DENVER — The loose change arrived in a steel box on a flatbed truck – $23,500 in quarters, dimes, nickels and pennies – totaling 6,500 pounds – the box needed a forklift to deliver it all – only attorney Danielle Beem wasn't about to accept it.
"In our pleadings we called it the figurative middle finger," she said.
The piggy bank-busting tonnage of change is the latest chapter in a business dispute between two Northern Colorado welders.
Fire Up Fabrication sued JMF Enterprises last summer, alleging JMF did not pay them for work they did building metal handrails and stairs (JMF's owner counters the work wasn't up to par).
The case didn't seem like it would add up to much. The two parties agreed to settle the case for the aforementioned $23,500, but their agreement did not stipulate how the money should be paid.
"We tried to leave flexibility for the defendant," Beem said. "Coins were not something that we’d ever anticipated."
Coins, however, were what she received. Loose coins; JMF Enterprises had apparently taken them out of the boxes and rolls they arrived in.
"I'm just trying to pay a bill," said JD Frank, the owner of JMF Enterprises. "At the end of the day, it is U.S. currency."
Beem doesn't feel the same way. "At first I thought 'You've got to be kidding me,'" she said. "And then we had to go through the logistics."
She said her bank, her client's bank and the defendant's bank all said they couldn't accept the coins. She considered a grocery-store coin counter, but they couldn't handle the volume and charge a significant fee.
Beem refused to accept delivery. "In our pleadings we called it the figurative middle finger," she said.
But as the saying goes – in for a penny, in for 6,500 pounds of pennies – JMF Enterprises is doubling down. It argues in court filings that the coins are the "current coin of the realm" and constitute legal "tender of the settlement funds."
"Just to acquire the money took effort. But then to open them all up and dump them into a container, that is not just trying to pay a bill," Beem said. "I think it's just very petty."
Late Monday, a Larimer County judge agreed with Beem and ordered JMF Enterprises to pay in a more traditional method, like a check.
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