An out-of-state paving operator who did defective work at several Tucson homes and businesses could be stripped of his Arizona contractor’s license this week for failing to disclose his troubled past to the state’s regulatory authority.
An emergency license revocation hearing is set for Friday against BA Associates, one of several firms run by members of a Louisiana family who have traveled around the country doing paving jobs of varying quality — and sometimes filing liens against customers who refuse to pay for work that authorities deemed faulty, public records show.
At least two states — Idaho and California — have already revoked licenses held by members of the Acker clan of Sunset, La., a town of 3,000 about 60 miles west of Baton Rouge, the Arizona Daily Star found during an investigation of local consumer complaints.
The Star’s findings prompted the Arizona Registrar of Contractors to issue an immediate license suspension last week against Bill Roger Acker Sr., 62, who dispatched his offspring to Tucson to solicit paving jobs.
“The Registrar finds that the public welfare imperatively requires emergency action,” the agency’s July 29, suspension order said.
On the radar
Acker’s company has been on the registrar’s radar for months.
In less than a year, the agency has received five complaints of shoddy paving jobs from the Tucson area. In four of them, registrar investigators confirmed the work “failed to meet minimum workmanship standards,” public records show.
The suspension order also faults Acker for giving one of of his sons — whose own paving license was revoked in another state — a key role in the Tucson operation, another fact that came to light through the Star’s research.
Even before the suspension order, Acker was under investigation for doing business with defective contracts despite four written warnings from the registrar’s office.
His contracts did not include, as required, a consumer alert in bold-face type that tells customers they have the right to complain to the registrar if they’re not satisfied, public records show.
A lawyer for the Ackers said BA Associates has hundreds of satisfied customers and blamed the Arizona licensing discrepancy on an innocent memory lapse.
“My clients have done work on approximately 800 projects in the State of Arizona since 2017,” Tucson attorney Brenda J. Lee told the Star in an email. “As far as I’m concerned, four complaints or even five out of 800 is a negligible amount.”
Julie Littleton, owner of the Round Up Motel on East Benson Highway, said she couldn’t be happier with paving work done by BA Associates. “These are some really hard-working men who care about every little detail and it shows in their work,” Littleton said in a reference letter she wrote for the firm.
Lee, the company lawyer, said all but one of the customers who complained were satisfied in the end because work crews went back to fix the problems investigators identified.
The lone holdout was the owner of a popular Tucson restaurant, who refused to let the company back on his property and now is stuck with a crumbling parking lot and a $10,600 lien against his business.
Family affair
The elder Acker is facing revocation because Star research shows he once held an Idaho paving license that was revoked for poor workmanship in 2009 — and he neglected to disclose that, as required, on his Arizona license application in late 2017.
Instead, he listed three other states where he’d been licensed in the past with no complaints, records show
Non-disclosure of past disciplinary action amounts to “material misrepresentation” on a license application, punishable by suspension or revocation, said Jim Knupp, a spokesman for the Arizona registrar.
In Idaho, Acker Sr. paved a 7,268-square foot patch of land without doing basic site preparation work: he didn’t grade the surface or lay down a gravel base or a ground sterilant, records show. He also didn’t show up for the Idaho revocation hearing and told the Star that’s because he didn’t know about it.
Knupp said the registrar learned of the licensing discrepancy only when Star research turned up the Idaho revocation order and a reporter asked how Acker was able to qualify for an Arizona license after being shut down for misconduct in another state.
Acker’s son, Ike Jerome T. Acker, 32, a key figure in the Tucson operation, once ran a paving firm in California that was shut down by that state’s license regulator in 2013, public records show. The California complaints were virtually identical to the recent complaints in Tucson.
California records cite four cases in which Ike Acker “willfully departed from accepted trade standards” and put down asphalt that wasn’t hot enough and wasn’t rolled properly to create a smooth surface. California customers had to spend “substantial sums” to fix the jobs, the records say.
Another Acker son, Bill Roger Acker, Jr, 38, was identified by two recent Tucson complainants through Facebook photos as the person who signed their contracts or worked on the paving crew. Lee, the Ackers’ attorney, said Acker Jr. quit working for his dad in Arizona last year.
Acker Jr. was previously licensed in Washington state, where he was cited in 2013 for “failure to comply with contractor registration requirements,” online records show. The state’s website does not describe the basis for that finding.
