legal action against me for doing community service: THE REST of the Story!

I just don't understand, like, oh, yes, you can stay on public property and camp for months on end. You can tear down buildings and burn them down and burn down businesses and, you know, make some political statement or do a protest. And that's okay, that's okay. Just don't worry about. We'll clean up after you. But somehow I'm trying to give back to the community. I'm trying to make the property look better that's public, and that is somehow seen wrong, and I'm being litigated against. Hi, my name is Mike Andes. I am the founder of Augusta Lawn Care, and our community is right up against the Canadian border. The city's name is Blaine, and a lot of our tax revenue comes from Canadians crossing the border and buying fuel, groceries and dining out. Over the past 16 months, our economy has really taken a massive blow because the restrictions to the border crossing throughout Canada and the United States. So because of that, budgets have been cut dramatically. And so in our little town, we've had a deduction of well over hundreds of thousands of dollars that we have to cut outside the budget. If you look back at October 2020 in the Northern Light, which is the local newspaper for Blaine Washington, it said specifically that they were going to let go of the landscaping contract that they currently had in place as well as cut budgets around the city parks. And they were basically telling people the title of the newspaper article was get ready for some long grass at city parks because they just didn't have the money to maintain those areas. In June, I saw two of our city signs that were in particularly overgrown and uncared for and massive weeds. And it was just overgrown. And so I decided, hey, I'm going to go clean out all the weeds, trim the bushes, put down mulch, and I'm not going to charge anyone. I'm not going to make anyone pay for this. The city. I'm just going to go ahead and go ahead and get it done. And in all honesty, didn't think about getting a permit or anything like that. And in hindsight, I should have, but I didn't think anything of it. We'd done lots of work for the city in the past, have a really good relationship with them, and figured that they could need the help because of these budget cuts. I went ahead and did those two properties and in doing so, made two videos, one about how to install mulch and another one about how other landscapers could also also do free work for their community or for people in need. A few weeks later in July, I Got a cease and desist in the mail, and my email from the city that basically said from their attorney that I could no longer be on the property of the city, that I was illegally doing that, that I was going to be prosecuted, and legal action was going to be ensued. All the rest of it. I made my response here on YouTube, basically showing that I was a little bit peeved by that. We told the city that on August 2nd, we were planning two more signs and. And that we were going to do similar thing. Cut down the weeds, trim the bushes, put down mulch and gravel, and they weren't going to get charged for any of that. We told them exactly what was going to happen. The address, the location, exactly how the work was going to be performed, and we wanted to get that process started. Before I tell you what happened today, let me go ahead and show you the actual two signs that we were planning to do work on today.

All right, so this is where we.

Were supposed to do the work today.

Overground sign here. This is what you see when you first come into the country. Right there is where usually people are coming out from the border into Canada. They come across there, they come into Blaine. It's kind of the entrance to our community. This is all overgrown. In the center of the roundabout across the way there, you can see a whole bunch of weeds that are 2, 3ft tall over there. Gonna get those pulled out today. Also here we got weeds in the cracks of the curb. Those were all gonna get pulled out today. And this business actually right here actually went under because they're closed because of COVID There's no more traffic coming in from the border. Over here we got weeds. Everything's all overgrown. These weeds back here are 2, 3ft tall. This is gonna get cleaned out.

Put down mulch, trim these bushes back.

That are taking over the sign.

But nope, not anymore.

Funny how that works.

Couple hours after they tell us to leave, they send a city worker to come pull the weeds out.

So the long and short of it is that this morning, we had to call our crew off of the job. And I just told them, hey, just. Just leave. We'll get you another job. We're not going to deal with this anymore because the city was again saying that we were doing unauthorized work. They called the office, and it was just a big fiasco.

All right, so now we're out at the second sign, the one that actually they were doing first this morning when they got pulled off the job. There's the sign to the city of Blaine here. We already Got started on knocking down the weeds. But this is kind of like a main intersection here going into Birch Bay. We were going to take all of this area. That's all a bunch of weeds. We're gonna put down landscape fabric, we're gonna put down drain rock, a riverbed, we're gonna put down mulch. But, yep, not gonna do that now. We already actually got started. You can see they limned up this overgrown shrub. It started taking all the underbrush out in the lower limbs so you could actually see the sign. But this is what we had to stop doing today.

And it's just incredible to me that they keep changing their story. The first time when they sent me the cease and desist letter, they were concerned about me taking the videos down that I made. And they were saying that I was doing it for personal gain, I wasn't authorized to do the work. That was the first time. Well, then they rescinded. They brought back that cease and desist letter and said, oh, actually it was a member of the community that reported you because of spraying chemicals, which I, by the way, had been spraying complete all natural vinegar and water solution. But they blamed it on someone reporting them. And then they basically said, hey, we overreacted. We're now going to rescind, bring back that cease and desist letter. Well, then on July 28, the Northern Light made another article and they interviewed someone from the city. And in that article, the city manager stated that the reason they sent me this letter and told me not to do any more work was because of liability and concerns with the labor union. So the question is, like, which Is it? Is it the fact that you wanted me to take the videos down, it made you look bad, or is it the fact that I was unauthorized to do the work and didn't get a permit? Was the fact that someone reported me about spraying chemicals, or was it the fact that you were worried about the labor unions and my liability? Like, which one is it? And more importantly, I understand about the liability. And what so many people commented in the last video that I made is, well, you should have just asked for permission. This would have been really quickly resolved with a quick phone call to the city. You would think, wouldn't you? Just a quick, hey, this is what we're going to be doing. Do you need anything from us? Oh, yeah, if you would just submit the estimate. Submit maybe your insurance. That's exactly what we did. We submit a very detailed exactly what we're going to do at the property. We submit our certificate of insurance and Then they say, hey, we also want you to make sure that you're paying prevailing wage. And we tried to go into the labor and industries website which is where we're supposed to, they're supposed to put up a job and we're supposed to create what's called an intent and affidavit where we submit the payroll and we show that we are paying certain wages to our employees while they're on that site. So we couldn't actually even submit that information because they hadn't done the back end work to allow us to submit that correct documentation. They also had assign an eight page contract and that's actually why I can't show you this contract because in that contract it stated that I could not show that contract to anyone else. Basically like a non disclosure agreement over doing volunteer work for the city. I'm trying to give back and they're making me sign an eight page contract and in that I guarantee it was created by a bunch of lawyers in that they're wanting me to state that I'm not going to show that contract to anybody else because they don't want me to make a video like this and show just how crazy this was. So that brings us to this morning when now they again are asking for more information. They now want our business license, which is public information. They can see it on record as well as now they want safety meetings, they want to have a safety briefing before we even do the job. The fact of the matter is that we submitted all of the information about the estimate three weeks ago, told them what we were going to do, how we were going to do it, and yet this morning once we're on the site, that's when they call us and want all this other information. At the end of the day we're going to try to work with them, we're going to try to submit all the information as they keep asking for more. We've worked for the city in the past and they've paid us to do projects on multiple different public areas and we have never ever had to submit any of this information in terms of prevailing wage, in terms of an eight page contract. We've always submitted our information in terms of our insurance and the fact that the estimate is very detailed in terms of what we're going to do. We've never had safety briefings or anything like that. It's just incredible to me that when someone wants to give back and do something for free, they make it so difficult and make you jump through all of these hoops. It's almost as if they would rather pay someone to do nothing than get something for free and get the work done.