Legislation designed to protect migrating right whales could have an unintended, devastating impact on ferry services to the Vineyard and Nantucket, the Steamship Authority has warned.
Under draft rules attached to the legislation, any sighting of a right whale would trigger the imposition of a strict, 10-knot speed limit on ships more than 65 feet long, operating within a so-called “dynamic management area” with a 36-mile radius, for 15 days from the time of the sighting.
In what may portend a troubling new trend, two prominent Island conservation properties — one in Edgartown and another in Chilmark — along with a third private property in Oak Bluffs have been virtually strip-mined to provide native plants for a billionaire landowner who is building a huge home on the North Shore.
A state environmental official who yesterday inspected all the properties involved confirmed several breaches of the Endangered Species Act.
As a young architecture student, Craig Whitaker took some time off from study one day to go see a movie, a western. A spaghetti western, as it turned out, directed by the Italian Sergio Leone in Spain and starring Clint Eastwood.
Mr. Whitaker didn’t know that when he went in, but as soon as he saw Clint Eastwood ride into town, he knew the movie had not been shot in America, for Eastwood was riding into a plaza.
“In America,” he said, “We don’t have plazas. We have Main street.”
BOSTON — Two property assessors working on behalf of the town of West Tisbury lied to justify new valuations in an exclusive neighborhood of the town, resulting in land owned by William W. Graham being overvalued by $24 million dollars, the Massachusetts Appeals Court was told this week.
Counsel representing Mr. Graham, John Stevens, is seeking to have the court overturn a decision by the Massachusetts Appellate Tax Board last year, which upheld with only minor variation the assessors’ original valuation of Mr. Graham’s property.
Proponents of beer and wine sales in Tisbury restaurants, defeated by a mere two votes in this year’s ballot, say they plan to put it before the people again next April.
After years of controversy, the proposal to license restaurants to sell alcohol failed 692 to 690, after a recount conducted last Friday.
For 10 years, Mark Luce, innkeeper at the Dockside Inn and Oak House, has employed the same seven-member Jamaican extended family to help run his business. But this year, they won’t be coming.
Darren Morris hires the drivers for the Martha’s Vineyard Transit Authority. Every year he hires 15 or 20 Bulgarian workers to drive buses. But this year, none.
