Second of two-part series

CARMEL – A Superior Court justice will decide if a petition-driven article that could end a long-standing legal dispute will be placed on the town warrant and put before voters at the annual town meeting March 4. Penobscot County Superior Court Justice Jeffrey Hjelm said Wednesday that he would rule on the matter by the end of the week, so that the warrant could be completed by the Feb. 25 deadline.

Sharrlyn Parsons and Earle McSorley are asking the court to order the Board of Selectmen to overturn its Dec. 17 decision not to place an article on the warrant presented to it by petition. The proposed article, in essence, would settle the town’s 9-year-old lawsuit with McSorley over gravel pits he owns on the Horseback Road.

The town contends that the gravel pits made the road unsafe for travel and that McSorley failed to take required action to make the road safe. The proposed article does not address how the town should deal with Barry Higgins and Donald Hewes, the other pit owners named in the 1993 lawsuit.

Parsons presented the petition to the board at an Oct. 29 selectmen’s meeting and proposed that the town recognize that if Earle McSorley put in a guardrail the road would be safe. In return, the petitioners proposed that the town drop its efforts to collect attorneys’ fees or fines from the McSorleys and return a parcel of their property the town acquired. Earle McSorley is married to Glennis McSorley, a former town manager and current selectman.

Town Attorney Greg Cunningham of Portland argued that the judge should deny Parsons’ and McSorley’s request because it was filed late; that the pair does not have standing to bring such a suit; that they could have petitioned a notary public to call a town meeting; and that the petition is illegal because it would force the town to return property without being compensated and would relieve the McSorleys but not the other pit owners of court-imposed fines.

Attorney A.J. Greif of Bangor countered that the primary issue before the court was who had the final say in town affairs – the selectmen or the voters. He argued that selectmen should honor the petitions, place the article on the warrant, and, if it passed, then ask the court to rule on its legality.

A divisive issue

The courtroom reflected how divisive the gravel pit issue has become in the town of 2,416 people. Selectmen Doug Small, John Luce and Jay Deane sat on one side of the courtroom while on the other sat Parsons, McSorley and their supporters, including two candidates running against incumbents Deane and Suzan Rudnicki for Board of Selectmen on March 2.

Parsons, Robert Pelletier, a member of the town budget committee, and others have formed the Carmel Citizens for Responsible Government Committee. The group is campaigning for Ted Johns and Colby Palmer who were in the courtroom Wednesday. They are offering rides to the polls and assistance with absentee balloting, and are urging residents to attend the informational meeting and candidates forum at 7 p.m. today at Carmel Elementary School.

The group opposes the plan to borrow $125,000 to lower the Horseback Road and fill in the pits as a solution to the problem. Its flier claims if the Horseback Road proposal along with a re-evaluation plan are approved, the municipal budget alone would be $1.2 million and would increase taxes between $1.50 and $2 per $1,000 assessed valuation.

Figures published in the town report state that selectmen are recommending a $901,000 budget including $25,000 for the Horseback Road project. The budget committee’s recommendation is $876,000 because it issued no recommendation on the selectmen’s gravel pit plan, although Pelletier claimed it originally was rejected by the committee and should have gone into the report as “not recommended” by the budget committee.

Glennis McSorley, who handles most issues for the couple due to her husband’s age and severe hearing loss, now works part time in the Etna town office. She and the couple’s supporters said in separate interviews that town officials were conducting a “vendetta” against her and her family. Neither Glennis McSorley, Parsons nor Pelletier, whose son is married to the McSorleys’ daughter, explained why or how such a “vendetta” began.

Selectmen and Town Manager Tom Richmond denied there was a “vendetta” and said that the goal was to find a way to reopen the Horseback Road once it is deemed safe for travel and to end costly litigation over the gravel pits once and for all. Richmond said that if the warrant is passed as proposed, the Horseback Road could be reopened as early as September, in time for school buses to use it for the first time in almost 10 years.

Small said last week that he had hoped that once the pit owners complied with the court order and the road was reopened, voters would be asked at a town meeting to forgive the court-imposed fines. He added that, like Glennis McSorley, he abstained from voting on the proposal to borrow money to fix the Horseback Road. “I think the people who caused the problem should fix the problem,” he said.

McSorley ‘vs.’ Richmond

Public tensions between former Town Manager Glennis McSorley and the current town manager have been building since her election to the Board of Selectmen. In December, she was the lone dissenter in a vote to renew Richmond’s contract for another year. At most meetings, McSorley sits directly across the table from Richmond. She takes copious notes, asks very specific questions and questions Richmond’s bookkeeping methods, which are different from hers.

