Sam Bungey
A ban on cars. A moratorium on fossil fuels. A bus that runs on cafeteria burger grease.
These are among the many projects in discussion or already under way at Island schools seeking to lead environmental action on the Vineyard.
With support from private donors, West Tibsury’s green-minded design and building firm South Mountain Company is managing two such projects: to eliminate fossil fuel consumption at Chilmark elementary school and to construct a highly visible solar energy producer for the Martha’s Vineyard Regional High School.
By SAM BUNGEY
A $1.5 million wastewater proposal for Martha’s Vineyard Regional High School hit the skids once again Monday night when the high school committee decided it was not ready to send the matter for vote at pending Island annual town meetings.
The proposal to link the high school with the Oak Bluffs wastewater plant still lacks a complete set of designs; written agreements from Oak Bluffs town and wastewater commission or potential financial backers; and permitting at the state level for construction.
It’s 8 p.m. on a Sunday inside the brand new World Revival Church — a colorful, million-dollar building on the Edgartown-Vineyard Haven Road in Oak Bluffs. Weeping men, women and children are belting out popular Brazilian evangelical songs. At the pulpit, a dozen harmonizing singers are accompanied by electric bass guitar, keyboards, and a full drum kit, while band leader Jorge Silveira plucks an amped-up Spanish guitar in front of an arcadian painted backdrop.
Oded Na’Aman, a bespectacled 26-year-old in a brown corduroy blazer with the collar turned up towards a dark brown quiff, is telling an audience at Martha’s Vineyard Hebrew Centre about scaring people half to death.
“I told bad jokes and good jokes and they laughed just the same,” he says, “or they stood there shivering. Sometimes they would spontaneously apologize, just because they thought I might be displeased about something.”
Edgartown selectmen approved a series of parking reforms Monday that included additional time allowances at parking spaces, increased fines for violations, and a name change for the Dark Woods Trolley Lot, the sinisterly monikered park-and-ride at the entrance to Edgartown.
The rulings follow the recommendations of the Edgartown planning board and a voluntary parking committee, who have met for the past five months to come up with ways to alleviate parking pressure in downtown Edgartown.
Looking out on a grey Aquinnah woodland, the sprawling front room of singer Lexie Roth’s family house, with its vintage guitar and miniature car collections, has been converted into a live studio for a loose collective of musicians wintering on the Island.
This Monday afternoon it is dotted with microphone stands, a drum kit which sits obtrusively in the sitting area, and a group of twenty-something musicians — Willy Mason, Colin Ruel, Sofi Thanhauser and Miss Roth — who are preparing to record.