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Yahoo
2 days ago
- Business
- Yahoo
Hearing set June 12 in CARD Clinic seizure; sheriff's sale set for July 2
Jun. 6—A federal judge in Missoula will hear arguments next week dealing with BNSF's attempts to seize the assets of Libby's CARD Clinic. The hearing is scheduled for 9:30 a.m. Thursday, May 12, in the Russell Smith Federal Courthouse. Judge Dana L. Christensen will hear the case. Also, Lincoln County Sheriff Darren Short signed a notice Thursday, June 5, giving notice to a sheriff's sale July 2 to the highest bidder to satisfy the judgment for the plaintiff, BNSF, with interest and costs. While the date is subject to change pending an order from the court, the sale is currently set for 10 a.m. Wednesday, July 2. According to Montana code, the sheriff's office has 120 days from the day it received the writ to conduct the sale. The sale will include the real property as well as office equipment, furnishings, and other machinery, fixtures and equipment. For more information, contact the sheriff's office at 406-293-4112, ext. 1232. The non-profit clinic, which has served thousands of patients afflicted with asbestosis and other deadly ailments, has been closed since May 7 when the Lincoln County Sheriff's Office served a Writ of Execution on the Center for Asbestos Related Disease, Inc. to satisfy a $3.1 million judgment. A writ of execution is a court order directing a sheriff to seize and sell property to satisfy a judgment. The judgment stems from a lawsuit won in 2023 by Texas-based BNSF, owned by billionaire Warren Buffett, that accused the clinic of filing hundreds of fraudulent claims over several years. Federal jurors ruled two years ago that the clinic made or presented false claims 337 times, including 91 violations after November 2015. CARD filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in August 2023, allowing it to continue operations. But the United States intervened in the bankruptcy proceeding and determined that the judgment should not be paid, so the bankruptcy was settled and dismissed in spring 2024. In September 2024, CARD lost an appeal to a jury's 2023 judgment. In the meantime, CARD officials recently found another location to serve its patients. It is located at 118 West 3rd Street. It will be open the same hours as the clinic, 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday through Wednesday. "We are still receiving grant money and we have a mission to fulfill so we're pleased we can still offer some services," McNew said. "Patients are welcome to stop in and we'll work to answer their questions." McNew said they are able to answer emails from patients and send test results to patients. She also hopes that they will be able to continue outreach education. Another hope is that the new location will have working phones next week. McNew said since the seizure of the clinic, BNSF has taken at least $100,000 from the clinic's operating account. In a May 9 court filing, Billings-based Assistant U.S. Attorneys Mark Smith and Lynsey Ross filed a motion in Lincoln County District Court to quash the court's writ on the CARD Clinic. In the motion, the attorneys said it contacted BNSF attorney Cole Anderson and requested the company withdraw the application. But the company declined and objected to the motion. "In 2023, a Montana jury found that the CARD clinic had submitted false asbestos claims costing taxpayers millions of dollars. The judge determined the amount of damages to be repaid, and the process for recovery is set by law," said Kendall Sloan, BNSF Director of External Communicatons. According to a declaration by CARD Executive Director Tracy McNew filed with the motion to quash, she reported that all CARD employees were compelled to vacate the clinic May 7 following the seizure and the sheriff's office replaced all of the locks. Thursday, May 8, following a request, certain CARD employees were allowed to enter the clinic to access the CARD Quickbooks accounting program. McNew said sheriff's office officers monitored CARD employees activities and once they were done using the accounting program, they left the office and haven't returned. In a May 20 filing in federal court in Missoula, CARD's attorney, James A. Patten of Patten, Peterman, Bekkedahl and Green, a Billings firm, sought to join the federal motion to quash the writ and sought a preliminary injunction and temporary restraining order. CARD argues that the railway's writ violates bankruptcy proceedings and applicable law. It is seeking the injunction and restraining order to prevent further harm upon CARD and the wrongful interference with the clinic due to its status as a federal grant recipient. In 2011, CARD was chosen by the U.S. Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry for a four-year grant for a screening program for environmental health hazards, including asbestosis, pleural thickening and pleural plaques, caused by exposure to hazardous substances at Libby's Superfund sites. The federal grants continued with the most recent reward in September 2024. It will run through August 2029. The argument also includes the harm the clinic will suffer because it cannot screen patients, provide education, monitor diagnosed patients and provide follow up of testing results and respond to patient requests. In another declaration by McNew, she said the clinic had to cancel about 50 appointments per week since the May 7 closure. It also said the clinic's pulmonary function testing equipment, the only of its kind in Lincoln County, has sat unused as a result of BNSF's seizure. "CARD has on several occasions identified patients in need of emergency care and/or serious treatment for previously undiagnosed malignancies as part of our routine screenings," McNew wrote. BNSF replied to the clinic's filings in a 53-page document filed May 30 in federal court. Among its arguments, railway attorneys Knight Nicastro MacKay maintain because the federal government didn't intervene in the original lawsuit, it doesn't have a right to stop BNSF from recovering money from the judgment. "The Government begins by claiming that litigation in which the United States is a party is reserved to the officers of the Department of Justice, under the direction of the Attorney General, citing U.S. statute. But BNSF attorneys say federal attorneys left out a relevant portion of the statue which directly applies. It reads, "Except as otherwise authorized by law, the conduct of litigation in which the United States, an agency, or officer thereof is a party, or is interested, and securing evidence therefor, is reserved to officers of the Department of Justice, under the direction of the Attorney General." They also say because CARD has mixed its grant income with non-grant income that it must prove its bank accounts and property represent only grant money. During the 2023 trial, a number of donations from plaintiff attorneys were revealed. From 2012 to 2017, the clinic received $81,000 from attorneys and $30,000 for a mortality study. Dr. Brad Black, CARD's former medical director, testified to $116,000 in donations from Montana plaintiff attorneys. The list didn't include two $10,0000 donations from a national plaintiffs' law firm or a $24,381.94 donation for the clinic's new parking lot. BNSF also believes CARD has received its most significant non-grant income in the form of Medicare payments for treating its patients. "This is the equivalent of personal income for CARD and the amount of this income what property it was used to buy is still unknown to BNSF," the attorneys argued. Railway attorneys also said they do not intend to use grant funds to satisfy the judgment or ask to liquidate CARD assets pending the federal court's review of whether grant funds were mixed with non-grant funds to secure the assets. Gold miners discovered vermiculite in Libby in 1881. In the 1920s, the Zonolite Company formed and began mining the vermiculite. In 1963, W.R. Grace bought the Zonolite mining operations. The mine closed in 1990. In 2002, the Environmental Protection Agency placed the site on the Superfund program's National Priorities List and cleanup work continues to this day. Fibers from the asbestos tied to vermiculite mining that began in the 1920s can embed in lung tissue and cause fatal lung disease. No one knows how many people in the region have died from the effects of asbestosis, mesothelioma or other cancers linked to exposure to asbestos-containing vermiculite mined, processed and shipped from Lincoln County and Libby. BNSF's involvement relates to asbestos-contaminated vermiculite in the rail yard that a 2024 federal jury said was a considerable factor in the negligent deaths of former Libby residents Thomas Wells and Joyce Walder. Both Wells and Walder lived near the railyard and were both diagnosed with mesothelioma and died in 2020. Hundreds of people died and more than 3,000 were sickened from asbestos exposure in the Libby area, according to researchers and health officials. BNSF faces accusations of negligence and wrongful death for failing to control clouds of contaminated dust that used to swirl from the rail yard and settle across Libby's neighborhoods. The vermiculite was shipped by rail from Libby for use as insulation in homes and businesses across the U.S.
Yahoo
25-02-2025
- Automotive
- Yahoo
Champion of fiscal-conservative causes Duane Alton dies at 88
Feb. 24—A tire salesman, who twice got within a few percentage points of beating Tom Foley in races to represent Spokane in Congress and later challenged attempts all over the state to raise funds for schools, died last week. Elvin "Duane" Alton, founder of Alton's Tire and Automotive Center and a financer of conservative politics, died on Feb. 17. He was 88. "He was very conservative and concerned about his community," former Spokane Valley Mayor Diana Wilhite said. "He wanted the best for the community, from his perspective. I didn't always necessarily agree with him, but I appreciated his passion." Alton was born in 1936 in tiny Atkinson, Nebraska, a town that counted 1,306 residents as of the 2020 Census. He later enlisted in the U.S. Air Force on May 27, 1955, and was honorably discharged on Dec. 27, 1958, according to a candidate profile he provided The Spokesman-Review decades ago. His military career apparently brought him to Spokane, where he attended night classes at Eastern Washington University and Whitworth University, which was then known as Whitworth College. In 1958, he married his first wife, Blanche, who previously had three children, Pamala, Greg and Douglas, whom Alton listed as his children on his campaign disclosures. The couple later had sons Matthew and Troy. In 1964, Alton opened the first Alton's Tire store, which would eventually grow to 13 locations in Spokane and North Idaho before he sold them in 2008 to Billings-based Tire-Rama Inc. Plane crash candidacy Just weeks before the 1976 election, Republican