Chilmark Votes Its Assessment for the Regional High School, Marking Final Town Needed; Edgartown Lacks Quorum

Two days shy of the start of the new fiscal year, the Martha's Vineyard Regional High School has a budget. Chilmark voters became heroes last night when they said yes to an amended high school budget, marking the fourth and final town approval needed in a tangled regional school assessment odyssey that has dragged on for months.

During a standing-room-only special town meeting in Oak Bluffs that featured more emotion than a game-winning home run, voters on Tuesday defeated a motion to rescind money to expand and improve the baseball park at Veira Park.

The decision proved one of the closest town meeting votes in Oak Bluffs history.

Almost 40 years ago, after a careful assessment of the state of the Viet Nam war, Walter Cronkite delivered an editorial on CBS, saying it was time for a negotiated withdrawal.

President Lyndon Johnson, in response, was famously quoted as saying: "If I've lost Cronkite, I've lost middle America." Five weeks later, the President announced he would not run for reelection.

It is 2 a.m. on South Beach in Edgartown on an overcast and chilly evening in early June.

It is a gamble, of sorts, that most Island businesses are forced to take each year.

When seasonal employees shuffle off at the end of each summer to either return home or to college or to explore farflung corners of the world, employers have no guarantee the same workers will return at the start of the busy season next year.

Earlier this month, the state reclaimed the brush breaker fire truck it loaned to the town of West Tisbury several years ago to fight fires in the Manuel F. Correllus State Forest.

West Tisbury fire chief Manuel Estrella 3rd said the repossession is just one example of how the state is shirking its responsibility for caretaking the 5,168-acre state forest.