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.
The Vineyard is among a handful of places in America selected as part of a pilot study involving new “smart grid” appliances which take advantage of cheaper off-peak electricity.
The Vineyard Energy Project (VEP) has been awarded almost $800,000 to be part of the project, which will be carried out in association with General Electric, and which will see 50 Island homes fitted out with new smart appliances, able to be remotely controlled to take advantage of times when demand for power is lower and it is therefore cheaper.
Gov. Deval Patrick has been accused of snubbing attempts by a delegation of Vineyard community leaders to meet with him and share their concerns about the impact of the state’s draft oceans plan on the Island.
The delegation, which includes representatives of every Island board of selectmen, the Dukes County Commission, Martha’s Vineyard Commission and the Wampanoag tribe, has been trying without success for almost three weeks to get a meeting with the governor.
As subdivisions go, the plan for Flat Point Farm in West Tisbury could hardly be more carefully balanced between the need to plan for family succession and the desire to maintain the farming tradition, so threatened on Martha’s Vineyard.
Yet it has served to raise a whole raft of questions that go to the very heart of the Island farming methods, which contribute disproportionately to the Vineyard’s most pressing environmental problem, pollution of the great ponds by excessive nitrogen.
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.
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.
