By Lisa Chmelecki,Staff Writer

AUBURN – It took an hour and a half Tuesday for a jury to decide that Eugene Jordan Jr. doesn’t owe Ken and Jean Guidi a cent.

The Guidis filed a civil lawsuit against Jordan, alleging that his automobile junkyard on Snell Hill Road polluted the Nezinscot River and decreased the value of their house by 20 percent.

A jury of four women and five men spent the past week listening to testimony in the case. They began their deliberations at 3 p.m. Tuesday.

At 4:30 p.m., they returned a 7-2 verdict in favor of Jordan. They concluded that Jordan’s use of his property did not constitute a nuisance as defined by Maine law, and therefore the Turner native did not owe the couple any damages.

“I feel like I can hold my head up now because I’ve done nothing wrong,” Jordan said before leaving the courthouse.

The Guidis were not in the courtroom when the verdict was read. Their lawyer, Curtis Webber, said they had gone home to wait and could not make it back in time.

He called them with the news.

“They are very disappointed,” Webber said. “But they are also relieved that it’s over.”

The Guidis have been battling with Jordan since the fall of 2000 when Jordan applied to the Turner Board of Selectmen for a permit to operate an automobile junkyard.

He had been running the junkyard on the banks of the river without a permit for years, and the Guidis protested his attempt to finally become legal.

The couple built their home on Jordan Lane, about one-third of a mile from Jordan’s property, in 1983. They claim that in the late 1990s they started seeing tires and car parts floating down the river.

They alleged in their lawsuit that Jordan’s business of crushing junk cars was polluting the water with gas additives, and they had no choice but to stop using the water for drinking, swimming, boating and fishing.

The couple eventually moved out of the house and rented it. They claim they’ll never be able to go back.

One of the Guidis’ witnesses was a local real estate agent who appraised their property in 2001 and concluded it was worth 20 percent – about $24,100 – less as a result of Jordan and the illegal automobile junkyard.

Jordan admitted during the trial that his automobile junkyard, which has been in his family since 1954, was illegal for several years because he had let his permit lapse.

But things are different now, he contended.

As the result of a court order in February 2003, he claims that he shut down the junkyard, cleaned up the property and now runs only a legal towing and automobile repair business.

His lawyer, Juliet Browne, pointed out in her closing argument that town officials inspected Jordan’s property in December 2003 and determined he was in compliance.

As proof, Browne presented recent photos of Jordan’s property that were drastically different from ones taken by the Guidis in 2001 and 2002.

During his closing argument, Webber told the jurors to be suspicious.

“During the past few days, there has been a frantic effort to clean up what they’ve been doing,” Webber said. “The fact of the matter is that the mess is still there. It’s just hidden.”

Webber acknowledged after the trial that the recent photos “show a dramatic change in the landscape,” and the Guidis have taken some satisfaction in that.

“They are going to cross their fingers and hope it stays that way,” he said.

Despite the outcome, Jordan remained angry. He blamed the Guidis for causing him years of financial and mental stress, and said he didn’t believe they would stop until they shut him down completely.

“If you grew up in a town where everybody is always pointing at you, how would you feel?” he said. “I have a bad heart and high blood pressure. This whole thing has cost me a lot.”

Browne argued that Jordan’s business was simply a way of life in rural Maine that clashed with the Guidis’ “romanticized and idealized expectations” of what life would be like in Turner.

“The reality is there are a lot of operations in the town of Turner that are less than pristine,” Browne said. “But that’s the way life is.”

Unlike in a criminal trial, the jurors did not need to reach a unanimous decision. Their verdict only required six of them to agree.