Tooele County officials have had their share of disputes with Grantsville wrecking-yard owner Dennis McBride, so they weren't going to give him a break on his overdue property tax debt.
McBride told officials one of the reasons he had fallen behind in his property tax payments was the financial burden Grantsville officials had imposed on him by charging him with stealing the mayor's campaign sign in 2005, a charge that eventually was dismissed when McBride appealed his Tooele Valley Justice Court conviction to 3rd District Court.
But McBride also had filed a lawsuit against the city, which also was later dropped, and the government brass didn't feel too charitable towards him.
He owed about $10,000 in back taxes and another $4,000 in interest. McBride said he had pieced together the $10,000 for his tax obligation, but asked that officials work with him on the interest.
The answer? No.
So McBride took back his fire engine.
Not just any fire engine, mind you. It's a vintage 1914 LaFrance fire engine in perfect condition and good running order that he had donated to the Utah Firefighters Memorial Museum in Tooele County.
It was the show stopper at the museum, since it could be the oldest running fire engine in the country.
So the county got its $14,000 in taxes and interest, and lost an antique reportedly worth as much as $80,000.
Speaking of Tooele: A freelance writer who had been a fairly regular contributor of columns to the Tooele Transcript Bulletin's op-ed page has been told his work is no longer welcome at the paper after he told other journalists the Tooele paper killed a column he wrote that was critical of EnergySolutions.
Writer Bob Henline had written a column about the leak of hazardous material from EnergySolutions' Tooele County site and the fact the truck carrying the material had merely a duct tape cover over the leak.
Transcript Bulletin Publisher Jeff Barrus told Henline he would not run the column because the paper had already run several columns and editorials on the company and didn't want to be repetitious.
Henline told Salt Lake Tribune blogger Glen Warchol of the rejection and the fact the Transcript Bulletin had not covered the incident, which had been in news stories around the world.
Barrus told me he wasn't covering up for EnergySolutions, a major employer and taxpayer in Tooele County, noting that the paper had been critical of the company in its editorial pages in the past. He said the Transcript Bulletin simply missed the leakage story and that Henline was being cut off as a contributing columnist because he had questioned the ethics of the paper.
Henline, by the way, has announced he will run as an independent for the Utah House of Representatives from Tooele next year.
