June 24, the morning after a tornado, we called Hartington Tree to get a free, written estimate for some broken branch removal.
Kyle Hochstein stopped by, and we told him what we wanted. We also told him $500 was the limit of our insurance. He said he was really busy and would get back to us in a couple of days and give us an estimate.
We left for a Doctors appointment. When we returned several hours later, we were horrified to see they had come to our place, while we were gone, and cut down our old growth maple tree.in doing this unauthorized tree removal, they lost control of it and dropped it on our driveway, breaking it. They also buried their tractor in our lawn, causing three foot ruts and breaking sprinkler heads.
They then had the gall to send us a bill for $1100. They refused to repair the damage they caused and they refused to call their insurance company. They refused to come grind out the ugly stump they left us with.
They came to our home twice to try and intimadate us into paying, calling us liars and deadbeats.
We decided to take them to small claims court to try and recoup some of our losses. During this trial, we found out Ken Hochstein had put an illegal lien on our property! We had to pay a lawyer to send a letter making him remove it. He lied about the extent of the damage and for some reason the judge believed him, so we filed an appeal.
We caught Ken Hochstein on our property without our permission, with a bucket of dirt and two yardsticks. What he did was fill up the cracks and holes with dirt in a underhanded attempt to minimize the true extent of the damage. These were the photos he showed the judge. Our neighbor witnessed what he did, but the local cop refused to file a trespassing report for us. The issues with the police and courthouse are another, long, ugly story.
We are still waiting for our appeal, in the meantime Hartington Tree LLC filed a small claims case on us for the $1100 they want to charge us for stealing our tree and damaging our property.
The bottom line seems to be, if you call Hartington Tree LLC for the free estimate and fully insured work they advertise, they can come to your property while you are gone, do whatever they want, charge any price they want and put illegal liens on your property with no fear of reprisal from the Justice System in Cedar County.
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