More than $20 million was raised for the campaign against Cape Wind before Interior Secretary Ken Salazar approved the wind farm project last week.
And it has all been spent, as Audra Parker, the president and chief executive officer of the Alliance to Protect Nantucket Sound, told people this week while doing the rounds on the Vineyard trying to persuade them to dip into their pockets to fund legal action against the federal government.
The federal government has given its blessing to the development of Cape Wind, America’s first big offshore wind farm, on Horseshoe Shoal in Nantucket Sound.
The Secretary of the Interior, Ken Salazar, announced his decision to approve the project, with only minor changes, at a joint press conference with Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick in the state house in Boston at noon on Wednesday. In words suggesting a conclusion to the nine-year controversy, Secretary Salazar called his approval “the final decision of the United States of America.”
After long controversy and indecision, Tisbury voters on Tuesday approved the sale of beer and wine in the town’s restaurants.
Tisbury selectmen now will be empowered to issue as many as 19 year-round licenses and an unlimited number of seasonal licenses for the sale of beer and wine.
Proponents of beer and wine sales have been pushing the measure for five years. When all the votes were tallied on Tueday night, they had won by a clear margin: 881-747.
Tisbury voters today approved the sale of beer and wine in the town’s restaurants.
Proponents of beer and wine sales have been pushing the measure for five years. When it last was put to a ballot, two years ago, a first count scored it 690 votes all. A subsequent recount found two more no votes.
This time however, the margin was clear, if not overwhelming. There were 876 yes votes and 741 no votes.
Tisbury has three candidates for selectman on Tuesday’s ballot. One is running on an understanding of management, one on understanding of the town and one on an understanding of the job.
Tristan Israel is the one who’s pitching job experience. Like the bumper sticker says, decisions are made by those who turn up, and Mr. Israel has been turning up for 25 years, 17 of them as selectman.
After five years of division over whether or not beer and wine should be sold in Tisbury restaurants, five years of discussion and debate, ceaseless lobbying and innumerable letters to the editor, the issue will go to a vote of the townspeople this Tuesday.
