Brea Firm Awarded $450,000

BREA — An Orange County company that installs home water treatment equipment has won nearly $450,000 from EcoWater Systems Inc. in an arbitration award that rebukes the Minnesota firm for lying about its products and concealing reports about defects.

Bertollini & Associates in Brea, once EcoWater’s biggest dealer, is the first of five former dealers to go through binding arbitration over alleged problems with EcoWater systems installed in thousands of homes nationwide.

A spokesman for the privately held St. Paul, Minn., company, one of the nation’s major suppliers of water softeners and filtering systems, said Friday that the company denies doing anything wrong and will challenge the arbitrator’s award. Grounds for appeals in such cases are extremely limited.

Bertollini demonstrated numerous instances of equipment failures that caused flooding in kitchens and garages and resulted in more than 1,600 service calls, said arbitrator David K. Nightingale of Minneapolis in his decision Tuesday.

EcoWater failed to reimburse the Brea company for much of its work and supplies, he found, and told Bertollini that it was the only dealer experiencing such problems.

“EcoWater engaged in a repeated pattern of misrepresentation with regard to the products supplied to Bertollini over the [six] years of his dealership,” Nightingale ruled.

In fact, numerous dealers among the more than 800 nationwide had similar problems, and test reports showed the company was aware of failures, said Bertollini’s lawyer, Ronald K. Clausen of San Francisco.

Charles Bertollini, owner of the Brea company, said EcoWater rejected an offer last year to settle the case for $100,000.

In addition to the award to Bertollini, Nightingale issued a fee award to Clausen’s firm, Bronson, Bronson & McKinnon LLP, for $290,748.