candidate Charles Kimball was killed in a small airplane crash on Aug. 31. Republican leaders put forth 39-year-old Alton as their standard bearer to take on Democrat incumbent Thomas "Tom" S. Foley who was running to retain his seat in the U.S. House for the 5th District of Washington. "I really believe in all my heart that Tom Foley can be beat," Alton said in 1976. "If I didn't think I could beat Foley, I would not run." Alton, who would later become a Trustee of the Freedom Foundation, ran on a platform of smaller government and fewer taxes. At the time, he had three tire shops operating in Spokane and Coeur d'Alene. "We need to let the free enterprise system in the U.S. run ... with as few controls as necessary," he said during the campaign. Alton said he would be in favor of amending the U.S. Constitution to end federal deficits, which he blamed for causing the high inflation at the time. "I would be in favor of such an amendment if no other way could be found to force Congress to balance the budget," he said. Foley won the 1976 election with just over 58% of the vote compared to Alton's showing of just under 41%. Two years later, with years to allow voters to get to know him, Alton challenged Foley a second time. In the August prior to that election, according to Spokesman-Review archives, Alton called for a complete elimination of the food stamp program and grants for the National Science Foundation. He also called the Occupational Safety Health Administration and the Environmental Protection Agency "squanderers of taxpayers' money." "Mr. Alton's position is far too extreme in political circumstances, even in the Republican Party, to represent the people of the 5th District," Foley said in response. "If trying to leave more of the taxpayer's dollar in his pocket, if trying to stop inflation is extreme, then he's right," Alton countered. During the campaign, Alton got $1,400 donation from Citizens for The Republic, a group set up by soon-to-be President Ronald Reagan. With that support and with the help of others, the tire salesman nearly completed the transaction. Foley won the election by just a handful of percentage points, 47.9% to Alton's 42.7%, with the other 9.3% going to an independent candidate. "When you lose, you lose and you don't feel good about it," Alton told a Spokane Chronicle reporter on Nov. 8, 1978. "I'm just going to go back and sell some tires and keep some food coming." The loss would be Alton's last major foray into politics except for a truncated run as an independent for state office in 1984 and a 1994 primary loss to George Nethercutt, who that year finally unseated Foley. Antitax crusader According to court records, Duane and Blanche Alton divorced in 1989. He later remarried Andree Rabe in April 1993. But publicly, Alton never missed a beat challenging anything that could raise taxes, even if he wasn't the one affected. In 1991, he became the co-chairman of the Truth About Coliseum Taxes, which was a group opposed to a proposal to use sales taxes to replace the Spokane Coliseum with the Spokane Arena. "It's not a crap shoot, it's economic rape," Alton said in a Sept. 14, 1991 article. Alton complained that increasing taxes to pay for a facility that a private enterprise couldn't pencil out was "morally wrong." A year later, Alton targeted the $18 million effort to upgrade the Spokane County Fair & Expo Center. "When is the rape of Spokane taxpayers going to stop?" Alton asked. "There is no economic development created when you take money from people to spend it on a project they do not want." But Alton took particular interest in funding efforts to kill school bonds and levies. In a 1994 letter to the editor in The Spokesman-Review, Alton claimed that the state was wasting taxpayer dollars on education. "Some $2,000-plus per student is swallowed up by the bureaucracy" in Olympia, he wrote. "What we need is less bureaucracy, not higher property taxes. Less bureaucracy will raise the standard of education; more taxes will not." Over the next two decades, he became one of the prime financers of campaigns against school tax proposals in almost every area school district and even districts in places like Battle Ground, on the state's west side. For instance, in 2011 the Citizens for Responsible Taxation, which was nearly completely funded by both Duane and his son, Matt Alton, warned voters of Orchard Prairie about a "sneak election" that would raise their property taxes $2,490 for a home valued at $100,000. The actual figure was $249. "The fact that it has grossly incorrect figures really disturbs me," Dan Cutler, a school board member said at the time. "I don't mind people sending out fliers saying to vote no, but to send it out with false figures in it is really unethical." As recently as 2022, the elder Alton was the largest single donor to local campaigns over the prior 15 years. At that time, he had given more than $70,000 to candidates and measures. Wilhite, the former Spokane Valley mayor, said donations are the lifeblood of most local campaigns. "Unfortunately, these days, you have to raise a fair amount of money" when you are running for state office, she said. "People who are willing to donate to campaigns are special people. "Duane, if he felt you met the guidelines he felt were necessary, he was very willing to donate," Wilhite continued. "So, he was generous in that respect." Efforts to reach Duane Alton's friends, colleagues and family were not successful on Monday.
