CARMEL – The town was the highest bidder at the Tuesday auction of a 75-acre parcel owned by a selectwoman and her husband.

Carmel offered $40,000 for the land owned by Earle and Glennis McSorley. Sharrlyn Parson of Carmel submitted the only other bid. A longtime friend of the McSorleys bid $1 for the land.

Later Tuesday, Parson questioned Town Manager Tom Richmond’s authority to make the $40,000 bid because the money wasn’t appropriated at town meeting or voted on by selectmen.

Richmond verified Tuesday afternoon that the town had submitted the high bid. Richmond refused to answer further questions on the advice of the town’s attorney, he said.

The Board of Selectmen voted in July to ask the Penobscot County Sheriff’s Department to conduct the unusual auction in an effort to collect $35,000 in court-imposed fines the McSorleys owe the town. Selectwoman Glennis McSorley attended that meeting but did not vote on the matter.

More than 130 Carmel voters signed a petition submitted to selectmen Monday night asking that the board call a special town meeting to vote on a proposed settlement to the 12-year-old dispute over gravel pits along the Horseback Road. Selectmen accepted the petitions, but did not act on them.

Petition circulators proposed that the town recognize that Earle McSorley has rendered “that portion of the Horseback Road which passes through his property safe for travel” once he has installed a guard rail. In return, the petitioners proposed that the town drop its efforts to collects attorneys’ fees or fines from the McSorleys and return their property.

The complicated dispute began in 1989 when the town first notified gravel pit owners about concerns that excavation had encroached on the road. Four years later, selectmen voted to close the Horseback Road and took the three owners – McSorley, Donald Hewes and Barry Higgins – to court.

Last year, Justice Andrew Mead of Penobscot County Superior Court ruled that the three owners were in contempt of the court’s previous order to fill in the pits. Early this year, the judge determined that McSorley was the only owner who had the resources to complete the job and pay the $50-per-day fee that had mounted for each defendant.

Mead’s ruling led to the July decision to sell the land through the sheriff’s department, whose civil duties included such sales on the behalf of municipalities.

The McSorleys’ attorney, A.J Greif, said Tuesday that he is asking the Maine Supreme Judicial Court to rule the sale invalid because Earle McSorley was not personally notified of the sale as the statute required.

“If the voters show some sense,” he said, referring to the solution proposed in the petition, “the town could put an end to their attorneys’ fees and the sale of the land would mean nothing.”