A Decade Ends

The year was 1999, the twentieth century was coming to an end and the Vineyard stood at the precipice of change. The Steamship Authority was under siege by the city of New Bedford, where powerful and corrupt politicians were mounting a hostile takeover of the boatline that was Island’s lifeline. The golf course wars were in the early skirmish stage. Real estate prices had begun their climb to dizzying heights that would grow to nosebleed elevations in a few more years. There was a grand new airport terminal and new bus service that would operate year-round for the first time. Enrollment at the Martha’s Vineyard Regional High School was on a steady upward climb.

Tracers from growth were everywhere, prompting warnings and predictions. Speaking at a summer fundraiser, Brendan O’Neill, the executive director of the Vineyard Conservation Society, warned that soaring real estate prices would pose new challenges to conservation groups on the Island. In an essay for the Gazette at the end of the year, James Lengyel, executive director of the Martha’s Vineyard Land Bank, predicted that in time the Vineyard would pay to have buildings razed to revive habitat. He also predicted bluntly that the cause to save agrarian life on the Island was lost.

Islanders sounded their own alarm, calling on the Martha’s Vineyard Commission to adopt an Islandwide district of critical planning concern that included a building cap. But the commission shied from the job, and soon the call for an Islandwide DCPC faded from view.

And now as the curtain falls on the first decade of the twenty-first century, it is time to pause and take stock.

The Steamship Authority battles have quieted; left in the wake is an expanded boat line board with a member from New Bedford, and an independent passenger ferry service between New Bedford and the Vineyard that never really caught on and is just barely surviving.

The golf course wars are over and the final outcome is one successful organic course and private club in Edgartown and Corey Kupersmith’s failed exercise at the Southern Woodlands in Oak Bluffs that at last report was unbuilt and nearly in bankruptcy.

Real estate prices are falling like so much snow in December. The land bank, which is the Island’s best barometer of the real estate market, bought a scant seven acres of land this year with what it collected in transfer fees on real estate transactions. Placed against an annual average of about one hundred and forty acres, that makes it the quietest year in the history of the land bank.

But the pendulum swings, as a wise Dad used to tell his daughter, and certainly that is as true on the Vineyard as it is in the rest of the country and the world. And the news has not been all bad. Bay scallop populations swung back into health this year for the first time in recent memory, especially in Edgartown, which once led the state in scallop landings. The Martha’s Vineyard Commission showed some spine, standing up to the state secretary of environmental affairs and his poorly sketched draft oceans plan, voting to adopt two districts of critical planning concern that are expected to lead to careful rule-making concerning the development of wind turbines at sea and on land.

With the help of the county and some dedicated animal lovers, the people of the Island rallied successfully to save their animal shelter. The landmark night club near the airport which had fallen on hard times reopened as Nectar’s with a promising business plan thanks to the young owners of a club in Burlington, Vermont. Vermont and the Vineyard have always had something in common: an intelligent rural lifestyle.

Sheriff’s Meadow Foundation celebrated fifty years of land conservation and stewardship. And ten years later, the prediction about farming on the Island happily has proved to be untrue. Bolstered by the buy-local movements sweeping the country and a yen to return to simpler lifestyles, small farming is experiencing a delicious renaissance on the Island, where locally grown lamb, chicken, beef and fresh spinach and broccoli were among the choices for Christmas dinner this year.

There was good people news. Helen Lamb and her singular Camp Jabberwocky won the annual Creative Living Award. High school thespians won recognition at a state drama competition for their production of Letters.

And President Obama came to the Vineyard in August for a truly quiet family vacation, defying the political cynics still nursing their hangovers from the Clinton years and confounding the national press corps, which found itself with little to do but pester the local press corps.

So the pendulum keeps swinging. And as 2009 turns to 2010, with bitter winds sandblasting the Beach Road between Oak Bluffs and Edgartown and temperatures barely climbing out of the twenties, the Vineyard Gazette sends out its best wishes for a Happy New Year to all its readers near and far. Let the new decade begin!