Oak Bluffs voters will be asked to take action on some $1 million in spending requests at a special town meeting Tuesday, including one to correct a loss from a cyber scam this past August.

The meeting begins at 7 p.m. at the Oak Bluffs School. There are eight articles on the warrant. A quorum of 50 voters is needed.

Voters will be asked to approve a $332,000 transfer from the stabilization fund to cover the loss from cyber scammers. The money, a grant from the state, was intended for wastewater improvements for the Southern Tier affordable housing project. Funds were meant to be sent to the two developers of the housing project, the Island Housing Trust and Affirmative Investments, but along the way they were intercepted by scammers. 

“As far as I am aware the investigation is still ongoing and we are still working on various recovery options,” Deborah Potter, the town administrator, said in an email on Tuesday. She directed voters to the executive summary of the warrant article.

The summary explains that while the payment was coordinated, fraudulent emails were substituted for legitimate ones. Cross checks meant to confirm the banking information were omitted, which resulted in the first payment to Affirmative Investments and the Island Housing Trust being stolen. The town conducted a review to ensure that town systems were not compromised. The fraud was reported to the FBI and Oak Bluffs police.

On Tuesday voters will also decide whether to borrow $750,000 to go toward the creation of a town-owned solar farm. If the spending is approved, a request for proposals will go out. Plans to create a solar array over the town’s capped landfill have been in discussion for several years. The project was submitted to the Department of Public Utilities in 2022. The project, along with several others, were approved by the department in the summer.

“If [voters] don’t [approve the article], the town cannot keep its application to the utility,” said Beth Greenblatt, the managing director at Beacon Integrated Solutions, the consulting company for the town on the project. “They drop out of the project group that’s already been approved, which means years of delays. It won’t give them a better deal, it’ll just increase the time before they’ll be able to have a project move forward,” she added.

Two articles will ask voters to transfer funds for cemetery care. The first would transfer $5,000 from the sale of cemetery lots to be used for general upkeep of Oak Grove Cemetery. The second asks voters to authorize a transfer of $4,000 originally earmarked for water line improvements to go toward finishing a cemetery expansion, as the money is no longer needed for the water line.

Four other articles seek to update and clarify language in town bylaws.