Julia Wells
One letter at a time. That was the drill on Wednesday morning this week as the nameplate went up over the entrance to the new Martha’s Vineyard Hospital. A Columbia Construction worker was perched on a ladder to do the job, while project manager Connie Bulman looked on, standing in an empty parking lot awash in unseasonably warm April sunshine. It was one of a flurry of final touches underway as the hospital prepares for its grand opening on Saturday night and Sunday morning this weekend.
Adding another twist to the high-stakes gamble for who will win the right to use the ocean waters around the Vineyard for industrial wind power development in the name of green energy progress, a formerly prominent member of the Wampanoag Tribe of Gay Head (Aquinnah) has publicly disputed the claim that Nantucket Sound is sacred ground traditionally used by the tribe for sunrise ceremonies.
As public attention ratchets up surrounding the controversial Cape Wind project planned for Nantucket Sound, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court is set to hear arguments next week in a case that will decide whether the wind farm developers can sidestep review by the Cape Cod Commission.
In a decision that helps cement the ongoing efforts of Island towns and conservation groups to protect the ancient ways that crisscross the Vineyard like so many strands of history, a superior court judge ruled yesterday that Rogers Path in West Tisbury is open for public use.
“The public has the right to use the entire length and width of the way,” wrote the Hon. C. Brian McDonald, an associate justice of the superior court.
Citing a desire to pursue other interests including the Island Plan and his business at Morning Glory Farm, James Athearn, Edgartown’s representative to the Martha’s Vineyard Commission for the past 10 years, quietly resigned his post last month.
He was the quiet Islander, the longtime town attorney who had seen it all. I was the cub reporter stomping up the stairs to my office, shoulder bag stuffed with soft-lead pencils and notebooks filled with scribbles from some selectmen’s meeting, ready to be banged into a short story that the editors at the Cape Cod Times would inevitably make shorter by the time it appeared in print.