By Mike Weland
Kelli Martin is no stranger to tears, but on Saturday evening, passing by her late brother-in-law’s basement room while doing laundry, she broke and wept as waves of pain crashed over her. “If he hadn’t come here to help me with dad, he would be alive,” she said. She and several neighbors believe the business at the south end of Pothole Road, Panhandle Door and Drawer, bears a measure of responsibility for his and two other recent deaths in the home closest to the business. On Wednesday, Boundary County Commissioners will hold public hearing not so much to determine if a violation exists – it does – but to weigh if the county’s long-time ambivalence toward its own zoning laws can continue.
Nelson Mast is a respected developer in a community that typically considers developers suspicious. In 2018, he bought Panhandle Cabinet and Door, a small mom-and-pop business established in 2005, and expanded it into one of the largest privately-owned businesses in Boundary County, a fine example, many in the county agreed, of the economic possibilities inherent in free enterprise. Even some living on Pothole Road were initially impressed.
Frank Weston bought property on Pothole Road and quietly moved his family here in 2002, long before the road was given its name and before any businesses occupied the road. Theirs was a beautiful spot on a quiet lane off Highway 95 on the south side of Peterson Hill. He was one of many in law enforcement to retire here, but Frank was more famous than most, having built a reputation as more of an old west lawman than an officer of the 20th Century.
He grew up on Route 66 in Kingman, Arizona, a man of the desert. He enlisted in the U.S. Army as the stable 50s segued into tumultuous 60s, serving for a time with Elvis Presley. After his service, Frank returned to the desert and became a lawman on the Nevada side of the Idaho line.
“A hermit living near a remote hot spring in Nevada’s Black Rock Desert was arraigned in Winnemucca Monday on triple murder charges in the deaths of a Colorado couple and a prospector,” read an article on page six of the Twin Falls, Idaho, Times-News June 27, 1978. “Ronald ‘Three Fingers’ Gress, 43, was ordered held without bail … A sheriff’s search and rescue team led by Humboldt County Sheriff Frank Weston tracked him down after discovering the bodies of Richard and Judy Weiss.”
“A gunman who took an Idaho city official and deputy sheriff hostage, then exchanged them for a pilot and light plane, surrendered today after five hours of negotiations with officers who shot out the tires of the aircraft when it landed to refuel,” read the Idaho Statesman January 26, 1978 … “no one was hurt.”
One of those officers was Sheriff Weston, who, on learning of the hijacking, evacuated a church group meeting in a building on airport property. As he’d anticipated, the hijacker, a 20-year-old Idaho kid coming off an epic drunk, made a beeline to that building with his hostages, keeping everyone safe until his surrender.
In April 1982, the sheriff was a participant in a shootout near the Highway 95 crossroads community of Paradise Hill, Nevada, that brought in Claude Dallas, on the run since killing Idaho Fish and Game officers Conley Elms and William Pogue January 5, 1981.
Frank and his wife Judy held off moving to Boundary County for two years to allow daughter Kelli to graduate high school. Actually, Frank was her stepfather, but it was to she and Frank both a meaningless detail.
“My dad never called me his stepchild nor any the nine other kids he raised in his four marriages,” she said. Frank, Judy and Judy’s mother, Toni Dale, moved to Boundary County in 2002.
Judy became active in her church, the Crossroads Chapel, and forged several close friendships, especially Evelyn Rae and next door neighbor Lorna Martin (no relation to Kelli).
Frank focused his attention on making their new home more beautiful, planting more trees to complement the already lush forests surrounding the house, putting up a quaint white picket fence both for the aesthetics and for the safety of the pets and grandkids who visited often.
When Lorna’s husband, Joel Martin, made application for a special use permit to open Panhandle Kitchen & Door in 2005, a shop making cabinet doors and boxes from 6 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. in a 40- x 130-foot metal shop 20-feet off the Weston property line, the Weston family had no objection. They requested a privacy fence be installed and it was included in the permit as a condition, but it was never built and the Westons didn’t complain. In 2006, a county permit was issued allowing up to 10 employees and a pickup and trailer to haul their product.
