The Oak Bluffs selectmen hosted their annual meeting for summer taxpayers on Tuesday, and found this year that there were few people with little to complain about.
California Road resident Anne Theodore asked selectmen to do something about large trucks traveling at high speeds on her road. Another woman asked about the proposed new sewer line from the town wastewater plant down Edgartown-Vineyard Haven Road, eventually connecting with the new YMCA and the regional high school.
They are as common in the summer months on the Vineyard as out-of-state license plates or tourists in T-shirts, those familiar purple and white parking tickets tucked under windshield wipers that spell trouble: you have parked in the wrong spot or stayed too long.
Many get shoved into glove boxes; some are promptly paid, while others are challenged by motorists who either have a legitimate gripe or simply decide to take a shot and hope challenging the ticket will be enough to get it reversed.
Island police responded to a slew of motor vehicle accidents, broke up numerous parties and made several drunk driving arrests over the weekend, one for a boat operator.
Tisbury police first received a call of a possible intoxicated boater at 2:30 p.m. on Saturday, when the manager of the West Chop Club called to report a belligerent man on the beach causing a disturbance. The manager told police he tried to move the man along but was unsuccessful.
It wasn’t long ago that Oak Bluffs police chief Erik Blake could not imagine riding a bike across town, never mind across the Island, or halfway across the state.
“Let’s put it this way: I wasn’t much of a cyclist,” the chief bluntly remarked last week. “I had the usual mountain bike and I sometimes took it out in the park . . . but it was casual, it was for fun more than anything,” he said.
An engineering report examining the stability of scenic East Chop Drive in Oak Bluffs concludes the fragile coastal slope is extremely unstable and showing signs of distress and imminent failure.
The eight-page draft report from the firm of Stearns and Wheler recommends that the town repair the bluff as quickly as possible by both reshaping the coastal bank and installing stabilizing materials such as a concrete block system, heavy riprap, sheet piling or a specially designed mechanically stabilized earth wall.
The state Department of Revenue has agreed to allow a large portion of Seven Gates Farm in West Tisbury to be classified as a working farm and recreational land under chapter 61A and 61B of the Massachusetts General Laws, a decision that will cost the town of West Tisbury some $100,000 in lost property tax revenue.
Effective July 1, the changed classification will apply to some 930 acres of common land at Seven Gates, a residential community that spans the towns of Chilmark and West Tisbury and includes some 1,600 acres.
