A racetrack in Altamahaw has finally reached the end of the road in a long-running court battle over a state-imposed shutdown that occurred at the height of the coronavirus pandemic.
ACE Speedway has voluntarily dismissed the legal claims that it originally lodged in the fall 2020 after North Carolina’s department of health and human services had ordered the racing venue to temporarily close due to its alleged violation of certain pandemic-era restrictions.
ACE formally filed this dismissal on July 18 in light of an undisclosed financial settlement between the Alamance County-based business and its one-time antagonists in Raleigh.
Chuck Kitchen, an attorney who has represented the speedway’s owners in this matter, had little to say about the terms of this settlement when he was reached for a comment on Monday.
“The case has been settled, and we have taken a voluntary dismissal of the counterclaim,” Kitchen informed the newspaper that afternoon. “The case is over, and that’s all I’ve got to say.”
Kitchen’s brief epitaph for this case follows more than five years of legal wrangling between Robert and Jason Turner – the speedway’s father-and-son owners –– and the state-level officials who forced them to suspend their operations for about three and a half months in 2020.
The state’s order came at a time when many businesses had just begun to emerge from a two-month-long shutdown that the state had imposed after the initial outbreak of Covid-19 in North Carolina. During the post-shutdown period, many businesses were still subject to mandates on crowd sizes and “social separation” in order to prevent the spread of infection. ACE was accused of dodging these rules after photos and video footage surfaced online showing large, shoulder-to-shoulder crowds at the venue.
The speedway’s alleged violations initially drew public reprimands from state-level officials such as former governor Roy Cooper and Mandy Cohen, the state’s then-secretary of health and human services. In response to the speedway’s alleged recalcitrance, Cohen convinced an Alamance County superior court judge to issue a temporary injunction against ACE in June of 2020. This court-ordered closure remained in effect until September 28 of that year, when the state abruptly abandoned its entire legal case against ACE amid a general loosening of pandemic-inspired restrictions.
Although the speedway was no longer under the state-imposed shutdown, Robert and Jason Turner nevertheless pressed ahead with a counterclaim against Cohen and other state-level officials. Among other things, the speedway’s owners accused their critics of selective enforcement based on the public reprimands that Cohen and others had aired. The Turners also alleged that the state’s enforcement action had infringed on their right to a living as laid out in North Carolina’s state constitution.
Originally filed in November of 2020, this counterclaim was dismissed before trial by an Alamance County superior court judge, who felt that the demise of the state’s temporary injunction had rendered the whole issue moot. The case nevertheless made its way to the appellate level and, in 2024, the state supreme court decided that the matter deserved a more thorough hearing. In the meantime, however, the two sides took part in court-ordered mediation that culminated in the voluntary dismissal of the speedway’s claims.