Kelli moved to North Idaho in 2008 to be closer to her family, and she raised her four youngest children here. They were frequently at “grandma and papa’s home,” and Kelli came to look forward to the visits to see what Frank was working on.
“They picked this property because it was nestled in the trees and completely hidden except for their circle driveway,” Kelli said. “They remodeled the entire home and spent a lot of money upgrading the land with more trees and bushes along with roses and blooming cherry trees.”
Her grandmother died in 2012, having nearly reached the age of 90.
“My grandma was 89 when she passed away, “Kelli said. “Her sister is almost 100. The family lives for a long time on the female side.”
In 2017, Frank and Judy were at a Sandpoint restaurant where Frank fell and broke his femur. Joel and Lorna Martin divorced and put Panhandle Kitchen & Door up for sale. In 2018, Nelson Mast purchased Panhandle Kitchen & Door. Kelli, her dad getting around well using a walker, moved to Texas in August. In October, Jim Dewberry, his wife and two children moved to Bonners Ferry from Utah. After living in Bonners Ferry for a time, they closed on a property and moved to their new home on Pothole Road in the late summer of 2019, sure that God led them to the right place.
Panhandle Door and Drawer, now also known as Panhandle Door, Inc., or PDI, which adjoined their property, operated from 6:30 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. Monday through Friday and was barely noticed, though on occasion they burned waste … sometimes unintentionally. He overheard firefighters on one such occasion complain about the noxious gases. Before long, the fire department prohibited the burning of trash and waste materials, and issued notice they would no longer fight fires there due to the threat posed to firefighters.
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Neighbors then watched as waste, including chemical barrels and containers, MDF and plywood, was hauled to a low-lying area south of the shop and dumped in the area of the septic system. Soon, he said, truckloads of fill dirt from road and highway projects were being trucked in and dumped.
Settled in, Dewberry decided to give up life as a trucker. In August 2021 he accepted a job as shipping department leader at Panhandle Door & Drawer and soon learned that major changes were underway.
A swing shift was added from 2:30 to 11 p.m. and building expansion plans developed to bring the shop to about 22,000 square feet. The internal dust collection system was replaced with an external disposal system that neighbors say discharged unfiltered paint, dust and noxious chemicals from fan-forced vents on the side of the building.
After a year, Dewberry was promoted to production manager, overseeing a crew of 75. He advocated for safety gear to protect the workers and community, but he said the focus was on profit.
“I tried for the whole time I was there to get a dust collection table for this poor young man … who would spend all day sanding dried clear coat from drawer boxes,” he wrote in a zoning and health complaint sent to Panhandle Health District, Boundary County Commissioners, Boundary County Prosecuting Attorney, government leaders and Whom It May Concern in government on June 27, 2024. “His eyes would be completely red every day. God knows what his lungs must look like along with the condition of his hearing, with no respirator and no ear protection. I could not get his entrenched leaders to enforce the use of proper PPE … I was hamstrung to change requirements and systems to make things safer, due to the unwillingness for ownership to spend the money, and the unwillingness of the tenured and antagonistic leader of the Finish Department to make needed changes. His people were very unsafe in my opinion.”
By mutual agreement, his employment soon ended.
On August 27, 2022, Kelli came back to take care of her mom, who called and said she had stage four lung cancer.
“How?” Kelli thought. On arriving at her parents house, she couldn’t easily grasp what she was seeing.
“I was mortified when I saw the property and the huge building that now stood where I only used to see big, big trees,” she said. All the roses and blossoming cherry trees her father had so lovingly planted and nurtured were dead. A clearing of stumps and dead and dying trees extended in a straight line to the vents on the side of the massive new building.
She found her dad bedridden, on oxygen and drugged with heavy pain pills administered by her mom, not because he needed them, but because they kept him manageable. Her mom, healthy and active last time they said goodbye, died September 17, 2022, at 78 years old.
Kelli focused on restoring her father back to health.
