Consumer Comments on Contractors

The Small Business Administration's Advertising Primer tells businessmen that "Nobody sells you better than a satisfied customer, so in your efforts to gain sales from new prospects, remember that you can build sales equally well through customer referrals" So in this era of great technology, you would think that finding a blog entry with someones' first hand account would be the best way to go to determine which contractor you should hire.

Perhaps, but you don't know if the person giving you the glowing referral isn't the contractor's brother-in-law. Also, Internet entries are hard to find and never expire although the tiling subcontractor hired by the pool builder might have been fired for that bad workmanship, or he might even have retired.

What would be good would be ratings from a large number of each contractor's clients. It really works for books and professors. Someday one of the following companies will be your trusted resource:

Kudzu Free. Several listings and reviews for local area. Not comprehensive. Links to other reviews by each reviewer. This cuts down on the likelihood of the brother-in-law writing a phony review.

Angie's list One year membership costs $50 in advance. No survey could be completed due to cost. There are many complaints that it is not satisfactory, however.

Service Magic Free. Looks very professional. No local listings found.

Insiderpages Free. Easy to use. Part of the IAC group which owns Ask.com and Expedia. Has many local listings and several reviews. Reviewers are ranked by number of reviews posted so you can see how many reviews they've written without clicking and seeing all of the person's other reviews.

Toolman Depot Free. Straight forward search strategy but at this point so few listings and reviews that it's hard to judge its value. Perhaps in a few years.

Christmas Parade - Aid

Major social/cultural events define a town that hosts them. How they form, grow, are maintained, and the people who participate are definitive because nothing that important can exist in a vacuum. For example, children who march in the annual Christmas parade probably perform better in school because they are brought lovingly into the community fold. Studies on student volunteer programs confirm this. Cities with high performing schools are highly desirable places to live, so cities with superior events do more than entertain, they enhance home values.

Street Fair, First Night, Grape Day, and Cruising Grand are events which will be discussed in Your Escondido Home in the future, but until this morning's announcement that the police presence at the 2008 Escondido Christmas Parade would be funded by a donation from the Rincon Band of Luiseño Indians, it appeared that that event would be cancelled. Perhaps the marching bands had played their last note on North Broadway. This morning, in fact, the Jaycees were still posting that the 2008 Escondido Christmas Parade would be postponed until 2009.

Now that this year's parade has a pulse, consider not only attending - 9:30 AM, December 13, 2008 - but also volunteering to help, or possibly even joining the Escondido Jaycees as a member. The next parade meeting will be at 7 p.m. Wednesday at Cocina del Charro, 525 N. Quince St.

Consumer advice on contractors

Blogging is a wonderful way to record information. The problem is that the information you place online is, quite possibly, as invisible to the world as it would be sitting on your own hard drive.

Say that you have a complaint against a building contractor and you believe that it would be a service to warn others of their shoddy work. People who want confidence in a contractor before they call them might look for "escondido strawbale house contractors complaints" on Google or Dogpile. They won't find Leslie Miley's blog though, unless they know to search on the contractor's name: Three Little Pigs Construction. Exchanging the word "recommendations" for "complaints" does pull up an article on Anthony Flynn of RAF Construction but that article, as well as Mister Pimley's complaint about Mission Pools were posted on the Internet within the last few months. Miley's blog was posted almost two years ago.

Nothing but serendipity led to finding Laura Silver's list of recommendations last updated 18 months ago. Mentioning it and linking to it here will make it that much more prominent in the Google hit list next time someone searches.

The next post will present an alternative way to research consumer comments. Stay tuned.

Education Options

Say that you wanted to learn how to play the guitar. There are three Escondido listings in the yellow pages under Music Instrustion - Instrumental: B&H Music, The Music Room, and The Music Playce.

Arthur Golden is hosting two classes this fall at the Palomar College Escondido branch.

Jack Brooks is offering a class Wednesdays after school for teens through the Escondido Recreation Department. The classes are held just next door to the library at the Mathis Center.

In the past, guitar classes have been offered at the Escondido Adult School - ROP.

You might try looking for a tutor to come to your home on craigslist.

And of course, you can check out one of the dozens of books or videos available at the Library here at Second and Broadway in Escondido and strike out on your own.

Proposition A: Regional Fire Protection

There have been a large number of major fires in San Diego County in the last 15 years: the Harmony Grove Fire 1996, the La Jolla Reservation Fire 1999, the Pechanga Fire 2000, the Viejas Fire 2001, the Gavilan Fire 2002, the Pines Fire 2002, the Coyote Canyon Fire 2003, the Paradise Fire 2003, the Cedar Fire 2003, the Mataguay Fire 2004, the Witch Creek Fire 2007, the Rice Fire 2007, the Harris Fire 2007, and the Poomacha Fire 2007. All of them cost over a million dollars to fight and did over ten million dollars damage. Many took lives.

Fire protection issues make for lively discussions at both the state and local level, but little department funding has been added. A mandatory weed abatement program has been put into effect charged to rural land owners. Studies have shown this to be the most effective method of reducing the dangers of wildfires; however, weed abatement in San Pasqual would have meant little to the homeowners in Scripps Ranch and Rancho Bernardo or in the Escondido neighborhoods of Sonata and Lomas Serenas in 2007. They needed fire fighters, fire trucks, and airtankers.

Jerry Sanders and Ron Roberts have developed Proposition A for the November ballot. If approved by two-thirds of the county's voters, the parcel tax is expected to generate about $50 million a year to improve the funding of the Regional Fire Protection Agency. As of today opposition to the proposition has not united, but opponents are comprised of those who don't want to pay additional taxes and those who feel that the money raised will not be enough to do the job.