Almost exactly two years after its last defeat in the state legislature, a proposal to impose a one per cent tax on the sale of higher-cost homes to pay for affordable housing on the Vineyard is again set to go before the House.
Two separate bills — one relating to the Vineyard and the other to Nantucket — were approved by the Senate last Tuesday night, giving renewed hope to affordable housing advocates.
Opponents to the Cape Wind project have suffered another setback, with a new court ruling dismissing a series of complaints related to the state’s jurisdiction in assessing the project.
Barnstable Superior Court Judge Robert Kane ruled in favor of Cape Wind Associates, and struck down four of five counts brought by the town of Barnstable, the Alliance to Protect Nantucket Sound and a group of individuals, who had claimed the state’s review of the project’s impact was inadequate.
There are times when it’s hard to see the environment for the trees.
Look across the Martha’s Vineyard landscape and that mantle of woods, growing where once the land was substantially denuded, and things look pretty good.
But beneath that green canopy, as Vineyard Conservation Society executive director Brendan O’Neill points out, are 78 parcels of land, ranging in size between 20 acres and 100 acres, which remain undeveloped, but also unprotected from development.
There are six parcels of 100 acres or more.
The litany of complaints of the squeezed middle class is familiar.
Three million jobs gone overseas this decade. People working all their lives on the promise of pensions they don’t get. Declining availability of health care. Parents believing, for the first time in U.S. history, that their children will not do as well as they did.
“Everyone knows that recitation,” said Philip Dine.
First, Edgartown seasonal resident William O’Connell was forced to write off his plans for a helicopter landing pad at his Chappaquiddick home. Now, Mr. O’Connell has written off a helicopter, too.
He was at the controls of the Bell B206, with three others aboard, which plunged into the ocean on Saturday off Lake Tashmoo.
Each time a Steamship Authority boat has docked at Woods Hole or Hyannis over the past week or so, the captain has turned off the engines. In the time taken to load the vessel, the SSA saved five or six gallons of fuel.
Multiply the number of trips by the number of boats, and the boat line’s latest energy-saving measure makes a saving of more than $30,000 a month. Which sounds like a tidy sum, until you consider the cost of the fuel the boats still are burning.
