Longtime Box Butte County Medical Doctor John Ruffing officially retired Thursday, December 27, 2012, after 51 years of practicing Medicine in Hemingford, and St. Joseph’s and Box Butte General Hospitals in Alliance.

The public is invited to an Open House Sunday, January 6, from 2-4 p.m., at the St. Bridget Parish Hall in Hemingford to commemorate his retirement and to say “thank you” for a life well lived, a job well done, and a community well served.

Dr. Ruffing graduated from Loma Linda School of Medicine, Loma Linda, CA.

Dr. Ruffing has been practicing at the Hemingford Clinic since 1961.

Attorneys for the Rushville Volunteer Fire Department and Sheridan County Sheriff Terry Robbins have filed responses in a civil suit blaming them and others of negligently setting a grass fire last spring that burned a man in the border town of Whiteclay.

Bryan Bluebird, an Oglala Sioux Tribe member who lives in South Dakota on the adjacent Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, suffered burns over 25% of his body in the March 6 fire.

He’s seeking unspecified damages from Sheridan County, the fire department, the village of Rushville and various elected officials including Robbins for medical costs, loss of earning capacity and pain and suffering.

His attorney, Tom White of Omaha, has said Bluebird — an Army veteran who worked laying cinder blocks, branding cattle and fixing cars — has undergone several surgeries and skin grafts with some of his fingers fused together.

The prescribed burn in a grass field on the edge of Whiteclay was planned to reduce the threat of an uncontrolled wildfire later in the year. Bluebird says he was asleep in the field and awoke as the fire burned his hands, face, left leg, lower back and abdomen.

His lawsuit alleges that the fire department and others were negligent by failing to spot him before they started the fire, and by igniting it on a dangerously windy day.

In their court filings in response to the suit, Rushville and Sheridan County officials argue that Bluebird’s injuries were caused by his own negligence, and that they can’t be held liable for “simple or ordinary negligence” because they were acting within the scope of their duties as firefighters and public safety officials.

Attorney Jeffrey Nix wrote that “the alleged harm was not due to the volunteers’ willful or criminal misconduct, gross negligence, reckless misconduct or a conscience, flagrant indifference of the rights or safety” of Bluebird.

Whiteclay…an unincorporated community of about a dozen residents…has been the subject of heated debate for years because its 4 stores with beer licenses sell the equivalent of more than 4-million cans of beer each year, most of it to residents of the officially dry reservation.

Some of those who buy beer there go to the field that was burned to drink or to sleep after drinking, but Bluebird insists he had not been drinking.

In February, the Oglala Sioux Tribe filed a half-billion dollar lawsuit against the 4 Whiteclay stores and the brewers and distributors who service them…arguing they sold alcohol to Pine Ridge residents, knowing they would consume and resell it illegally on the reservation.

Bluebird wasn’t involved in that lawsuit and said he doesn’t blame the beer stores for his injuries, but activists who have tried to limit alcohol sales in Whiteclay say such a case was inevitable, given the number of people who loiter around the stores and sleep in nearby fields.

     Slipping in just ahead of the Christmas holiday, Nebraska State Auditor Mike Foley released his fiscal year 2012 audit of the Nebraska State College System last Friday…including conclusions to the response from the NSCS and Chadron State College to the highly critical report he issued back in February over the financial irregularities in the CSC athletic department that led to an NCAA investigation.

Foley says the college and NSCS implemented quite a few of the recommendations his office made, but considers many of them pending and not settled because the NCAA investigation is continuing…with follow-ups to be made in next year’s audit since the NCAA is scheduled to take final action in February.

At the heart of both the NCAA investigation and Foley’s critical earlier report are secret checking accounts set up by former football coach Bill O’Boyle outside the Chadron State Foundation to handle donations from a golf tournament and one set up back in the 1970s for concession sales.

In his February report, Foley cited weak overall accounting procedures in the athletic department, a lack of institutional control, insufficient training of athletic department personnel on NCAA compliance rules, insufficient documentation for the secret accounts, and the release of confidential information before it was made public.

The latter issue was the hiring by the NSCS and CSC of outside firms to do an initial forensic accounting investigation of the secret accounts, then to work with the NCAA investigation on possible rules violations. Foley objected to both the hiring process…done without a Request for Proposal…and to the NCAA-required secret nature of the investigation.

Among the changes made since the critical report that won a thumbs-up from Foley in the new audit are the hiring of a business officer to oversee athletic department finances and a full-time NCAA compliance officer, processing and recording concession sales through the state college computer system, and a review by all 3 state colleges of athletic department policies and procedures.

Foley also recommended that all student organizations maintain their own bank accounts outside the college and college foundation for fundraising or other activities. His new report says that as of October, only 3 of 38 CSC groups had moved their accounts off campus. 25 still had account balances with the foundation and 10 had no funds in their foundation accounts.

State College System Chancellor Stan Carpenter says in response to Foley’s new audit that Chadron State has made “considerable progress” in tightening up its athletic and financial situation, adding that the college and the NSCS “reacted reasonably quickly last year” when the secret accounts came to light and made “made major changes at the college to make sure this wouldn’t happen again.”

