For 90 per cent of its duration, Tuesday’s Tisbury special town meeting went almost impossibly smoothly for town officials. But they fell at the last hurdle.
As is so often the case in Tisbury, the bone of contention was dog laws. Specifically, an article proposing penalties for breaches of a town policy prohibiting dogs from municipal buildings. It provided for a written warning for a first offense, and a $25 fine for every subsequent offense.
The long-held vision of a connector road to bypass one of the Island’s worst traffic spots, the Edgartown-State Road intersection in Tisbury, might finally be just one town meeting vote away from realization.
This Tuesday’s Tisbury special town meeting will be asked to approve construction of the bypass, and work could begin within months. Voters also will be asked to authorize the board of selectmen to apply for funding, so, with a little luck, the project can be completed at no further cost to town residents.
Tisbury voters overwhelmingly endorsed a plan to spend some $7 million on a new emergency services facility at Tuesday’s special town meeting.
Concerns that townspeople might not be in a spending mood, given the tough economy, proved unfounded, and the article providing for the bulk of the money — $6.8 million — was passed by a count of 167 votes to 22.
The new building will house the town’s fire, ambulance and emergency management staff and equipment.
In nine years’ experience running Tisbury town meeting, moderator Deborah Medders has noticed one type of warrant article which really gets people going is proposed changes to zoning bylaws. And so it was again this week.
The Tisbury special town meeting on Tuesday went pretty smoothly for the most part, until it came to two arcane, and, it must be said — for many people at the meeting said it — hard-to-comprehend proposed changes to zoning regulations.
The construction of a road connecting State and Edgartown-Vineyard Haven roads and a garage to temporarily house the town's new ladder truck top an atypically weighty list of requests facing voters at the Tisbury special town meeting Tuesday night.
It took 18 drafts, hundreds of hours of meetings and more than a year’s planning, but Tuesday night at the special town meeting, Tisbury residents