What's it going to take for Wiscasset and a Guatemala company to get on the same page about equipment at Mason Station?

That depends on who you ask.

Selectmen's Chairman Ed Polewarczyk said he thinks questions about the equipment's ownership could be resolved pretty quickly if the town's lawyer could speak with an attorney for the Guatemala company, ESI.

But an ESI consultant, Alex Barboni, said the town is overstepping its bounds.

In his latest letters to the Lincoln County Superior Court, Barboni argues that it's the court's role, not the town's, to determine who owns what, including the items he claims ESI owns.

“What exists is ... the town and its attorney acting like judge (and) jury demanding others with assets at Mason Station to prove their ownerships, and continue to 'rule' as to their acceptance of evidence, as if they are the court,” Barboni, of Edgecomb, writes in a November 20 letter.

“It's like 'pin the tail on the donkey' (to) slap seizure notices on everything and ask everyone else to prove your case,” he writes in a separate letter to Wiscasset's lawyer James Belleau. The court received it November 21.

The letter responds to one Belleau wrote November 1, stating that the town has never been given adequate documentation of the equipment buys; he never heard back from a Florida lawyer Barboni said to contact about the purchases, according to Belleau's letter.

In an interview November 22, Polewarczyk said the town was continuing to follow its legal advice.

“In my opinion, the court found in favor of the town to recover lost taxes, and the court authorized the sale of property there. But it would be wrong for us to sell property that doesn't belong to Mason Station,” Polewarczyk said.

Attorney Bryan Dench, who is also working on the Mason Station case for Wiscasset, said on November 25 that the town still has not gotten any reliable or even intelligible documents to confirm Barboni's claims.

“We're not doing anything out of the ordinary .... We're simply trying to recover those monies for a town that like all towns can't afford to walk away from hundreds of thousands of dollars in property taxes,” Dench said.

The court ruled in January that Mason Station owed Wiscasset more than $800,000 in taxes. The town has foreclosed on most of the lots there.

Dench wouldn't say what steps the town is currently taking to try to recover the money.

“We’re not leaving any stone unturned,” Dench said.