LeMond Continues Long Legal Fight With Yellowstone Club

The Tour de France might come to seem less grueling -- and certainly less murky -- than Greg LeMond's two-year legal fight against the Yellowstone Club, which he resumed this week when he asked a Montana judge to order club owner Edra Blixseth to pay him the final $13.5 million of a $21.5 million settlement, a Bloomberg story says.

The judge granted LeMond's request, but the cycling great, who won the world's top cycling race in 1986, 1989 and 1990, will have to get in line for his money. The Yellowstone Club, which Edra Blixseth only won control of in August after a long and bitter public divorce with former timber executive Tim, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy on Nov. 10.

In her filing in U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Butte, Montana, Blixseth tallied the club's debts at about $350 million. The biggest liability is $307 million, not including interest, to Credit Suisse Group. The Zurich-based bank loaned the club $375 million in 2005.

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By Robert Struckman, 11-21-08 | comments (1) | email story | print story

New West Blog

Will Green Building Survive a Recession?

Writer Lisa Selin Davis asks on Grist this week: “… if McDonald’s is seeing record profits due to inexpensive food, will green housing be the equivalent of a biodynamic, $8 a pound plum?”

Industry leaders say not so much:

“Certainly green building is not a fad, rather, it’s a trend,” James Brew, an architect with the Rocky Mountain Institute’s Built Environment Team, wrote to me. “And while this current economic situation has stalled some projects and limited the availability of capital, the trend is still there.”

Read Davis’ story here.

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By Courtney Lowery, 11-21-08 | comments (3) | email story | print story

Guest Commentary

“Peaceful Enjoyment of Your Property” Except in Montana

The Montana Supreme Court finally handed down its long awaited ruling on the so-called “Mitchell Slough case.” Brought by the Bitterroot River Protective Association (BRPA), the appeal challenged the right of “rich out-of-state landowners” to limit public access to the Mitchell Slough. The plaintiffs argued that the Mitchell is a “natural, perennial-flowing stream” and as such is open to access by the public under Montana’s Stream Access Law (SAL). The state supreme court bought BRPA’s argument and reversed a lower court ruling denying public access.

The fact that the lower court found the Mitchell to be man-made while the supreme court found the opposite illustrates the slippery nature of the definition. Like so many legal battles, however, the technical legal sparring in the Mitchell case missed two truly important implications of the decision.

Special Report

Inside the $100-million GE-Wyoming Coal Project

The story behind the new $100-million GE-Wyoming coal gasification project goes back to the early 1980s when a then-California-based energy company, Tosco, was trying to extract fuel from massive oil shale deposits outside Grand Junction, Colorado.

The challenge at the time, former Tosco CEO Morton Winston recalled in an interview with WyoFile.com, was to build a device that could introduce precisely measured amounts of crushed oil shale into a mildly pressurized chamber. Winston turned to a brilliant British mechanical engineer named Donald Firth for help.

Missoula's Future

Downtown Master Plan Nears Completion

The master plan that's in the works for downtown Missoula will take many years to implement, but if you want to do your part today to push it along, the consultants have a suggestion for you: shop local, and, especially, shop downtown.

And while Macy's may not be locally owned, shop there too.

At the fourth and final public forum on the master plan project Wednesday night, consultants Crandall Arambula identified four top-priority projects for getting the plan rolling, and two of them indirectly involved Macy's: a new parking garage at the corner of Front and Pattee, which would allow Macy's to expand onto its existing parking lot, and a new mixed-use commercial development, including a hotel, that's envisioned for East Main just north of the store.

Update

Court Opens Mitchell Slough in Landmark Stream Access Case

For more than 20 years, the Mitchell Slough in Montana's Bitterroot Valley has become a showcase of the battle between public access and private property rights and Monday the Montana Supreme Court ruled in favor of the former.

With a 54-page ruling, the Supreme Court deemed the waterway a natural stream, which means access to it is protected by Montana's stream access law, which is among the strongest in the country. The ruling has been coming for more than two years and overturns two lower-court decisions that had defined the stream the way the Bitterroot Conservation District and several high-profile landowners had advocated it be: Just a ditch.

The case, which has been watched closely across the West as a crucial test of stream access law, has been a long-running extravaganza of protests, celebrity, and political maneuvering but more than that, it has been a spur for complex and often heated discussions on water rights, landownership, what's natural and what's not and most of all, how to square the values of the Old West with the demands of the New.

The Ravalli Republic's Perry Backus has a detailed story on yesterday's ruling here and to catch up on the case and it's implications, Greg Lemon wrote a very good primer for NewWest.Net when the case first went to the high court.

Guest Column

Building the New Rural West

As newly elected legislators prepare to join returning Westerns in the halls of Congress they have an opportunity to help build a new economy in the rural West. By supporting programs that unlock the entrepreneurial spirit of rural America, Western legislators can deliver on their promise to create opportunity for rural communities in their states.

Real Estate Woes

North Idaho Hit Hard by Slump

It's not a big surprise that Sandpoint, Coeur d'Alene and other parts of North Idaho would be suffering from the real estate bust and the souring global economy; the area had been among the fastest-growing in the country, and was increasingly reliant on expensive resort development and second homes. But Associated Press writer Nicholas K. Geranios today details just how tough it has become: the "preferred builder" at the Idaho Club, a new luxury golf community near Sandpoint, is going out of business after failing to sell a single home in the past year.

The region, a classic story of conomic transformation from a mining and logging base, could be in for a double-whammy because the global downturn is also taking the shine off metal prices (just six months ago there was talk of a mining revival) and hurting the wood-products industry badly.

Tales From Bankruptcy Court

Yellowstone Club Gets a (Brief) Lease on Life

A Montana bankruptcy judge reluctantly breathed three weeks of life into the Yellowstone Club in a Missoula courtroom Thursday when he OK'd a three-week loan to keep the club operating during the next stage of bankruptcy hearings.

"Why am I doing this?" asked U.S. Bankruptcy Court Judge Ralph B. Kirscher, who called it "troubling" and "overkill" that his order included the terms and conditions of a $4.4 million temporary bailout loan from lender Credit Suisse to the luxurious-but-broke private club.

"What happens if I don't sign this order?" Kirscher said. "If you would have asked me at one o'clock last night, I would have said, 'This isn't going to get signed. I'll let things fall where they may.'"