Roofer madness: Hail storm brings in flood of workers

Glancing down any given residential street in Billings this summer, you might have thought a political campaign was in full swing.

But those signs in what seems like every other yard are advertising roofing companies, not politicians. And that explains the sound you are likely to hear on any given street, too — the rat-a-tat-tat of nail guns attaching tarpaper and shingles to hail-damaged roofs.

“This is the biggest influx we’ve seen in years,” said Peter Van Nice, chief of the Workers’ Compensation Regulations Bureau of the state Department of Labor. “I was in awe when I came down to Billings.”

The influx of roofers from around the country — and the sudden abundance of work for established local roofers — is all owing to the hail storm that pummeled a large swath of Billings and surrounding communities on May 18.

Since that day, the city’s Building Division has issued 4,806 roofing/siding permits in the city, according to division manager Kim Palmieri. He said about 375 of those permits were used for siding, meaning at least 4,400 roofing jobs were permitted.

At an estimated average cost of $10,000 per roof, Palmieri said, that translates to more than $40 million worth of roofing jobs. And that doesn’t include new roofs outside the city limits, in places like Lockwood, which suffered some of the heaviest damage in the valley.

Nor does it include all the many roofs that haven’t been replaced yet.

“I think the roofers are going to be here until the snow flies, and they may still be here next summer,” said Art Hazen, of Billings, acting area director for OSHA, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration.

Officials with OSHA and the state Department of Labor have been busy this summer, too. With so much money to be made, and so many thousands of people wanting their roof replaced as soon as possible, corners are cut, rules are bent or broken and sometimes homeowners are left holding the bag.

Dallas Cox, program manager for the Labor Department’s Independent Contractor Central Unit, said the problems are almost inevitable byproducts of big storms.

“We have this happen every time we have a hail storm,” he said. “We don’t have enough roofers in the state of Montana to do all these roofs in the time frame homeowners want it done.”

Of all the ways of cutting corners, said Tom Bradford, vice president of Bradford Roof Management, the most common is abusing the state’s independent contractor system.

The system was designed to allow people to work for themselves, meaning they can use their own liability insurance and don’t have to buy workers’ compensation coverage from the state. But what is increasingly happening, Bradford said, is that roofing companies employ multiple crews of four, five or six roofers, and all of them have independent contractor certification.

So, while companies like Bradford Roof Management are paying huge workers’ comp premiums — it can cost as much as $1.30 for every dollar paid out in wages, Bradford said — companies with crews of “independent contractors” pay no workers’ comp. And if roofers are injured on the job, they have to fend for themselves, whether they have insurance or not.

“It’s really a shaky deal,” Bradford said. “The problem is, the Department of Labor has no enforcement authority whatsoever.”

Van Nice didn’t dispute that assessment. The Labor Department sent four two-person teams to Billings for a four-day “sweep” July 8-11. He said they visited more than 100 job sites, checking to see whether roofing crews had workers’ comp coverage, or, if not, independent contractor certification.

One excuse investigators heard more than once was that a crew had work comp coverage, but the policy was issued by Texas, Florida or some other state. They were told they needed to obtain a Montana policy, immediately.

The department is still going through the stacks of documents and findings and in the next 30 days will be looking to revoke certification for non-compliant contractors or workers. And that’s about all they can do. They can’t issue a citation on the spot, as OSHA does, or bring a job to a standstill until everything is brought into compliance.

“We don’t have enough teeth to do that,” Van Nice said. “We don’t have quite the bite OSHA does.”

Cox said it takes a lot of time and effort to prove someone is abusing independent contractor certification. Independents are supposed to have their own tools and work under their own direction, but “when you have five or six guys on a roof, somebody needs to be in charge.”

Compliance specialists can take photographs and make observations, trying to determine whether contractors are truly independent, but it’s tough to make a solid case.

It’s a bit easier for OSHA, since safety violations are usually more blatant and noticeable. Like the Department of Labor, OSHA also did something of a sweep, with two teams of two people working in Billings from July 1 to July 28.

“We made Billings our priority and we were out there six days a week for a little over four weeks,” Hazen said, “and we made contact with many, many roofers.”

The main thing they were looking for was proper fall protection. Because falls are the No. 1 cause of death in the construction industry, he said, there is a nationwide emphasis on fall protection.

OSHA inspectors do respond to complaints, he said, but if they’re out driving around, “if they see a hazard, they have to investigate it. They can’t drive by.”

If there is a violation, investigators generally issue one citation per job site. The contractor in charge would then have 15 days to either contest the citation or settle the matter by paying a fine. No one contested a citation, Hazen said.

Violators paid fines ranging from $600 to $2,000 depending on the number of workers, the height and slope of the roof, the number of tripping hazards and other variables. He said he was still working to compile all the information, but that his teams (he joined them on the sweep) issued more than 100 citations. Of those, there were “probably 97 different contractors,” with only two or three multiple offenders, he said.

