Small-business owner Jim Fuller was upbeat when he heard a nearby vacant church building was to be torn down.
He figured the McDonald’s restaurant and other development planned for the site would help to revitalize the area just south of downtown Akron.
Now, more than a year later, Fuller, owner of Advanced Computer Services at 800 S. Broadway, says the demolition job was botched. He said the demolition led to a loss of more than $1 million in sales last year at his computer repair and sales company and resulted in layoffs and a damaged building.
“I had a stable, steady business for 17 years,” Fuller said. “The last two years have been terrible.”
Fuller said the lost sales were half his annual revenue and the demolition led to repeated disruption of communication service, including Internet lines.
Fuller said his business has a large Internet-based business, selling computer equipment and services over several websites that the company hosts.
“We would have customers on our websites and it [the Internet connection] would literally cut off,” Fuller said.
Fuller has sued local McDonald’s franchisee Rubber City McDonald’s — which has yet to build the McDonald’s on the site of the former Church of the Good Shepherd at 785 S. Main St. Fuller also sued the demolition company, Bob Bennett Construction Co. of Norton.
Fuller is seeking punitive damages of more than $1 million and compensatory damages in excess of $25,000. The lawsuit has been assigned to Judge Thomas Teodosio in Summit County Common Pleas Court.
John Blickle, owner of Rubber City McDonald’s, said he was not aware of any damage to the Advanced Computer Services building, the former home of Summervilles’ office supply.
Blickle said he did not know of any Internet disruption except for a period of a few days in the early days of the demolition of the church.
“AT&T made an honest mistake,” he said, explaining that AT&T apparently did not know that there was a phone junction box inside the church when demolition work began.
Fuller said in his suit that Rubber City and Bennett Construction “lacked authority to cut the communications lines,” and the outages continued while AT&T worked around the demolition crew to relocate the line.
“Because of the way they [AT&T] had to patch things together and make temporary fixes, we had outages continually,” he said, over a 13-month period ending earlier this year.
AT&T is not a defendant in the suit. Bennett did not return a phone message seeking comment.
He said he tried to contact Blickle several times to talk about how the demolition was affecting his business. Blickle said no one at his company heard from Fuller after the initial outage.
Fuller said now “it’s a matter of trying to stay open with a lot less business.”
Fuller said he laid off five people working in sales and shipping, and he might have to make further cuts. Employment now stands at 10.
The continual Internet-service disruptions mean that his company’s websites don’t rank as high as they once did on Internet search results.
That means his websites get less traffic.
Fuller said damage to the building — including cracks in the walls and damage to the foundation — totals an estimated more than $150,000. He said while his insurance has given him money for repairs, “it is really not enough to do it right, put it back the way it was before.”
Rubber City McDonald’s, which operates 20 McDonald’s in Portage and Summit counties, amassed three acres adjacent to Advanced Computer Services in 2011, purchasing the property and building of the former church and a nearby Verizon retail store.
Blickle had hoped to build the McDonald’s this year.
Construction has been pushed back to 2014 at the earliest because of a possible reconfiguration of the nearby South Main and South Broadway expressway exchanges.
Family Dollar earlier this year scrapped plans to put a store on the parcel.
Katie Byard can be reached at 330-996-3781 or kbyard@thebeaconjournal.com.