News
After a string of frustrating seasons, the Martha’s Vineyard Regional High School girls’ basketball team has jumped out to an impressive 5-2 record early this season, and could easily be 7-0 if not for a pair of tough overtime losses.
Meanwhile the boys’ basketball team continued to roll this week with an easy win over Minuteman Tech, while the boys’ hockey team lost to perennial powerhouse Framingham on Saturday and Bridgewater-Raynham on Wednesday.
Amid mixed reports about whether the recession is easing its grip on the nation, the Vineyard economy remains in decline and has yet to hit bottom, merchants, tradesmen and bankers said this week.
Unemployment on the Island is still high — especially among contractors — while many businesses ended the calendar year with sluggish sales and little hope for a better spring or summer. In Edgartown alone at least 10 retail stores have closed their doors for good this winter, and some observers put the number closer to 20.
U.S. Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar will meet with Cape Wind opponents and proponents, among them members of the Aquinnah Wampanoag tribe in Washington on Wednesday, following this week’s finding that Nantucket Sound was eligible for listing on the National Register of Historic places.
The Martha’s Vineyard Commission is specifically excluded from any role in deciding whether or not commercial-scale wind power could be developed in the waters off the Elizabeth Islands, under the final version of the state’s controversial Ocean Management Plan, released this week.
That exclusion raises the prospect that scores of turbines, each more than 400 feet tall, could be constructed only a few miles west of Aquinnah, without regard to regulations developed by the MVC and the six Vineyard towns.
Chilmark is a Yankee town, no doubt about it. Some might call it behind the times, but Chilmark is quite content to preserve the quiet simplicity of the past, both in its rustic landscape and in its traditional methods of settling business and political matters.
Case in point: The hand-cranked ballot box.
Chilmark still uses one, an old-fashioned wooden box that takes hand-marked paper ballots.
The Island Housing Trust is appealing to the town of West Tisbury to ease affordability requirements on the high-profile eight-house project nearing completion at 250 State Road.
The reason is a new challenge facing Island towns trying to ensure their affordable housing stays affordable in perpetuity: lenders.