“After my mom passed away and I had a host of VA people flooding the home to assist with getting my dad out of his state of living, he was able to stand at his kitchen sink and see for the first time the huge building standing where trees used to be,” Kelli said. “He cried when he took his first wheelchair ride to his front porch and felt the sun for the first time in years. Due to the overpowering smell of paint and lacquers, we would have to keep his time outside very short. He was the happiest I’ve seen him in years. He was free. He went for car rides and told all of the caregivers his adventures as a Sheriff. He even reconnected to his first wife, and they became ‘boyfriend and girlfriend.’ He passed away nine months after my mom.”
Her dad didn’t die of a broken heart as people suggested.
“Dad passed away after having a continuous cough. He had been breathing regular air, not oxygen, as when he was bedridden. Eight months of breathing the air and four months of a small irritation of a cough.”
At 88 years, storied lawman Frank Weston died July 7, 2023. The next morning, his first wife passed away. Jeff stayed on.
“Jeff Love was a brother any person would dream to have,” Kelli said. “He moved here just to help me with dad. If he hadn’t come here, he would be alive. That weighs on my heart so much. My daughter Emma looked up to him more like a dad than an uncle. She called him jokingly ‘uncle-dad.’ Her online school always thought he was such an involved dad. He whistled every morning, coming up the stairs to have coffee. It was such a delight.”
Having arrived in January, 2023, and helped remodel the house to accommodate Frank’s wheelchair, cut firewood and more, Jeff Love, a former soldier and Iron Man competitor who loved hiking, developed a cough. Just 57 years old, he died May 26, 2024. Then the family pets began falling sick, afflicted with lesions and tumors worse than any he’d seen, her vet told Kelly. Soon all six family dogs had died or been put down as well as several cats. Other cats just disappeared, likely having crawled off to die on their own.
On March 11, a formal complaint was filed over the increase in the number of employees and county planning staff, pulling the original special use permit issued in 2005, issued a notice of possible violation for the increase in vehicle traffic and the expansion of operating hours. Mast said he’d met with zoning administrator John Moss regarding the original permit at the time of the sale and been told that as long as the type of manufacturing hadn’t changed, the permit remained valid, but pursuant to provisions of the ordinance now in effect, he submitted conditional use permit application 24-0076 to reflect the growth, to reduce nighttime noise and to slow truck traffic on Pothole Road.
“I do not believe we are creating any adverse conditions on the surrounding land uses,” Mast wrote. “The fact that we are and have been operating at this location since 2005 is proof of this. We have not placed an unfair burden on local taxpayer or the community. On the contrary I believe we are an asset to this community. Both through job creation and as a way to bring additional revenue to our community.”
On July 5, the Boundary County Planning and Zoning Commission voted unanimously to approve the application.
The decision was appealed twice; by Don Jordan and Kathy Konek, who own property on Pothole Road as well as the road itself and who sold Frank Weston the property that was to be his haven, and Kelly Martin, Jeffery Steinborn and Jim Dewberry, all of whom live on Pothole Road and in close proximity to PDI, whose 58-page complaint lays out in detail how much they’ve lost and what they’ve endured thanks to the notion prevalent as pertains to Boundary County Planning and Zoning, “it’s better to ask forgiveness than seek permission.”
Many of the issues raised are similar to those heard at any number of land use hearings, but seldom is the evidence so compelling. Three people in the house closest to the facility dead with similar respiratory symptoms, all consistent with the effects of exposure to chemicals commonly used in the manufacture of cabinetry. Dead pets, dead trees marking unmistakable arrows pointing to the source of their demise, vents just above head level blowing unfiltered noxious chemicals straight out at homes and families just yards away. In August, after his permit was approved, Mast installed towers to elevate the point of discharge, and nearby residents say air quality has improved. But it’s still blowing out unfiltered, just at a higher elevation. The fumes are traveling a little farther, coming down a little more dissipated.
Two more in the same family, one just 18 years old, are now exhibiting the very symptoms they watched claim the lives of loved ones they lost. They can’t sell, and so can’t move. All they can do is pray.