Red flag
The sales pitch Acker’s sons are accused of using in Tucson — knocking on doors to offer discount paving with asphalt ostensibly left over from another job nearby — is widely regarded by consumer protection advocates as a red flag for potential fraud.
Knupp, the Arizona registar’s spokesman, said several of the written complaints from Tucson accuse the firm of “using the sales tactic of stating the company has leftover material.
“The notion of ‘discount’ or ‘leftover’ material should be a warning sign for consumers as this is a commonly used line for scammers, especially in the paving, roofing and painting industries, and one we warn the public against,” Knupp said.
The firm denies using the tactic. “My clients do not and have not ever gone to a potential customer claiming to have leftover asphalt,” said Lee, the Ackers’ Tucson attorney.
Arizona isn’t the only place the Ackers are accused of using the sales pitch. Four virtually identical claims are contained in California’s 2013 revocation order against Ike Acker.
“They left me with a mess”
Benjamin Galaz, the owner of BK Carne Asada & Hot Dogs on South 12th Avenue, regrets not checking up on BA Associates before hiring the firm in February to spruce up his restaurant parking lot.
“I was too trusting,” Galaz says. Now his eatery, which has drawn praise from national media including the Travel Channel and National Geographic, has a lien against it and a parking lot where chunks of new asphalt can be lifted off by hand.
Galaz said a BA Associates representative cold-called at the restaurant. A BK manager called Galaz’s cellphone because Galaz was out of town and wanted to speak to the company representative
The man on the phone offered to fill several potholes at a discount with asphalt left over from another job down the street, he said. The man led him to believe the job would cost less than $500, so Galaz said he verbally approved the work.
The contract the BK manager signed did not list a total price for the job, records show. Galaz said he later received a bill for $10,600, which he refused to pay. A registrar investigator confirmed the BK paving job “failed to meet minimum workmanship standards,” public records show.
The new surface was less than an inch thick in some places instead of the required 2 inches and was installed without proper surface preparation and without a bonding agent to help the new and old surfaces adhere, the investigator’s report said.
The registrar ordered Acker’s firm to return to the site and correct the problems. But Galaz refused to let the paving crew back on his property, so the registrar dismissed his complaint.
Lee, the Ackers’ Tucson attorney, accused Galaz of filing the registrar complaint to weasel out of paying what he owes.
“Mr. Galaz simply does not want to pay his bill, which is why I recorded a lien against his restaurant and filed a lien foreclosure lawsuit,” she said.
Galaz said he’s hired an attorney to fight the lien.
“They left me with a mess,” he said. “There’s no way I wanted them back after what happened the first time.
“I’m not paying them unless a judge tells me I have to.”
More trouble ahead?
More clouds may be on the horizon for Acker Sr. For one thing, he could face city action for unpaid sales tax.
Acker Sr. doesn’t appear to have the necessary sales tax license to conduct business in Tucson. Contractors are required to pay a 2.6 percent tax on contracts within city limits.
City officials who searched under his name and his company’s name couldn’t find any record of him being licensed for tax purposes, city spokesman Andrew Squire told the Star.
The city’s normal practice in such cases is to try to recover any unpaid taxes, Squire said.
“If there is a business operating without a license that we are made aware of, then we would send that to our revenue investigators,” he said.
As well, New Mexico’s contracting regulator is looking into the status of Acker Sr.’s license in that state, which he obtained at about the same time as his Arizona license.
Sally Galanter, an attorney with New Mexico’s contracting regulator, told the Star she expects to learn later this week whether Acker, Sr. properly disclosed the Idaho license revocation that he omitted from his Arizona license application.
Acker’s attorney did not respond to questions about the New Mexico situation.
The Arizona registrar is also looking into the references Acker Sr. provided to support his Arizona application. Most are from his home state of Louisiana, but were written during a five-year period when Acker’s lawyer told the Star he was not in business in that state.
Acker’s attorney also didn’t answer when asked if he intends to defend his Arizona license at this week’s revocation hearing.
Paul Polito, who owns Tucson Asphalt Contractors Inc., one of the city’s longest-operating paving firms, gets exasperated when he hears of itinerant paving firms charging top dollar for poor workmanship.
In his experience, there’s no way to effectively repair a faulty paving job, Polito said. The bad asphalt must be ripped up to start over, which ends up costing customers far more in the long run.
“What they’re doing is not asphalt. It just looks black,” he said.
