LEGAL ACTION AGAINST ME - for doing FREE Community Service?!

No, it's not clickbait. And yes, I am really getting threatened by my local city officials because I tried to do something good for them and did it for free. I'm gonna tell you a little story today about what's happened over the past couple weeks when I tried to give free landscaping services to my local city, Blaine Washington, and as of today, was served with a notice from the attorneys. I have a cease and desist. Let's get into it. Let me tell you a little bit of background story, though. Blaine Washington is a little city right up against the Canadian border. We have less than 8,000 people that live here, and over the past 12 months, COVID 19 has decimated our economy because the Canadian border has been closed. Taxes have been absolutely dwindled because we have relied so heavily on the commerce and the fuel sales and the retail sales from our Canadian constituents across the border. So what has happened? Budget cuts have taken place. Things have fallen behind. We. We no longer have our July 4th parades, et cetera, because of the budget cuts at our city. So several weeks ago, I was talking with another county community member and noted the fact that several of our city signs had fallen into disarray. They were overgrown. They had not been tended to for many, many months. They looked shabby. And they were the gateway to our city and the gateway to our entire country as you enter the United States. So I decided I was going to go ahead and clean them up. Now, I was at first going to have my crew as the owner of Augusta lawn care locally, have my crew do it. However, they were booked out three to four weeks because we are in the very busy season of the spring rush, and as we went into summer, so I decided I would have to do it myself. In doing so, I figured, you know what, we'll make a video of it. Because I try to help other landscaping business owners build their business. I'd try to make an educational video while I was at it and try to kill two birds with one stone. And. And so I decided I would do the project. There was two different occasions I went in June for several hours and did work on two different city signs. I'm going to show you some of those clips, and I'm going to go through the letter that I actually have gotten today that basically said for me to get out of there. So this is the letter that I received today after doing this work installing up mulch, trimming the bushes back, and spending two days working for free. So first of all, this is from the attorneys that the city of Blaine has hired. They said good afternoon. Attached Please find correspondence regarding the above reference matter. This is 1128 on July 8th. This letter, it's via email, regular and certified US mail. Unauthorized use of city property Cease and desist. Dear Mr. Andes, our firm represents the city of Blaine, Washington City. It has come to our attention that you have entered onto city of Blaine public property, performed unauthorized work and done so to advertise on YouTube for personal gain. All done without consent or permission. Additionally, you apparently applied pesticides or herbicides, a regulated activity, and the city cannot verify whether they are allowed under applicable regulations. Neither you nor any of your employees applied for a permit or were granted permission to perform landscaping or apply chemicals of any kind to the public property shown in the YouTube video you posted on June 23, 2021. The City of Blaine hereby demands that you and your business cease and desist from landscaping, clearing, spraying or performing any work on city property. The city also demands that you immediately remove any and all videos and or photos demonstrating or promoting the unauthorized and illegal activity. In the event you fail to cease and desist as demanded, the city will be compelled to to pursue appropriate legal action against you. Moments later, 11:53 this morning, I simply replied back. I was like, look, I don't have the time to deal with this. We will comply. I afforded this to Mike Hill that brought this need to my attention. It is very sad that a local citizen is being threatened for doing a good thing for the community and donating almost $1,000 of labor and materials and making a video encouraging others to do the same. This sort of bureaucracy is what will keep our small city from expansion, improvement and growth. Well, I have decided to change my mind. I am not going to comply and I am not going to take down the videos that I posted. The video that is referenced on June 23rd was the second of two videos that I made. The first video was a video about doing free work for your city and encouraging other landscapers to do the same thing to help their community. How? Help those in need and do free work where it's necessary in their local community to help and encourage other people that might not have the funds or their city potentially like mine has been affected by COVID 19 and had to cut budgets and cut city workers. Hey everyone, it's Mike andes here@landscapebusinesscourse.com today we're gonna be doing a little bit of community service. Not because I went to jail, but because we're trying to do something good for the community. These signs here were installed about five to ten years ago. Blaine is the city that I was born in, and it's a little bit run down. We got a clean. Clean this place up. There's two of them across the street here. We want it to look good. We're not getting paid for this today, but today we're going to do something good for the community. June 23, I created a video about how to make money as a landscaper installing mulch. I used the footage from that sequence of events, installing mulch at a city sign to be the. The background video of my audio over. How do you sell bark jobs like this, and this is the big thing you want to highlight when it comes to selling mulch jobs, is just how good it makes a flower bed look and makes the flowers pop. So I want to address the city directly. I want to talk to them and give my point of view. I truly believe that you're discouraging young people from improving the community and getting involved. I'm sorry, but if you look at the average age of the people that come to your city council meetings, do not tell me that the future of Blaine is there. They're old. They've done the same thing many, many times, time and time again, and it's got our city nowhere. If you want progress and you want change and you actually care about the future of our city and our community, you would involve and you would promote young people that get involved in the community and give back to the community that they so love.