“Our neighbors recently sold their residential property for roughly 50-percent of its value due to the presence of the subject business and their operations,” Dewberry wrote. “I have had people tell me they would not buy property nor live near the subject business, due to the hazards and nuisances resulting from their operations. We are working to gather written statements from professionals to attest the obvious adverse economic impact the subject business is having on us neighbors. Furthermore, we ask that you deny any permits for continued operation and/or expansion of the nonconforming and illegal operations of the business. This neighborhood did not agree to the expansion they have done for years far beyond what was agreed to by the community when it was permitted for a small mom & pop size business with little to none of the adverse conditions currently existing. All the legacy properties and many of the owners were here long before this business and the current owners. The subject business has been in violation of their original conditional use permit for years. Despite our complaints, this activity has been allowed to continue. We ask that you not reward them for their apparent unlawful behavior by giving them a new conditional use permit to cover up their illegal activity.”
County Commissioners will hold public hearing on these appeals at 6:30 p.m. Wednesday, October 9, in the Becker Auditorium at Bonners Ferry High School, 6485 Tamarack Lane. All interested are encouraged to attend and to testify, for, against or uncommitted.
Wow! This is the most baseless, piece of trash I have ever read on 9B News
The Wood pile pictured, was taken Years ago, all the Wood has chipped into sawdust and did Not contain any hazardous material.
No Hazardous Material has been dumped anywhere on the property
Any Hazardous by-products are, per DEQ, properly stored and hauled off by a certified company
The lot is a certified drop site for fill dirt. The State of Idaho brought in the fill dirt.
Absolutely None of the vents from the Paint Shop are unfiltered. All vents meet The State of Idaho DEQ requirements
All employees are outfitted with PPE when appropriate.
When standing in the Pan Handle Door parking lot, the Hwy noise usually drowns out any production noise.
Many Frivolous complaints have been filed with DEQ, and Pan Handle Door has been cleared every time
All the properties on Pot Hole Rd are Zoned AG/Forestry.
None of the neighboring properties are zoned residential and never have been zoned as residential.
Pan Handle Door qualifies for manufacturing under this zoning ordinance.
There are so many false accusations, flat out lies, in this article it could be used as evidence in a defamation law suit.
In future when writing this type of article it would be beneficial to your credibility and the credibility of your publication to do a little research.
Maybe contact Pan Handle Door for comment.
Maybe just maybe use Facts inside hearsay.
PDI was given 11 DEQ violations this year alone. That picture of the toxic waste material was taken on July 19th of this year. The waste material contains formaldehyde that creates a leachate. Leachate is harmful to health and the ecosystem. PDI has also been blowing Gas that contains Volatile Organic Coimpounds directly at the property just to the north. The gas emitted is known to cause a multitude of health issues to include cancer. If they weren’t in the wrong then why were they in a hurry to build the stacks. The unpermitted septic. Unpermitted building. Unpermitted approach off the highway. Pot Hole Rd is not designed for commercial use. Idaho Transportation Department does not favor the conditional use permit due to public safety concerns. Nelson Mast failed to obtain the proper permits when he decided to add another 22,000 sq ft on to the existing building. He is now racing to become compliant. His actions constitute gross negligence. He displayed a reckless disregard for the safety of others, including his own employees. A real failure to exercise even the slightest amount of care or diligence for those who resided next to his facility and their property. He committed a conscious violation of the rights of their neighbors and employees. He also threatened to move PDI out of the county if he doesn’t get his way.
