The town of Oak Bluffs is signalling its seriousness about combatting the threat of nitrogen in Vineyard ponds with a warrant article that begins the process of sewering subdivisions along Lagoon Pond. In the annual town meeting warrant selectmen are asking the town to transfer $150,000 from the town’s wastewater retained earnings account to fund the initial planning of the sewering project.
There will be one more beer and wine license in Edgartown this summer, and that has some local business owners uneasy.
Appearing at a public hearing during an Edgartown selectmen’s meeting on Monday, attorney Sean Murphy, representing John Ready of the proposed Edgartown Meat and Fish Market in Post Office Square, said that an additional alcohol license in town would not affect other businesses.
While the world trembles with renewed concerns over nuclear power, one government body is pushing to rein in the harmful, and perhaps wider-reaching, effects of more traditional power sources. Although there are no coal-fired power plants on the Vineyard, the Island’s isolation has not immunized it from distant emissions. Last week the Environmental Protection agency announced that it would begin to crack down on such pollutants, chief among them mercury, a familiar, and unwelcome, element in the Vineyard ecosystem.
On Monday the Up-Island School District agreed to grant West Tisbury more representation during the completion of more than $1.5 million worth of repairs to the West Tisbury School in the coming months.
While selectmen had hoped to assemble a formal building committee to oversee the repairs, on Monday they were content to heed the recommendations of the school committee and simply add three members to the school district’s own building committee.
The scope of one homeowner’s unpermitted dredging and filling work on Mink Meadows Pond became apparent on Tuesday night when conservation commission members heard from a land surveyor and the contractor who carried out the work.
The pinkletinks have reported their survival of another winter. The feat’s miraculousness does not wane with repetition, converting, as they must, their blood into antifreeze each winter through ramped-up glucose production, reaching something like a state of suspended animation. With each peep they hear, Islanders are reminded that they too have survived another winter, if only barely, and without the aid of antifreeze blood.
