Legal notice & sources

What this is, where it comes from, and what it does not claim.

Last updated Sep 19, 2026

1. What we publish, and what each label means

This directory answers one narrow question: who owns the company you are about to call? It publishes three kinds of statement, and they are not equally strong. The label on a record tells you which one you are reading.

• “PE-backed” means we located affirmative, citable evidence of private-equity ownership — typically the state contractor registry showing the business filed under a legal entity that names a holding company, and/or an acquisition announcement together with a current investor portfolio listing. It is a statement about a corporate ownership structure. It is not a statement about service, pricing, staff, or honesty.
• “Independence indicated” is deliberately weaker than “independent”. It means the business publicly describes its own ownership that way and/or its registry record shows no roll-up signal. It is not proof that no outside investor exists, and we do not claim it is.
• “Ownership unknown” means a documented ownership change whose current owner we could not establish from any accessible source. It is neither a finding of private-equity ownership nor an independence signal.
• Confidence grades (High / Medium / Limited) grade the evidence behind the ownership call, never the business. Each record states what its grade is allowed to mean.

Absence is not a finding. A company not listed here has not been assessed, cleared, or flagged — it has usually just not been researched. This is a curated directory of 30 businesses, not a census of the trade.

2. Sources — all public

We do not use confidential information, leaked documents, paid databases we are not licensed to republish, or data obtained by circumventing any access control. Nothing here is scraped from behind a login or a bot block. The sources are:

• Washington L&I contractor license data — published by Washington State Labor & Industries as open data under the Open Data Commons Public Domain Dedication and License (PDDL). Licence status, expiry, legal-entity identifier (UBI) and the principals of record are fetched by script, never typed by hand, and re-checked for drift. Attribution: Washington State Department of Labor & Industries. Records last fetched Sep 19, 2026. L&I is authoritative for those licence details and for nothing else on this site. Verify any contractor yourself ↗
• Washington State Attorney General consumer-complaint data — published openly by the Consumer Protection Division as counts of complaints per business per year. Where it appears, it is republished with that office’s own caveat: “The existence of a complaint is not evidence of wrongdoing.” A complaint is an allegation by a member of the public, not a finding against a business. The counts are raw and not adjusted for the size of a business, so a company serving far more households will tend to appear more often without anything being wrong with it. For that reason these counts are never compared between businesses on this site, never feed any ranking, and are shown only on a business’s own record as its own history over time. Businesses are joined to this data by an exact, hand-checked list of name spellings, never by a pattern match, because attributing someone else’s complaint to a business would be the most damaging error this site could make.
• Companies’ own public statements — what a business says about its ownership on its own website, and the licence numbers it publishes there. Quoted with the date it was read.
• Investors’ and acquirers’ own public statements — portfolio pages, partner lists and acquisition announcements published by the firms themselves.
• Dated press coverage and trade-body statements, used as context and cited to the publisher.

Secondary aggregators (deal databases, review sites, business directories) are treated as leads to follow, never as publishable evidence on their own. Where a lead could not be confirmed against a primary source, the record says so rather than quietly relying on it.

Personal names. Some records name the principals of record for a business. Those names are published by the state in a public licensing registry, are attached to people in their business capacity, and are reproduced here unchanged. We do not publish home addresses, personal contact details, or information about anyone in a private capacity.

3. No advice, no warranty

This site is published for general information and public interest. It is not legal, financial, investment, tax, employment or consumer advice, and it is not a recommendation to hire, avoid, buy from, sell to, or invest in any business named here.

The information is provided “as is”, without warranties of any kind, express or implied, including as to accuracy, completeness, currency or fitness for any particular purpose. Company ownership changes, licences lapse or are reinstated, and cited pages are edited or removed by the people who publish them. Editorial research on this site was last reviewed Sep 17, 2026; state records were last fetched Sep 19, 2026. Both dates are printed on every record so you can judge for yourself how fresh a claim is.

Before you hire anyone, verify their licence, bond and insurance directly with the state, confirm the scope and price in writing, and make your own judgement. Do not substitute this site for that.

4. Facts, and the opinions drawn from them

Statements of fact on this site — who filed under which legal entity, what a licence said on a given date, what a company published about itself — are sourced and dated, and we will correct any that are wrong. Editorial judgements — that ownership is worth knowing, that a shared legal entity across several brands is a pattern worth showing, that the labels should be graded by evidence strength — are opinions, offered as such.

We take no position on whether private-equity ownership makes a business better or worse. The site says so explicitly and repeatedly, because the honest answer is that this directory does not measure service quality and cannot tell you that.

5. Company names and trademarks

Business names, trade names and trademarks referred to here belong to their respective owners. They are used only to identify and report on the companies and investors concerned — nominative reference in a factual directory. No affiliation with, sponsorship by, or endorsement from any company or investor named here is claimed or implied, and none exists.

6. Links to other sites

Every record links to its sources so you can check them. Those sites are not ours: we do not control them, are not responsible for their content, availability or accuracy, and linking to one is not an endorsement of it. A cited page may have changed since the date printed next to it.

7. Corrections — how to get a record fixed

Corrections are taken seriously, and published rather than made quietly. When a published ownership call, ownership path, confidence grade, cited source or licence detail changes, it is listed in the public correction log with its date and the source that established it, and the entry stays there afterwards. A changed label should be visible, not silently rewritten.

If you own or represent a business listed here and believe a record is wrong, we want to fix it. The strongest correction is a primary source: a document, a filing, or a statement on your own website that establishes the position. We will re-read the evidence, correct what is wrong, and log it.

The public correction form is not open yet. Until it is, the honest position is that this site has no self-service intake, and it says so on the page rather than showing a form that submits nowhere. In the meantime, licence details can be checked and disputed directly with the state at the L&I lookup linked above, which is authoritative for them.

8. Privacy

This site does not ask you to create an account, and it does not sell or share personal information. Searching, filtering and sorting happen in your own browser; the filters you choose are kept in the page address so a view can be shared, and nothing about what you searched for is published by us.

If and when the correction form opens, it will collect only what a correction needs — the record, the field, the claim and a source URL — and the retention rule for that free text will be stated on the form before you submit anything.

9. Limitation of liability

To the fullest extent permitted by law, the publisher of this site is not liable for any loss or damage arising from reliance on it, including any decision to hire or not hire a business named here. Your remedy if you believe something is wrong is a correction, and we would rather make one than not.

10. Who publishes this

Local Ledger is published by Forgewell Digital at https://local-ledger.forgewelldigital.com. Correction requests, legal notices and source challenges should go to the publisher; the correction log above records what changed and when.

This notice is written in plain English to be read rather than to be impressive. It is not a substitute for legal advice and has not been reviewed by a lawyer.