A payment of $160,000 was apparently the fuel injection that powered a recent legal settlement between ACE Speedway and the North Carolina’s Department of Health and Human Services.
This six-figure sum wasn’t disclosed in the court record last month when the Altamahaw-based racetrack formally agreed to abandon a five-year-old legal complaint over a state-level enforcement action that occurred at the height of the coronavirus pandemic.
Robert and Jason Turner, the speedway’s father-and-son proprietors, had originally filed their suit in the fall of 2020 after the state’s then secretary of health and human services persuaded a court to temporarily shut down the venue over its alleged disregard of pandemic-era limits on crowd sizes.
By the time that the Turners initiated their claim, the state had already lifted the three-and-a-half-month closure amid a more general, statewide rollback of its crowd size restrictions. The speedway’s owners were nevertheless smarting from the revenue they lost during the state-imposed shutdown, which they insisted had unfairly singled them out without advancing any real public health benefit.
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The legal wrangling over the speedway’s complaint ultimately reached North Carolina’s supreme court before it was bumped back down to the superior court level for a proposed trial. In the midst of the preparations for this courtroom showdown, the two parties took part in a round of mediation that eventually gave rise to the settlement agreement.
On July 18, the speedway’s owners informed the court that they had dismissed their complaint in keeping with the terms of an undisclosed settlement. The court record offered no particulars about the settlement’s terms – which had presumably included some form of financial recompense.
In response to a public records request earlier this month, North Carolina’s attorney general’s office has passed along a two-page agreement that set the price of the détente at $160,000. The agreement, which both parties signed on June 24, goes on to spell out the ramifications should the Turners accept this payment.
“In consideration of the settlement amount,” the document states, “the parties agree to waive and relinquish any and all matters, both past and future, arising or potentially arising from the claims and/or counterclaims asserted in the civil action…The promises and terms agreed to herein are not to be construed as an admission of any alleged wrongdoing, nonconformity, error, or other deficiency on the part of any party.”
