On Wednesday West Tisbury selectmen confronted the reality of what an unexpected $1.5 million in repairs needed for the West Tisbury School will do to an otherwise well-balanced town budget.
“This project is a serious challenge to our planning for the future here,” said selectman Richard Knabel at the board’s weekly meeting. Multimillion dollar plans to renovate the town library and relocate and build a new police station are already well underway. “The numbers we’re talking about here are extremely substantial,” Mr. Knabel said.
Off Old Farm Road in Chilmark at the end of a dirt road sits the new house of Dardanella and Sean Slavin and their two small children. Over the past year this house has become a home for the young family but it has also become a laboratory. Here, and in 32 other houses across the Island, General Electric and the Vineyard Energy Project have been testing out the next generation of so-called smart appliances and gauging the response of customers whose energy demands have been tempered by the energy load capacity of utilities.
After a month of wrestling with how to close a $238,000 budget gap, the Oak Bluffs selectmen finally took out their scalpels and began to make the required cuts on Tuesday at a special selectmen’s meeting.
A diver who was working with a private team to remove unexploded ordnance from beach areas around the Island was rescued on a remote Chappaquiddick beach in a driving snowstorm early Wednesday afternoon. Calls that went out over the Island communications center emergency radio network reported the man was unconscious when he was pulled from the water and resuscitated by a fellow diver at the scene.
The diver, whose name was not released by police, was working off the jetty at East Beach in the Cape Pogue Wildlife Refuge.
The Martha’s Vineyard Museum would restore the former Marine Hospital’s view to Vineyard Haven harbor in its ambitious plan to relocate there, renovating the hospital building to house museum staff and collections, razing a 1938 brick addition, building a new barn-like structure running for exhibition and storage space, paving a 50-car parking lot and clear-cutting the property’s front lawns overlooking the Lagoon Pond, which have become overgrown in recent decades.
A Martha’s Vineyard Commission subcommittee decided this week to require a new traffic study for a proposed fuel station off State Road in Vineyard Haven, but not before a bit of open disagreement on the merits.
