Pasco County customers of Real Rock Pools who’ve waited up to half a year for completion of their backyard pool projects are wondering if or when that will ever happen.

“I’m beside myself,” customer Megan Sullivan tells 8 On Your Side. “It’s been six months since I gave money to Real Rock and they haven’t touched a blade of grass.”

Real Rock Pools owner Jethro (Jeff) Brennan insists he’s in a tight spot due to a rainy summer, a shortage of subcontractors and a cash flow problem that set back his construction schedule.

“I’m, in a word, struggling,” Brennan said.

But a growing number of angry customers insist the problem goes far deeper than that and have grown weary of the broken promises they keep hearing from Brennan.  

Sullivan and one other customer who’ve waited since May and June haven’t seen any real construction after giving Brennan a total of $20,000 in deposits that they now want refunded.

“He’s made promises over the last six months and hasn’t kept a single one of them and we’ve had it up to here,” Sullivan said. 

Another customer, Ashely DelGuidice, is just as frustrated about not getting her deposit refunded after months of inaction by Brennan.

“Been paying on a [home improvement] loan as well for the last four months that we have nothing to show for which is also quite irritating,” DelGuidice said.

Brennan tells 8 On Your Side he has nothing left in his business accounts to repay Sullivan and Delguidice, which raises the question of what happened to their $20,000 in deposit money. 

Brennan tells 8 On Your Side he co-mingled the funds with other customer payments and spent it on other customers’ pool projects.

“I didn’t do it maliciously. ‘I’m going to take this deposit and take it for other purposes,’” Brennan said.

Brennan insists he’s now working on a business loan to pay back Sullivan and DelGuidice and to complete 10 other pool projects currently in progress that have been dragging on in some cases since May due to his company’s cash flow problem. 

“I want to get these done. I don’t want to not finish the pools,” Brennan said.

He claims he completed five other pools in November as proof of his intent to fulfill all of his contracts. Finishing the rest, he says, is dependent on additional customer payments as he reaches various “milestones.”

On Nov. 15, Brennan applied for new permits to build six more pools for new customers, most or all of which paid him hefty deposits.

Brennan told 8 On Your Side if his business loan doesn’t come through he might use the “profit” portion of those new pool deposits to pay Sullivan and DelGuidice their overdue deposit refunds.

That plan appears to fly in the face of Florida construction law which explicitly forbids the “misapplication of funds” designated for one construction project to pay for another.

Brennan’s financial troubles appeared to deepen only yesterday. That’s when a third Pasco customer, Cindy Suy, tells 8 On Your Side she also demanded a partial return of her pool deposit because she’s tired of waiting for completion. 

Meanwhile, as many as nine other Real Rock Pool customers are getting anxious as Brennan’s endless assurances wear thin.

Annette Lampman has paid Brennan $32,500 since May 21 and all she has to show for it is a rough cement shell in her backyard surrounded by dirt instead of the pool she told her three young kids they’d be playing in by now. 

“They ask me all the time, ‘when is the guy coming back to finish up the pool’ and I always have to tell them ‘I don’t know’ or ‘we will see,” Lampman said. “I am really worried that we are getting stuck with this concrete hole.”