Sam Bungey
The Island adoption center run by the Massachusetts Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (MSPCA) has operated with an average annual loss in excess of $100,000 for the past five years, according to an agency spokesman.
Breaking a silence of several weeks on the operational details of the Vineyard shelter scheduled for closure May 1 by the financially troubled charity, spokesman Brian Adams told the Gazette this week that more than 50 per cent of the operating budget comes over on the boat.
A farmer and trucker from upstate New York bought the Islander this week for $23,600, placing bid 58 on Ebay Monday for the vessel that ferried Islanders to and from the rest of America for over fifty years.
The auction looked like it might be a humiliating episode with the old girl fetching a starting bid of just $10, with offers crawling to a few thousand in the first days.
But after a flurry of late offers from a total of 19 bidders it finally went to Donald Slovak of Valatie, N.Y.
Though the national economy is tanking at a fevered clip, the pace of one industry remains unhurried: Vineyard agriculture.
But then much is timeless — or out of time — about these farm businesses, some fully commercial, others family-run, part-time and increasingly labors of love.
Jim Athearn counts heads of Polled Hereford cattle, Mitch Posen keeps burros to wrangle his ewes and Elizabeth Thompson runs teams of oxen, which help move the hefty stones that form the farm’s centuries-old ramparts.
In a debate highlighting the growing complexity of affordable housing management, Chilmark selectmen are split over whether affordable housing recipients should be able to pass on their homes to their heirs.
The question arose after a Chilmark couple which won the right to buy a two-acre lot at High Meadows development was misled on the issue due to an administrative error on the part of the town.
A spokesman for the Massachusetts Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (MSPCA) yesterday denied that a lack of caution is behind a multimillion-dollar investor loss which led to the closure of the Vineyard animal shelter, announced a fortnight ago.
The Vineyard branch of the MSPCA is one of three state shelters which will close this year due to a loss of $11.5 million, or a quarter of the total endowment for 2008. Spokesman Brian Adams blamed the shortfall on the economic crisis as a whole.
Teacher unions responsible for salaries of the single largest group of municipal workers on the Island will not be asked to give up cost of living increases next year.
A Wednesday meeting of the all-Island school committee turned down requests from various town bodies to reopen negotiations with the unions that control teacher salaries, in light of the national economic crisis.