I'm 25 years old. My name is Mike Andes. I own anytime fitness in Blaine. A gym. Welcome to anytime Fitness. Blaine got this franchise a few years ago. It's in the city of Blaine. I also own Augusta lawn care, which is now in bellingham, but has been in Blaine for many years. And we continue to service this area. We continue to pay our taxes in this area. I have multiple real estate investments in the city of Blaine. I pay my sales tax, I pay my payroll tax. I pay property tax on all my real estate. And here you used. You used taxpayers dollars to litigate the person that's trying to actually give back to the community the money that you spent. The cost of you litigating and having a lawyer draft this document was probably more than it would have cost you to get this work done by a private company like mine. I did not ask for payment, and I never heard anything from you. After our first video, within a couple hours of being on site, our office received a call asking what we were doing. We simply said it was complete Charity. There was no money being transacted. We weren't expecting anything in return and there was nothing said. We were not told to get off the property. I was never confronted on the property and asked to leave. If I was, I would have done so. And yet, weeks later, now, hiding behind the guise of the law and legal action, you're going to come after me, a citizen in your community that wants to give back and take taxpayer money, money that I've paid towards, and you're going to litigate the people that are looking for progress and change in the community. I also am an employer. I employ dozens of employees in the local community. The average wage of our employees is around $23 to $24 per hour. In January 2022, we're gonna have full medical benefits. We have two weeks of paid time off for every single employee. Dozens of good paying jobs in our community. And these are the people you target that are trying to give back to our community. I'm 25 years old, I'm invested and I love this community. And yet I'm the one you're going to spend your tax dollars fighting against when I'm trying to help the community in the fact that it's been torn down by COVID 19 budgets have been cut and there are not enough city workers to get the work done that is needed. So I posted this afternoon a post on my YouTube channel sharing exactly the letter and had many comments and I want to go over some of the rebuttals of what I did. First of all, say in your letter, and I'm now addressing you as the city members of our wonderful state, our wonderful city of Blaine. You said I did this for personal gain. Let me be very clear. I've made less than $80 of ad revenue from, from the video that you mentioned on June 23, 2021. Now let me roll out to you the cost of me doing this, for which you were never invoiced, never mentioned, and never heralded for what I did. No mention not needed. My cost was the fact that I had two employees on the job site. There's an estimated 15 to 20 hours worth of time that we spent on the job site. And that doesn't include all the edit time for the video that I created to again encourage other landscapers to give back to. If you just took my time, we would usually charge $70 per hour for that time that we spent on that property at Augusta Lawn Care. If I was a regular laborer, we'd be charging $70 per hour. But Let me tell you one thing. I didn't have the ability to have my crew. They were too busy. I didn't want to interfere with the schedule. So I did the work. Let me break down to you what I'm usually going to be costing. If you go to my website, you can people pay. Pay $399 for a 45 minute Zoom call with me. So if you break down the fact that I probably spent six to 10 hours on these projects, you can do the math of how much this would have cost the city of Blaine to have me do the work. Let's not mention the materials and the debris that I hauled away after trimming the bushes, pulling the weeds, putting down the spray. And yeah, by the way, the rebuttal about the spray and the herbicides and the pesticides. I made it clear in the videos we, we were using an all natural vinegar and water solution because I was aware of the fact that spray and chemicals can affect pets and other people that are walking by. I was not only conscientious of the community, but I was looking after its best interest, unlike our city officials that are now trying to tear down the very people trying to build the community up. All right, another rebuttal is the fact that potentially this is taking away work from the unions, if potentially the city workers are unionized. I'm actually not 100% sure if they are. All I know is that their budgets have been cut. The work is not being done. And honestly, if you have a union, get the work done, get the jobs done, take the tax dollars and be more efficient. If not, let the private sector come help you. I didn't ask for money. I didn't ask for any sort of publicity. I did it out of the goodness of my heart. And that's what you're going after. That's what you're really trying to tear down. You say, well, you should have just asked. You should have asked for permission. You should have just asked the city, hey, can I get a permit to come be on the property and do the work? That's the kind of red tape and bureaucracy that's going to keep small town America from progressing, from getting through COVID 19 and everything that was hurled our way through, the budget cuts and the tax massive cuts that we've had in our city. What's gonna get us through that is cutting all this red tape and bureaucracy. Why do you think young people like me don't want to get involved in politics? Why do you think young people like me don't care about our communities or the welfare of the public or community health or every single other element that is now having to cost the government and our city officials and our taxpayers money is because of red tape and bureaucracy and garbage like this. Cowards that can't call a man or a woman and talk to me directly or let alone even my company or can come and confront me on site. And they have to go through a legal representative and litigate the people that love their community. And for the people that say I'm doing this for clout, that I'm doing this all for publicity, I make these videos because I'm just trying to get my brand or all the rest of it. Let me be very clear to you. Just because I shared 1% of probably the charitable things that I do and try to encourage other people and try to make that reciprocal, try to pass. Pass that along to other people and encourage them to do the same thing, you really think that's clout? You think I would spend my time, my money, my employees time, my materials, the truck that we have to use on that day instead of going out and doing other work to help our community? And I'm doing that for my own personal gain. Let me wrap this up and be very clear. We will also not comply to your second demand that says that we can't do any landscaping or spraying or anything else. The reason for that is because a community member has already stepped forward previous to your litigation to pay for us to do more work on city property that has been left undone and those areas have been completely neglected. On August 2nd, we will be on site. The estimates have been accepted. This individual is willing to pay for us to do this work because of the improvements that we made at the city out of the goodness of our heart. August 2nd, we will be on site. I will have a camera crew and the local media will be there if there's any sort of issues from our city officials. I don't do this out of spite. I do not make this announcement or this video because I hate my city or I hate my officials. I love our city. I want to see it grow. I want to see it progress. I want to see it move forward. I want to see community members get involved and step in when a small city like ours is going through a difficult time as we have in the past 12 months. But we can't with city officials and legalities and red tape that prevent us from doing the thing we love and giving back to our community without any sort of reparation, without any sort of expectation of anything in return. I just want to see positive change on August 2nd that will continue.