Despite the claimed end of the recession, the number of foreclosure proceedings on the Vineyard appears to be increasing, along with unemployment.
Analysis of the space taken up by foreclosure-related advertising in the Gazette shows that it took up more than twice the column inches in the December quarter of 2009, compared with the same period in 2008.
And Chris Wells, president of the Martha’s Vineyard Savings Bank, said this week he believed unemployment on the Island could be as high as 50 per cent over the next couple of months.
The basis of John Thayer’s complaint to the Tisbury selectmen this week was simple inequity. Mr. Thayer receives a $240 a year stipend for being a Department of Public Works commissioner, while two other commissioners receive their stipend plus health benefits worth around $20,000 a year.
After more than eight years of controversy, a final decision on the Cape Wind development planned for Nantucket Sound will be made by the end of April, U.S. Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar promised this week.
Mr. Salazar made the commitment after an exhaustive round of meetings in Washington on Wednesday involving all the major parties supporting and opposing the development, which would see 130 wind turbines, each more than 400 feet tall, placed in federal waters on Horseshoe Shoal in Nantucket Sound.
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.
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.
For most people on the Vineyard, the good news about the year 2009 is that it is over. No matter which way you look at it, last year was a tough one.
Even the weather was bad, beginning with a big dump of snow on New Year’s Eve. That was briefly very pretty, but over the succeeding weeks and months of repeated thaws and freezes, the ground cover mostly alternated between mush and dirty, treacherous ice.
