The family that plans to build a private championship caliber golf course along the shore of Edgartown Great Pond is fully aware that its plans will be examined with scrupulous care by Island environmentalists.
Ending months of debate, untold numbers of hours of public testimony and weeks of bruising deliberations, the Martha’s Vineyard Commission voted 7 to 6 last night to deny a proposal for a private 18-hole golf club on some 200 acres of land along the Edgartown Great Pond.
The developers who recently lost their bid to build a private golf club on some 200 acres of land along the Edgartown Great Pond intend to file a new plan and try again.
“We are neither dead nor finished,” declared a letter sent to the founding members of the Meeting House Golf Club one day after the plan was voted down by the Martha’s Vineyard Commission.
The letter was sent by mail and by fax to 30 seasonal residents of the Vineyard who advanced some $2 million in start-up money for the failed golf course project.
Developers at a hearing last night described the Meeting House Golf Club project as a blessing for the environment. The project would remove nitrogen from the groundwater, they said, improve the salinity of the Edgartown Great Pond and protect the rare plant known as gypsywort.
Some members of the public questioned those claims. And two opponents of the project hinted that scientific experts will appear, when the hearing continues, to offer different ideas about the environmental impacts of the golf resort proposed by Rosario Lattuca.
Two Boston area businessmen and a Mississippi real estate developer have announced plans to build a private golf club on the former Vineyard Acres II property off the West Tisbury Road in Edgartown.
The would-be developers are Jay Swanson of Medfield, Owen Larkin of Boston and William Vandevender of Jackson, Miss. Their partnership is called Swanson Ventures L.L.C.
Leaders in the two rival golf course development groups in Edgartown said yesterday that they will merge memberships and stop competing with each other.
Owen Larkin, the managing partner for the Vineyard Golf Club, confirmed that he has signed an agreement to offer guaranteed membership to every member of the Meetinghouse Golf Club Inc. In return, the leading developers for Meetinghouse have agreed not to reapply for permission to build an 18-hole golf course on the MacKenty family property along the Edgartown Great Pond, Mr. Larkin said.
The Lester H. Dana place, with its beautiful contemporary house on the summit of Manter’s Hill, off Tea Lane, and fifty-five acres of land, has been sold by Mrs. Dana to Mrs. Julia Green Sturges of New York.
Manter’s Hill, a Chilmark landmark since the beginning of the Manor, will be crowned with a year-round dwelling of imposing size at some time in the near future. The house is to be built for Lester Dana of Boston, who is in the process of purchasing fifty-five acres of the old Manter Place from Philip Siff, and the building will be done by the William G. Manter Co. of Vineyard Haven. William F. Swift, Vineyard Haven engineer and surveyor, will be in charge of the whole operation.
A partnership led by a South Boston bar owner and condominium developer will pay $5.15 million for 51 acres in Oak Bluffs once planned as a luxury home development. Paul Adamson, a real estate developer who also owns Shenannigans, a South Boston pub, was the high bidder at a foreclosure auction June 26, held on the property off County Road formerly owned by Corey Kupersmith.
