The case of a contractor who violated shoreland zoning rules in the town of Palermo took an unusual turn last week when he used a small swimming pool’s worth of loose change to pay the bulk of his $20,000 in fines and fees.
Kirk Sherman, a local business owner and contractor, had entered into a consent agreement with the town to pay the hefty sum, after he violated the shoreland zoning ordinance while working on a waterfront property on Lake Sheepscot last December, according to Select Board Chair Robert Kurek.
But when Sherman and his business partner came forward with the payment on July 24, they provided most of it in coins — mostly pennies. In an interview, Sherman said he made the unconventional choice as a way to protest the large size of the fine without going through years of legal wrangling to fight it.
“Life’s too short for that, so my only little kind of giggle that I could get out of it was in payment,” Sherman said.
While he said he didn’t intend to inconvenience local officials, it did create more work for them.
“We scurried around and found buckets from different people in our town and used a shovel, and shoveled them into the buckets so that we could … put them into the actual office,” Kurek said.
The case was first reported by WABI.
Kurek estimated more than 60 buckets of coins were removed from the premises to be transported to Machias Savings Bank. It took bank tellers multiple days of counting to confirm the full amount.
“I don’t know why they decided to pay in coins,” Kurek said, “but we find that gesture to be very unprofessional.”
Sherman had violated the town’s shoreland zoning when he cut a path towards the water, according to Kurek.
The six-foot-wide meandering trail looked more like an “on-ramp to I-95,” Kurek said, noting “he could drive his car right down to the water’s edge.” The heavy equipment also disrupted surrounding wetlands.
Sherman admitted that his work violated the shoreland zoning limits, but he argued that town officials misled him about what he could do, and that the matter should have been handled by the Planning Board rather than the code enforcement officer.
“One of the selectmen said that I’ve been doing this for 30 years and I should have known better. Why did I do it without a permit? My question to them was, ‘I met with your code officer three times before I did it. Why did he not say that I needed a permit?’” he said. “Come to find out, that particular area of the lake is a flood zone, so the code officer did not really even have the jurisdiction to give us advice in that area.”
He added, “If it had gone before the Planning Board, we would have done nothing.”
He said it took about eight weeks to collect the total amount in coins from about 40 of his friends, and that he did not expect the town to actually accept the coins. If it had rejected the payment, he said, he would have taken it all back and found another way to make it.
“We went in the side door. We didn’t disrupt the town office in any way. I respect the people of Palermo for the most part. The town office people are awesome,” he said.
But Kurek disagrees that it was all in good fun.
“I will work with our town attorney to see if there’s any opportunity for us to charge them for [the added expenses],” he said. “It caused a lot of extra work for our clerks, and that’ll cost the town some money to get this squared away, [but] we had to handle it somehow.”