Shame on you Mike Weland….You should have fact checked, called or came out to visit our site. We would have given you a tour of our facility, you could have seen for yourself the dust collection system our paint shop venting systems, the fill the State of Idaho actually permitted us to bring in. You would have seen the road in to PDI that is strictly maintained by PDI. Not to mention the 65 employees that work their tails off day in and day out to make an amazing product that make many Cabinet companies right here locally very successful, as well as supporting their families. I personally knew the Weston’s, I have been in that home sat by Frank’s bedside as he was bedridden for years and years. Judy actually contacted my husband who sat and visited with Frank many times about the health of the trees around their home and the need for their own safety to remove the dead and dying. Mind you the dead and dying were dying due to bug infestation or other deceases know to trees in our area. Due to all the complaints from this group of people we have seen more DEQ and state reps in the last few months than most businesses see in a lifetime. All whom gave us a thumbs up for the way we operate and precautions we take every day to ensure the safety of not only our neighbors but most importantly our employees, the folks like myself that come here everyday to be in a safe and healthy work environment. Due you really think PDI is out to hurt folks let alone kill them??? Come on Mike you really should have done your homework before sharing something that could be so devastating to one of the best places to work in this county.
The full evidence is on P & Z website. Compliance is only happening because the State was called to investigate.
There is an open ongoing investigation from January 2023 from the State Fire Marshal. The evidence is overwhelming of negligence and the four open paint booths with violations have been off gassing directly to employees. Look up Volatile Organic Compounds (VOCS).
Instead of defending the company, I would look into being tested in Spokane for VOCs. The toxicologist will tell you that VOC vapors can harm you yet not show impact for years depending on a person’s health, age and length of time to the exposure.
As a caregiver for Judy and Frank since 2022, I nor my staff has ever seen you or your husband at the Weston home. We are assuming you visited between 2019- early 2022 before Judy became ill?
In fact, Judy told me that her trees were cut down by the business next door accidentally.
Mr. Weston was using a wheelchair and leaving his home with his daughter and grandkids for appointments in 2023 so don’t paint the picture so bleak if you were not in the home to witness Frank standing or exercising with our PT, OT, and care staff.
All of us involved in his care take your comments seriously. All of the staff complained about the heavy paint smell in the Weston home and our cars that set for our seven hour shifts.
Imagine that two people who do business at panhandle are upset of the outcome of a company who just in the past few months started covering their wrong doings. No obviously PDI isn’t out there to hurt anybody or cause any harm however mistakes and accidents happen and it’s HOW you handle those mistakes and accidents that matter.
Also don’t speak for the dead when they can’t comment on a situation ..
I hope that panhandle realizes the community’s concern of toxic fumes and if your employees are around that stuff everyday I would assume you guys have an AMAZING solid health benefits for them since you know you guys care so much about safety. Understand not only is it concerning to residents but past employees.
The waste material has been found to contain formaldehyde that will create a leachate that directly contaminates the surrounding soil. that The The leachate poses a serious problem for the ecosystem and is harmful to our health. That picture was taken on July 19th of this year.
PDI engaged in willful off gassing of toxic gasses containing volatile organic compounds directly onto the property direclty to the north od PDI.
The chemicals being used are known to cause cancer if inhaled. This is off their own SDS sheets.
PDI did not use any filters that are required.
PDI did not use chimney stacks that are required. PDI did not have sealed booths for the application of the paint and lacquers as required.
These are just some of the 11 DEQ violations. The stacks were quickly installed in an attempt to cover up their negligence.
Both Maverick Ln and Pot Hole Rd are not permitted for commercial use. Idaho Transportation Department does not favor any conditional use permit due to the public safety concerns regarding the traffic on hwy 95. There needs to be a turn lane onto a commercially permitted approach. These are just some of the issues that should have been addressed prior to adding on the 22,000 sg ft without any permits. Hiring all the emoyees and subjecting them to unsafe conditions.
This is gross negligence. This is a reckless disregard for the safety of others, including their own employees.
A failure to exercise even the slightest amount of care or diligence for those who resided next to his facility or their property.
No one is against a business that employs those who live in the county. It is the American way. The problem is that this terrible situation was created because someone failed to do the right thing. One way or the other, people have suffered.
I have heard the recorded conversation where Nelson Mast blames his employees for the negligence of PDI. That he didn’t know what he was doing and trusted his employees. He blamed the county. He blamed the contractors who built the addition without the required state permits. He blamed KG&T for the unpermitted leech lines. He blames the neighbors. He has not accepted any responsibility. He has presented false claims at public hearings.