Rick Avila: Former candidate faces tough fight

SAN BERNARDINO — For Rick Avila, uncertainty is a constant companion.
It looms over work, where his once strong local construction business has dwindled to two employees - himself included. It shrouds his financial future.

Uncertainty even creeps into his house, which he may soon no longer be able to call home.
Avila, a popular lifetime resident who ran for mayor and City Council in 2005 and 2007 on an anti-corruption platform, knows he’s in a fix.

“The whole thing is crazy,” Avila said. “I still can’t believe this is happening.”

What’s happening is a hard-luck tale of a crestfallen local fixture, a man who contends that local power-brokers have conspired to ruin him after a contracted job at the former Norton Air Force Base went bad.
Others see it differently, a tale of some bad luck and irresponsibility mixed with poor decisions, including a lawsuit against the city that ended with a $750,000 judgement by a jury against the city in Avila’s favor.
But Superior Court Judge Tara Reilly lowered the judgement to $466,000, Avila said, a sum which was divided between the creditors to whom he had sunk into indebtedness during years of litigation.

Now, Arrowhead Credit Union is suing Avila for $155,000 in defaulted loans. The local bank’s suit also names DeRoy Avila, Rick Avila’s father who founded the business in 1972.

Avila, with his family business teetering and his bank account empty, faces the loss of his own house and possibly even the one in which his parents have lived 43 years.

The longtime resident may be no more.

Work gone bad

The outlook wasn’t always so bleak. In 2000, Avila was in his late 30s and his business was at its zenith. He did more than $2 million worth of construction work that year, and he had 14 full-time employees, Avila said.
“In 2001, I was set to do $2.4 million in work that I had on the books when this happened," Avila said.

In 2000, he bought himself a new Ford V-8 diesel work truck, plopping down $11,000 in cash and financing the rest.

Now 45, with the stress and the gray hairs accumulating, Avila’s old truck doubles as his personal car and rattles on with more than 140,000 miles on the odometer.

The truck is also something of an albatross dangling around Avila’s neck. The $25,000 he borrowed from the credit union for the complete purchase representing the original principal to the $155,000 he owes today.

The equipment he still has for his flagging company averages more than 10 years old, Avila said.
He blames his separation from his wife in 2003 on the financial difficulties.
“It tore us apart,” he said.

There is a near consensus as to how it all started.

Avila began work in 2001 on a $692,000 federal grant passed through the city to civilianize the base after the Air Force left town in the mid 1990s. About two weeks into the job, laying water piping for new buildings, he ran into unexpected underground electrical infrastructure, he said.

“I had to build deeper and for longer piping to avoid the stuff,” he said. “It turned into a $1 million job.”

He didn’t know it at the time, but that was the beginning of the decline of Avila Construction Inc.

Lawsuit and outlook

Even one of the officials Avila blames bitterly for the fall of his homegrown business, City Attorney James F. Penman, generally agrees with Avila’s version of events and the dismal outlook of his circumstances.

“I have a lot of sympathy for Rick Avila for the problems he encountered,” Penman said. “There were a lot of buried utilities and other things at Norton. Any contractor would have had a problem doing the job for the amount of money the federal government awarded.”

Penman said when Avila ran into unforseen troubles, getting the federal government to pony up more money was impossible.

The work at Norton for which Avila was originally contracted was never completed, Penman said.

Avila, frustrated that the city wouldn’t come up with more money for the job and facing a major loss if he did the work at the original price, sued the city.

Penman said that move compounded Avila’s problems. The contractor’s current predicament, Penman said, is the result of his pyrrhic victory in the lawsuit, not a conspiracy between courts, economic and city leaders.

“Jim Penman and Pat Morris and Larry Sharpe (Arrowhead Credit Union’s CEO)?” Penman said, noting that Sharpe backed and funded Morris’ campaign for mayor against Penman in 2005. “That’s a pretty unlikely conspiracy. The more likely scenario is that when a person has a history of litigation against those who hire and a history of publicizing those disputes, government entities and private businesses tend to shy away from contracting with that person.”

But Avila isn’t buying it. On Wednesday, he called the credit union to confront CEO Sharpe. Instead, he was routed to leave a message with a secretary, he said. He knows his tour as a lifelong San Bernardino resident is in jeopardy.

His next court date set for April 18, and he’s braced for the worst, believing he can’t get a fair trial in a building seated in the power corridors he’s convinced are against him.
Sharpe did not return calls for comment.

“I wanted to ask why they want to take me out of my home,” Avila said. “Haven’t I suffered enough?”