News
Jason Canha, a 36-year-old special agent with the Air Force, was serving at Bagram Airfield in Afghanistan last summer when he received four large boxes from the Vineyard. In that hot and windy place, Mr. Canha said, T-shirts are at a premium, and those boxes were loaded with T-shirts and other items from home. “It was almost like Christmas,” Mr. Canha said this week during a brief visit home with his parents in Oak Bluffs.
The deer are everywhere: strolling 30 deep through the pastures off North Road, blithely grazing Nat’s Farm field in West Tisbury, and bounding throughout the Island on streets, driveways and occasionally through windshields. They are gorgeous animals, what biologists delightfully call “charismatic megafauna.” But biologists have another term for the Island’s relationship with deer: beyond carrying capacity.
If you happened to be in Oak Bluffs on Tuesday and were surprised to see the Steamship Authority terminal building in the process of being flattened, you were not alone. Also surprised, and dismayed, were town officials.
For the SSA did not have the town’s permission to do it. The conservation commission had issued an order permitting the renovation and expansion of the existing structure, not the demolition of it.
Sparks flew at the Aquinnah selectmen’s meeting Tuesday night when one board member clashed with a town businessman, claiming that he had knowingly acted outside the law this summer by storing alcohol in a truck on his property.
The board held off on renewing Matthew (Cully) Vanderhoop’s liquor license for the Aquinnah Shop restaurant after selectman Camille Rose said she could not in good conscience approve the request for someone who had repeatedly failed to follow the law.
Revealing deep fault lines in its financial affairs, the Island Affordable Housing Fund announced abruptly this week that it can no longer pay for the county rental assistance program, pulling the rug out from under hundreds of Islanders who depend on the program for stable year-round housing.
The nonprofit fund not only has run out of money for the rental assistance program but is also in serious financial straits with its high-profile Bradley Square project in Oak Bluffs that drew Gov. Deval Patrick to the Island for a ceremonial groundbreaking in August.
Illness presumed to be swine flu has resulted in the absence of an average of more than 100 students each day of the past week from the Martha’s Vineyard Regional High School.
And still there is no indication of when Island health authorities will receive enough vaccine to inoculate all Island school children against the disease, much less the broader population.