An occasional series of short opinions on topics of local interest.

Look before buying near farms

Mapleton officials just got an expensive lesson in putting too much stock in the not-in-my-back-yard crowd,

The city recently agreed to pay $202,000 to Larry Opfar for rescinding the conditional-use permit it issued for his dairy farm in the city's agricultural zone.

Opfar was given the permit in the summer of 2006, but neighbors started complaining about the smells associated with a dairy operation. Some of these people claimed the odor of cow manure was sickening them.

In February, the city gave Opfar and the neighbors six weeks to work out a compromise.

The city pulled the permit last month and agreed to pay Opfar about half the money he invested in the operation. The money doesn't erase the fact that the city succumbed to a mob in this dispute.

We'll concede that cow manure is not a smell most people would want to wake up to or experience all day, but the fault doesn't lie with Opfar. He played by the rules and put his farm in the place where it was supposed to go.

His neighbors, on the other hand, should have known that they were living in an agricultural zone, where cows, horses, other farm animals and all their feces are permitted. If you don't like the smell of a barnyard, get out of farm country.

Some people can look past the smell and appreciate living near a farm for the simple beauty it offers. There is something heartwarming in seeing a cow with her new calf on a spring day. Living near a farm also provides a daily object lesson in where that food at the grocery store really comes from.

Now a man is out of the dairy business, and Mapleton is out $202,000 because some people didn't bother to check their neighborhood's zoning status before moving in. If justice were perfect, the city would forward the bill to the NIMBYs.

Al Sharpton meets the Mormons

The Rev. Al Sharpton's quest for absolution for his foot-in-mouth remarks about the LDS Church and presidential candidate Mitt Romney brought him to Salt Lake City yesterday.

Sharpton, the self-proclaimed civil rights advocate best known for falsely accusing several police officers and a prosecutor of raping a black teenager in the late 1980s, came to Utah to learn more about the people he implied were godless.

During a debate in New York, Sharpton said that there was no need to worry about Romney, the former Massachusetts governor, becoming president because "those of us who believe in God" would stop him.

Sharpton lamely denied that he was attacking the LDS Church and apologized on CNN's Glenn Beck show. Then he apologized in a phone call to Elders Russell M. Nelson and Henry B. Eyring of the church's Quorum of the Twelve Apostles.

Sharpton came to Utah to learn more about the church and took the whirlwind tour.

First-hand exposure to real people in Utah has had a salutary effect on perceptions in the past. When Ulysses S. Grant visited Utah in 1875, he had been fed unflattering informaton about Mormons. He had been led to believe that Mormons were low, uncivilized and oppressed. When he saw the bright, clean children along the parade route in Salt Lake City cheering his arrival and singing, he inquired who they were and was told they were Mormons. Grant remarked, "I have been deceived."

Perhaps Sharpton will have a similar change of heart.

This story appeared in The Daily Herald on page A5.