Miami animal hospital wants reimbursement for damaged business sign

The owner of an animal hospital called NBC6 Responds after his business's sign got damaged by a local contractor. 

Sky Lake Animal Hospital is located on Miami Gardens Drive in Miami. The small clinic has fought hard for its name recognition and steady clientele. 

But for the last year, they’ve been battling a different fight. 

Owner Dr. Matthew Cooper says last March, while road work was being done on the street outside the clinic, a local construction crew contracted by the Florida Department of Transportation backed into their business's yard sign. 

The incident was captured on surveillance video. 

“The gentleman driving it just backed into my sign, like, aggressively, moved up.” Copper said. “They totally rotated my sign, ripped out the electrical.”

After it happened, Cooper snapped photos and says his staff reached out to the construction company directly. 

“I'm like, ‘oh, let's just call them, we'll get this figured out, I'm sure they'll fix it, no problem,’ because it's on film, it was blatantly done,” Cooper said. 

He says that’s not what happened. 

Cooper says after his office manager reached out to the construction company and the Florida Department of Transportation, which hired the contractor, their line of communication with the construction company went cold. 

“Months and months of calls, emails, taking time away from her doing her job, you know, frustration. So, and throughout all of that, we still had to repair our sign,” Cooper said. 

The repair costs $4,569 and Cooper says they waited for reimbursement from the construction company for more than a year. 

NBC6 Responds reached out to the Florida Department of Transportation and the construction company, Leon America Construction, LLC to find out more about this incident. 

Within weeks, a representative from FDOT told us Leon America Construction is “working directly with Sky Lake Animal Hospital to come to an agreement on their claim.”

After we reached out, Leon America Construction reached out to Sky Lake Animal Hospital and made an offer to pay $680 for the repair of the sign pole, but not the total price of the sign replacement. 

A representative from Leon America Construction told us through email, in part, their “company attempted to contact the owner on many occasions” and “if we had any evidence to justify the damage, the pole cover affected the entire sign without affecting the pole itself, the full amount could be refunded, but according to the data shown by the owner, only the pole cover was damaged.” 

But Cooper disagrees, telling NBC6 he thinks the entire sign and electrical needs to be replaced. He says he is now considering legal action. 

Leon America Construction told us they asked to inspect the sign and offered to correct the damage last year, but Cooper says this is not true. NBC6 Responds asked Leon America Construction if they could share any emails or correspondence to show their request to inspect the sign last year after the incident, but they did not provide any.