Every audit of the town’s finances for the past decade, however, found that the town was in compliance with standard practices and state law. Certified public accountant Bruce Fowle of Bangor, who has performed the town’s annual audit since 1992, said Monday that both McSorley and Richmond had figures readily available for him, but she kept them manually and Richmond keeps them on a computer.

McSorley also has questioned Richmond’s choice of town attorneys, the Portland-based firm Bernstein, Shur, Sawyer & Nelson. When given a breakdown last month of the more than $64,000 spent last year on legal fees, more than half of it to defend the town against her discrimination suit, McSorley quipped that her lawyer had cost only $18,000 and she’d won. Selectmen quickly reminded her that no one had “won” because the case had been settled, and the town was reimbursed all but about $1,400 by its insurance company. The net result, according to the audit, was that about $35,000 went to pay legal fees in 2001.

Legal fees on the gravel pit lawsuits continue to mount, according to town documents. Since 1993, the year the first suit over the Horseback Road was filed, Carmel has spent almost $116,000 on legal fees. That figure includes McSorley’s discrimination suit, the gravel pit suits and other legal matters. During those years, voters approved budgets that included a total of $80,000 for legal fees within the administration budget. Richmond is quick to remind selectmen that once the gravel pit lawsuit is closed, the town will be reimbursed most of its legal fees by its insurance company.

While this may seem like the usual pot of simmering small-town politics, tensions among McSorley, her fellow selectmen and the town boiled over in late October at the sale by the Penobscot County Sheriff’s Department of a 75-acre parcel that had belonged to Glennis McSorley’s parents. It is one of 10 parcels owned individually or jointly by the couple in Carmel. The parcel borders Route 2 and the Irish Road and is not the property where the gravel pits are located.

Selectmen in August turned to an old and little-used state statute to sell the land in an effort to collect the mounting court-imposed fines, which totaled more than $40,000 for Earle McSorley at the time of the sale.

The fact that McSorley, the man who even the judge admitted was closest to complying with the court’s order, was being forced to surrender property, angered the couple’s family and supporters. At the time, it was believed that McSorley was the only pit owner with the resources to pay the fines. However, a sheriff’s sale of a half-acre parcel owned by Higgins is scheduled for Thursday, Feb. 28. After that sale is completed, the town will auction off three trailers Higgins owns in an effort to collect the fines imposed by Penobscot County Superior Court Justice Andrew Mead.

The town has conceded that it sees no way to collect the fines from Hewes, who all agree has done little or nothing to comply with the court order. Both pieces of his property have gravel pits on them. If the town were to seize any land on which the gravel pits are located, it would then be responsible for fulfilling the court order and paying fines of $50 per day for noncompliance.

A controversial sale

Parsons, a longtime friend of the McSorleys’, bid $1 for the property at the sheriff’s sale on Oct. 30, 2001. That bid was declared invalid because Parsons failed to deposit the required $5,000 with the town before the sale, according to Richmond. The only other bidder was the town itself, the successful bidder. When Richmond bid $40,000 on behalf of Carmel, a shouting match ensued. McSorley said last week that her husband never received proper notification of the sale and had no idea the town was going to bid on the property. Repercussions about how the sale was handled still are rippling through the community.

Pelletier criticized the way the decision was made and questioned whether selectmen expended funds without voter approval since the money bid on the land was not on the 2001 warrant. Richmond maintained that the town took “a paper lien and turned it into a paper asset” and that no money had changed hands or would until next October because the town can’t sell the property for a year and the McSorleys can reclaim it by paying the fines. Parsons and Pelletier also have questioned whether a sheriff’s sale is covered under the article passed at town meeting that authorizes selectmen “to sell and dispose of real estate acquired by the town for nonpayment of taxes.”

Parsons and Pelletier also believe that selectmen violated the state’s open meeting law by not voting outside executive session on the decision to bid on the land. Richmond countered that real estate transactions can be discussed in executive session if making them public would jeopardize the deal. The decision to have Richmond bid on the land was made during an executive session on Oct. 22 during which selectmen consulted with their attorney over the phone. McSorley did not attend the session. The approved minutes, posted on the town’s Web site, stated that after the board came out of executive session, it took no action.

Attorneys for the Bangor Daily News said that a plausible legal argument could be made for the board’s handling the sale in executive session.

The Carmel gravel pit saga started with a phone call in 1988. Over the years, it mushroomed into a complex chronicle of small-town politics, legal wrangling and political factions. While the residents of Carmel did not create the problem, after all these years, they may be the only ones who can resolve it on March 4.