The NCAA issued a Notice of Allegations in mid-September following the joint investigation by Chadron State and the NCAA enforcement staff. The college had until last Monday…December 17…to submit its written response, and is expected to present an institutional response at hearing before the NCAA Committee on Infractions when the panel meets in late February.

      A wildlife biologists says endangered black-footed ferrets have been spotted on the Standing Rock Indian Reservation in South Dakota, raising hopes that a new wild colony has been found.

The black-footed ferret…the only ferret native to North America…was thought extinct until a single colony was found in Wyoming 30 years ago, but Standing Rock Sioux tribal biologist Barry Betts  tells the Sioux Falls Argus Leader (http://argusne.ws/UuIF0w) he thinks the adult ferret and two juveniles photographed near Mobridge may be the second native wild colony.

The U-S Fish and Wildlife Service began reintroducing ferrets into the wild in the early 1990s, including on U-S Forest Service land in the Conata Basin adjacent to Badlands National Park and the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, and Pete Gober…coordinator of the national ferret recovery program…believes the Standing Rock ferrets have simply migrated there from another site in South Dakota.

Gober says researchers are always encouraged by the possibility of a long-lost colony of ferrets, but in over 3 decades of searching in South Dakota, none has ever panned out. He thinks these ferrets probably came from a release site on the Cheyenne River Reservation.

Betts says he’s agreed to disagree with Gober on the point, with both men waiting for the Standing Rock tribe to trap some of the ferrets and draw blood for DNA testing while checking for the chips implanted in some released animals.

Both Gober and Betts say the benefits would be enormous if there really is a new wild colony. That’s because all the existing black-footed ferrets…both those released into the wild and those still in captivity…are all from the single colony found near Meteetsee, Wyoming.

A new colony would allow researchers to add a new source of genetic material to diversify the ferret’s genome, giving the species a better chance of adapting and surviving in the wild.

Black-footed ferrets were among the first animals placed on the federal endangered species list in 1967. A captive breeding program has been successful, but although 3,000 have been released into the wild at 19 different sites, federal wildlife officials estimate there are fewer than 500 breeding adults now in the wild.

South Dakota alone had about 500 breeding adults in 2008, but since then plague has hit both the ferrets and the prairie dogs that make up the bulk of their diet. Only about 150-to-200 breeding adults are now thought to be in the state.

The Fish and Wildlife Service announced a proposed new interagency “safe harbor” plan that encourages landowners, tribes and state agencies to allow ferret reintroduction on their land and refrain from shooting or poisoning prairie dogs there in return for easing rules to kill nuisance prairie dogs elsewhere on their property.

Safe harbor participants would also be released from liability under the Endangered Species Act with “no future regulatory restrictions…imposed or commitments required” unless the landowners are deliberately killing ferrets. Public comment on the plan is being taken through January 18th.

On the state level, the South Dakota Department of Game, Fish and Parks has a program that pays ranchers in some counties to preserve prairie dog habitat and to refrain from killing prairie dogs.

As for the Standing Rock ferrets…first spotted Halloween night…Barry Betts says the search has switched to daytime surveys because it’s easier to see the telltale trenches formed in the snow when ferrets hunt prairie dogs.

He’s hoping to land some federal grants to help the tribe develop a management plan, and he wants to relocate the ferrets to a safer prairie dog town…saying there’s “a lot of work ahead” in the next two years.

The first 11 months of calendar year 2012 have been busy ones for Box Butte General Hospital in Alliance.

Statistics provided by the hospital’s marketing department reveal that between January 1 and November 30, there were a total of 77 babies born at BBGH.

There were also 762 inpatients that received care and 52,237 outpatients.

2,172 dialysis treatments were conducted, and 22,365 rehab treatments also took place.

The hospital’s fitness center received 7,471 visits, and there were 311 blood donations.

The hospital also provided just under $70,000 in community benefits.

As of December 14, the hospital employed 269 people.

At a recent board of trustees meeting the financial statements also looked impressive, year-to-date assets increasing by $342,000.

The latest architectural plans for the hospital’s planned expansion were also revealed to the trustees (shown below).

Viewers of Denver’s KUSA-TV 9 News learned on Christmas Eve about a Chadron teacher and school administrator who received a new kidney earlier this month from his son.

Earl McConnell…a former Rushville High school basketball coach who’s been an administrator at Loneman School on the Pine Ridge Reservation the last few years…was told a decade ago that his kidneys would eventually fail, and they finally did just over a year ago.

That began a search for a donor that saw one of McConnell’s sons prove not to be a match, but son Justin turned out to be both a perfect match and eager to help his dad.

The doctors said he needed to improve his own health a little…including losing some weight…before he could donate, leading to several months of preparation before the doctors at Porter Adventist Hospital in Denver finally gave the ok.

The McConnells and wife and mother Shelby…who works at the Chadron Medical Clinic…headed down to Denver earlier this month with two younger children remaining behind in Chadron.

The double surgery proved to be successful with both father and son coming through with flying colors. Justin told the Channel 9 reporter that while everybody kept telling him he was a hero for donating a kidney to his father, he just did what he knew his dad would do for him. Earl disagreed, calling his son “an amazing individual.”

The McConnells celebrated Christmas staying with friends in the Denver area, their first Christmas away from Chadron, waiting for the doctors to say it’s alright to go home. They hope to get that news next week.