On Tuesday, April 12 the voters of Oak Bluffs have the chance to do the right thing for our public recreational beaches, our nonvoting-taxpaying residents, our seasonal residents, our tourists and ourselves. We should vote to purchase a beach rake. The public beaches have deteriorated over the last decade from beautiful sandy recreational havens to a hard scrabble surface that only seems to please the gulls. The Oak Bluffs conservation commission is the sole architect of this deterioration. The commission has made it utterly clear that they do not see it as their mission to protect the recreational value of our public beaches, so it is up to us, the voters, to overrule the commission.

What about the economics? First, the money used to purchase the beach rake will come from surplus revenues. No one’s tax rate will increase this or any year in the future to purchase the rake. Second, as a percentage of this year’s budget (0.14 per cent), the cost is small. However, since the rake should last 30 years or more, the cost as a percentage of those budgets (0.05 per cent) is microscopic. Further, consider that, according to the assessors office, 70 per cent of all Oak Bluffs tax bills are mailed to addresses off-Island. We can’t know the exact correlation between mailing address and residency but we can make some intelligent inferences. If only half of those tax bills are mailed to seasonal residents then 35 per cent of the taxes raised would come from seasonal residents. That would fund entirely the budgets of the elementary school, the high school, the police and the debt principal. As a seaside community dependent upon tourism as our economic engine, and out of respect for our seasonal residents who contribute mightily to our town, I urge you to come to the annual town meeting and vote in favor of the beach rake.

Brian Hughes

Oak Bluffs