News
Edgartown fell short of a quorum by about 30 voters last night, missing the chance to pay its share of the Martha’s Vineyard Commission budget with available money from 2009.
The town had planned to pay using money from available funds for 2009. Doing so would have avoided putting the town over the levy limit for the coming year.
Now the town is faced with financial uncertainty and has yet to secure voter permission to make the mandatory annual payment to the commission.
In the face of unspeakable tragedy — an accident that left one Island teen dead and another seriously injured and charged with criminal responsibility — it seems an easy and obvious place to begin to lay blame: on the bottle. According to surveys taken by the Martha’s Vineyard Youth Task Force, the percentage of high school-age Islanders who drink alcohol is higher than both state and national averages.
Police have issued an array of criminal charges again the teen driver in the single-car accident on Edgartown-West Tisbury Road that claimed the life of 18-year-old Jena Pothier last week, including motor vehicle homicide and driving under the influence of alcohol.
Family and friends remembered Jena Pothier as a funny and vivacious young woman at a memorial held at Our Lady Star of the Sea church in Oak Bluffs Wednesday morning.
Ms. Pothier was a graduate of Martha’s Vineyard Regional High School and had recently completed her freshman year at Plymouth State University in New Hampshire when she was killed in a car crash last Thursday night in West Tisbury. She was 18.
Cousin Jay Pothier remembered the little girl on his shoulders at the Oak Bluffs summer fireworks, and described the young woman she became.
By the miracle of instinct and enormous exertion, a little bird, the red knot, migrates from the Canadian low arctic to the tip of South America and back each year.
But a decade or so ago, their number dropped dramatically. And the reason for it makes for one of those scientific detective stories that illustrates the interrelatedness of things to each other, and to us.
They are two Oak Bluffs plumbers who have much more in common than fixtures and pipe fittings. William D. (Bill) Norton, 80, and his son Ralph W. Norton, 53, have plenty to share when Father’s Day arrives on Sunday.
They are the perfect father-son team, sharing not only their work and trade, but also a certain easy fellowship that comes about with age. Their interests reach across the generations and intersect.
They say the Vineyard has changed a lot. The places to hunt and fish aren’t the same.