Butano Geotechnical Engineering

I never write reviews but we decided to do it this time so that no one else would have to suffer as we suffered at the hands of this firm. 
We hired Butano to design our landscape retaining wall. After 3 months, they submitted a design to the City that came back with 13 pages of comments for just landscape walls. After speaking with the City we found out that their design had several major issues with the City's ordinances, which could not be fixed easily, nor approved or implemented. Butano did not follow up and did not provide us with any fixes even though our contract was supposed to include one free round of revisions and so we assumed they can't handle the project and they were walked away. But after 3 years they took us to a small claims court. We lost the case because they presented a forged contract with different scope of work and different payments schedule. We realized later that only the first and last page (with my signature) of the submitted contract to the court was correct.  Butano's owner is a con-artist. We had to pay Butano over $4500 for a job that was not done. We also lost $1100 City's permit fee, wasted lots of time and efforts and suffered emotional distress during the process. Interestingly we also found out that they had 4 other cases in the small claims court.  Later another firm which we hired had to redesign the walls completely based on the City's ordinance, and we received the approval easily and the walls were built.

Butano Geotechnical Engineering provided reports to Santa Cruz County that had gross errors. Greg, the owner, was very slow with communication. He did not call back or provide any updates to the project. Working with Greg at Butano was very disappointing. I highly recommend you check Butano Geotech Engineering references before hiring this firm to do geological work for you and get a land use consultant from the start to communicate with the County and Geo issues.