Sam Bungey
After he has extolled the virtues of off-menu choice making in American restaurants at the Dock Street Diner in Edgartown one morning, Leslie Baynes — high school committee member and the only 39-year Vineyarder with a London cockney accent — explains how he came to like this country, eventually.
An indefinite suspension imposed on the firm laying a private sewer line from the Field Club to the Edgartown sewage treatment plant was lifted yesterday after 48 hours when wastewater, water and highway departments declared satisfaction that the job could be continued safely and within regulations.
Farrissey Telecom, a construction firm hired by the developers of the high-end members-only Field Club, had hit service lines on three occasions during the previous week, breaching contract rules for the excavation work and prompting selectmen to suspend the work.
Beer and wine: fine? Or, wine and beer: oh dear? A barbed public discussion at the Katharine Cornell Theatre Tuesday night appeared to bring neither residents nor selectmen any closer to which of these — if either — should be Tisbury’s town slogan going into the annual town election this spring.
And in the lead-up to April 15 — when voters will decide on whether to allow the town to license the sale of beer and wine by restaurants and cafes of a certain size — few residents at the meeting were seeing the lighter side.
Since last week’s assassination of Imad Mughniyeh, a leading figure in Islamist fundamentalist organization Hezbollah, Liz Dembrowsky, director of New York theatre company White Trash Intellectuals, does her day job with a police officer in the room, for security.
A speechwriter for United Jewish Communities, a non-governmental organization that raises funds for Israel’s poor, she also spent her 30th birthday last week writing a press release on a suicide bombing that occurred in Dimona, Israel. For Ms. Dembrowsky, it’s all good training.
The town of Tisbury collected $240,000 from the 50-cent levy paid by most passengers on ferry tickets last year and an embarkation fee committee, formed this year in response to controversy over past spending ideas, is in the process of developing final recommendations for where the money should go.
The committee will take its decisions back to the selectmen who will have final sign-off ahead of the annual town meeting in April.
The rest of the state may have other ideas, but the Vineyard wants Sen. Barack Obama to be President of the United States of America.
Bucking the state trend on Tuesday, an extremely high turnout of Vineyard voters squarely backed Sen. Barack Obama in the Democratic primary with 55 per cent of the 5,288 Democrat votes cast, while Sen. Hillary Clinton picked up 40 per cent. The result is a mirror image of Massachusetts numbers which put Senator Clinton at 56 per cent and Senator Obama at 41 per cent.