News
Dean’s List
Ryann Emin of Chilmark, the daughter of Wanda and Keith Emin, has been named to the Bridgewater State College dean’s list for the fall 2009 semester. She is studying early childhood education.
Conservation Funds
The Edey Foundation, founded by the late Maitland Edey of Seven Gates Farm, has funds available for grants to Island nonprofit organizations.
The foundation provides money for conservation and environmental programs on Martha's Vineyard. Submissions that relate to ongoing conservation, energy, education and scientific studies are welcome. Construction or building projects are ineligible.
An unexpected spike in project costs for the Edgartown Public Library expansion project left library trustees scrambling for a solution this week, as a plan to ask town voters for $4 million was scrapped when it was discovered that the actual need would be significantly higher.
At a Wednesday meeting of the Edgartown financial advisory committee, library trustees said that they would need closer to $5.4 million from the town by this coming June to secure a $4.6 million grant from the Massachusetts board of library commissioners.
Deep cuts to state funding for tourism marketing have prompted the Martha’s Vineyard Chamber of Commerce to ask Vineyard towns to contribute tax dollars to establish an Islandwide tourism fund. Chamber members made the rounds in Edgartown, Chilmark, Aquinnah and West Tisbury this week, asking selectmen this week to back their appeal. They plan to visit Oak Bluffs and Tisbury next week with the same request.
Two hours before sunrise on Saturday, the call went out to the Island’s volunteer firefighters of a Christiantown home engulfed in flames. Some 50 people responded, in bitter cold that caused their equipment, clothes and even beards to freeze, but they were unable to rescue the man inside, Daniel E. Prowten, 63, who had served on the West Tisbury fire department for 30 years.
There’s been a great deal of focus lately on the local effects of the rush by federal and state authorities to build big wind farms near the Vineyard to ameliorate climate change, but very little focus on the local effects of climate change itself.
Except in Oak Bluffs, where there is quiet work underway to prepare for the worst, including sea level rise that is expected to erase beachfront property as it is now known, and the potentially ruinous effects of extreme storms caused by climate change. And it’s all backed by a state grant.