the project was completed in January.
W.A. Thomas is holding monies for a punchlist that was supposedly generated in January. Were were signed off as finished in January. We came back to fix a problem of ours in March and nothing was said about an additional punchlist. Their Project manager Laurence Maller told me "we are recorving from a server crash so the list wasn't generated until now" I talked to the owners representative Ron Richards in May and he said there were no outstanding issues concerning our company.in the interest of clearing my books of this unscupulous company I make a settlement offer that was accepted, yet the next day they said they want $500.00 more knowked off the bill which I told them where to shove. The are as of now in violation contract have have been vitually the entire project. If you are a sub contractor on Contra Costa County, BEWARE of W.A. Thomas Company Inc.
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