In addition to assessing fines, Hazen said, the OSHA inspectors handed out a lot of training materials, and “well over half” those materials were in Spanish, reflecting the preponderance of Latino crews working in Billings this summer.

Three of those Latino crews were working under Valentine Molina of Oklahoma. Molina said he and his brother have been partners for nine years. They’ve worked for the past five years for MadSky Roofing and Restoration, based in Kansas City, Mo.

They have three five-man crews, workers who also live in Oklahoma but are from Mexico, Guatemala and El Salvador. One of his crews was working Wednesday on a house on the 900 block of North 31st Street. Molina said a crew generally completes a roof in eight hours, working 7 a.m. to 3 p.m., but they were expecting to spend a few extra hours on North 31st because the roof was steep and they were tearing off a layer of wood shakes and a layer of asphalt shingles.

He said he had obtained workers’ comp for his crews. “Sometimes it’s hard, but in Montana it’s easy to get it,” he said. As for OSHA, he said, “I have everything for that,” meaning safety gear and fall protection.

His crews all stay in the same motel, working Monday through Saturday afternoon. They work hard because there is little work in the winter, though sometimes they’ll go to Florida for work.

In his five years with MadSky, he said, he’s been to at least seven states. The hardest part for him is being away from his wife and two children in Oklahoma.

“On the winter we see the family,” he said.

Molina also said MadSky guarantees all its work.

“We have warranties,” he said. “If there’s a problem we come and fix it,” even if they’re back in Oklahoma.

That isn’t always the case. Jacob Martin, vice president of Empire Roofing, like Bradford Roof a longtime Billings business, said Empire has gotten calls from people asking if they’re hiring crews, not individual workers.

Empire wasn’t interested, he said, but when other companies do hire crews, “then what they do is go out and act as salesmen under your name.” If they find enough work they’ll start hiring their more crews, and then some more.

“And before you know it they have more people than you do,” Martin said. The general contractor might end up being liable for crews he wasn’t even aware of, and homeowners who later have problems with their roofs might not have any idea how to get ahold of the people who did the work.

“They can bounce around and all of a sudden you’re never able to find them,” Martin said.

Martin said he even heard that some out-of-state roofers have purchased local roofing companies, in order to use their name and to take advantage of their Montana certification.

Some companies that advertise themselves as local stretch the definition. Lots of roofers opened offices in Billings after the Father’s Day storm of 2010, Martin said. When that work was finished, some of them left but others stuck around and did regular roofing work. Others moved on but maintained a post office box in Billings and a listing in the Yellow Pages.

“Now, they’re saying they’re local contractors,” he said. “I guess they can say that because they were here for the last hail storm. But they weren’t here before that.”

Martin said one benefit of using “storm chasers,” as the itinerant crews are sometimes called, is that most of them know what they’re doing.

“A lot of these guys, that’s all they do,” he said. “They go from town to town and that’s all they do. It’s hard to be bad at something you do that often.”

The danger is that they might work too fast, use substandard materials and perhaps be impossible to reach once the job is done.

Some people worry that if roofers have no work comp coverage, homeowners might be liable if a worker is injured on their roof. Cox, with the Department of Labor, said that’s not true. Although a homeowner might be liable if he let a roofer use a ladder and the roofer fell off the ladder, the hiring agent — the person who paid someone to go on your roof — is ultimately responsible for his workers, Cox said.

Bradford, president of the Montana Roofing Contractors Association, said the group is hoping to seek some relief when the Legislature meets next year. Bradford and a dozen other association members recently met with Department of Labor people, including Cox and Van Nice, to talk about legislative solutions.

Cox said one of his compliance specialists suggested capping the number of independent contractors on any job to, say, two or three. Another possibility is giving investigators the authority to shut down a job if they find abuses of the law.

Bradford thinks something has to be done.

“The concept of being a professional roofer is almost a lost concept,” he said. “The shingle and hail work is the most frustrating thing I’ve ever seen.”

 

State offers tips: The Department of Labor issued a tip sheet earlier this month, advising homeowners of the “dramatic increase” in uninsured and unregistered contractors. Here’s what the department advised homeowners to do before hiring a contractor:

1.Check with the State Construction Contractor Registration Unit —www.mtcontractor.com — at the Department of Labor to make sure the contractor is in compliance.
2. Ask for references and follow them up. They can include banks, lumberyards and previous customers.
3. Find out if the contractor belongs to an industry association.
4. Ask for proof of liability insurance.
5. Ensure that the contract details every aspect of the project including how and when paid.
6. Update the contract when changes are made to the plans.
7. Maintain communications with the contractor throughout the project.
8. Visually inspect each part of the project.
9. If the contractor hires a sub-contractor to do the work, ask for proof of insurance for the subcontractor.

For more information, click on the link above or call 444-7734.

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