A8
BUSINESS
East Oregonian
Saturday, January 19, 2019
Five Star Car
Wash opens
By JAYATI
RAMAKRISHNAN
East Oregonian
The owners of a Herm-
iston car wash have started
a second one on the oppo-
site side of town. Five Star
Car Wash is now open, and
is located at the corner of
Southwest 11th Street and
West Highland Avenue,
near a cluster of new
businesses.
Todd Perkins, who
owns the business with
Hermiston native Russ
Greene, said they had been
looking to expand for a
few months. They run the
Five Star Auto Wash, near
Hermiston’s Wal-Mart on
the northeast side of town.
“This side of town
doesn’t have much,” he
said.
The car wash officially
opened on Wednesday, and
Perkins said as of now, they
are open from 8 a.m. to
5 p.m. Hours will expand
as the days get longer.
Perkins said the car
wash has some new
amenities that aren’t avail-
able at their other loca-
tion. Customers using
the self-wash station now
have access to dryers and
“triple-shine” conditioner,
which gives the car a
colorful shine.
The tunnel car wash
Staff photo by
Jayati Ramakrishnan
Todd Perkins is one of the
owners of Five Star Car
Wash, which just opened
on Southwest 11th Street
and Highland Avenue.
also has some new LED
lights that create a show as
cars get washed.
“It looks like a curtain
of lava,” Perkins said.
Perkins said he and
Greene previously owned
Five Star Auto Sales,
which they recently sold to
Toyota.
“We always needed
to wash our cars, and we
would always see the land
(by Wal-Mart),” he said.
“The location was so
good, we decided to start
washing them.”
The business is located
at 1180 West Highland
Ave.
Town & Country
tickets now on sale
HEPPNER
—
A
discount
is
available
for those who purchase
advance tickets for the
Heppner Chamber of
Commerce’s annual Town
& Country Community
Awards banquet.
With a theme of “An
Evening with the Stars,”
the event is Thursday, Feb.
7 at 6 p.m. at the Morrow
County Fairgrounds, in
Heppner. A catered meal by
Alvin Liu of Gateway Cafe
features prime rib with au
jus, creamy garlic mashed
potatoes, green beans in
garlic sauce, garden salad,
dessert and a beverage.
Tickets purchased prior
to Feb. 4 are $25 each.
They are available at
Bank of Eastern Oregon,
city of Heppner, Commu-
nity Bank, the Heppner
chamber and Murray’s
Drug. If available, tickets
will be sold after that date
and at the door for $30.
For more informa-
tion or to reserve a large
table, call the chamber at
541-676-5536.
AP Photo/Jessica Hill, File
In this Aug. 17, 2018, file photo, Stamford Police stand outside the headquarters of Purdue Pharma, which is owned by the
Sackler family, in Stamford, Conn.
Lawsuits ramp up pressure on
family that owns opioid company
Suit aims to hold
drug industry
accountable for
crisis in the U.S.
By GEOFF MULVIHILL
Associated Press
The legal pressure on the
prominent family behind
the company that makes
OxyContin, the prescrip-
tion painkiller that helped
fuel the nation’s opioid
epidemic, is likely to get
more intense.
The Sackler family came
under heavy scrutiny this
week when a legal filing in a
Massachusetts case asserted
that family members and
company executives sought
to push prescriptions of the
drug and downplay its risks.
Those revelations are likely
to be a preview of the claims
in a series of expanding
legal challenges.
Members of the family
that controls Connecti-
cut-based Purdue Pharma
are also defendants in a
lawsuit brought by New
York’s Suffolk County. Few,
if any, other governments
have sued the family so far.
But Paul Hanly, a lawyer
representing the county, said
he expects to add the Sack-
lers to other opioid suits.
He explained last year that
he was targeting the family,
known for its donations to
some of the world’s great
museums and universities,
in part because they took
“tens of billions” of dollars
out of Purdue Pharma.
Looming as potentially
the biggest legal and finan-
cial risk for the family is
a massive consolidated
federal case playing out in
Ohio.
More than 1,000 govern-
ment entities have sued
Purdue, along with other
drugmakers and distrib-
utors, claiming they are
partly culpable for a drug
overdose crisis that resulted
in a record 72,000 deaths in
2017. The majority of those
deaths were from legal or
illicit opioids.
The company documents
at the heart of the Massa-
chusetts claims also could
be evidence in the Ohio
lawsuits, which are being
overseen by a federal judge.
The allegations ramp up
pressure on the industry
— and perhaps the Sack-
lers — to reach a settle-
ment, said Paul Nolette, a
political science professor
at Marquette University
who studies the role of state
attorneys general.
Having Sackler family
members named as defen-
dants in Massachusetts
“indicates that the govern-
ment attorneys believe they
have the ‘smoking guns’
necessary to broaden the
potential liability of those at
the top of the organization,”
he said in an email.
The allegations could
tarnish a name that is
best known for its gener-
osity to museums world-
It’s time to
GET OUT
and GO!
On the road to make an affordable car, Tesla cuts jobs
Associated Press
PALO ALTO — Tesla
will cut 7 percent of its
workforce as it tries to lower
prices and break out of the
niche-car market to produce
an electric vehicle that more
people can afford.
Tesla’s cheapest model
right now is the $44,000
Model 3, and it needs to
broaden its customer base to
survive.
“Looking ahead at our
mission of accelerating the
advent of sustainable trans-
port and energy, which is
important for all life on
Earth, we face an extremely
difficult challenge: making
our cars, batteries and solar
products cost-competitive
with fossil fuels,” CEO Elon
Musk said in a letter to staff.
“While we have made great
progress, our products are
still too expensive for most
people.”
Tesla had boosted its
payroll significantly to meet
production goals, but then
cut its staff by 9 percent in
June. The company deliv-
ered more than 245,000
electric cars and SUVs last
year, nearly as many as all
previous years combined.
But it still fell far short
of a goal set nearly three
years ago of manufacturing
500,000 vehicles for the year.
Musk said in October
that Tesla Inc., based in Palo
Alto, California, had 45,000
employees. The 7 percent cut
would mean that about 3,150
people will lose their jobs.
Tesla posted a $311
million quarterly profit in
October, only its third profit-
able quarter in eight years as
a public company.
Musk acknowledged that
the profit was driven by its
ability to sell higher priced
vehicles in North America.
Tesla dominates that market,
but it wants to make electric
vehicles for the masses.
It has been Tesla’s long-
held goal to get a less-expen-
sive, mid-range Tesla Model
3 on the road.
Shares
tumbled
11
percent Friday.
wide including New York’s
Metropolitan Museum of
Art, which has a Sackler
wing, and London’s Tate
Modern. The Sackler name
also is on a gallery at the
Smithsonian, a wing of
galleries at London’s Royal
Academy of Arts and a
museum at Beijing’s Peking
University.
The
fami-
ly’s best known and most
generous donor, Arthur
M. Sackler, died nearly a
decade before OxyContin
was released.
The
Cleveland-based
judge, Dan Polster, has
been pushing for a settle-
ment since he took over the
federal cases a year ago,
arguing that the parties
involved should find ways
to end this man-made
crisis, rather than hold years
of trials. A court order
prohibits participants from
discussing most aspects of
settlement talks publicly.
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