News
Superior Court Marks 150th
Martha’s Vineyard Regional High School administrators are taking steps to keep the high school budget level with last year: extensive cuts to department supply budgets, a significant decrease in heating fuel costs and the elimination of salary increases in administration are all hallmarks of the draft $16.5 million budget.
But anticipated reductions in state revenues and reimbursements mean the assessed portion of the budget (about $13 million paid by the six Island towns) is still about five per cent higher than last year.
Bracing for a nasty flu season, Chilmark selectmen voted Tuesday to adopt an influenza pandemic plan, urging town employees to stay home when sick and extending sick days to town workers who have not accrued sick leave.
“We don’t want people to think they should be a good trooper and come to work [when they have flu symptoms],” said selectman Warren Doty, who added that staying home is “the way to reduce everybody’s chance of exposure.”
A major wind turbine development near the Vineyard is at best a stopgap measure, and the real energy future lies in federal waters, state energy and environmental officials told Islanders this week.
“The state’s interest, long-term is not in state water,” Deerin Babb-Brott, one of the senior bureaucrats driving the state oceans plan, told local community leaders at a public meeting at the regional high school Wednesday night. The interest is in federal water, at the extreme limit of visibility, or completely over the horizon, he said.
Ian Bowles, secretary of the Massachusetts Executive Office of Energy and Environmental Affairs, certainly would not categorize those who oppose a major wind power development off the shores of the Vineyard as Nimbys.
He prefers more delicate, more bureaucratic, terms than that.
“People have different interests and prerogatives,” he said.
Island health authorities have been forced to cancel a planned clinic to inoculate Island residents against swine flu, after the state was unable to live up to its assurance that it could provide enough vaccine for the job.
The clinic was to have been held on Nov. 11 at the regional high school. A clinic to provide vaccine against the regular seasonal flu will still go ahead at the high school on that day.