Golf courses dominated the discussion following a lecture on the role of environmental mediation in resolving public policy and site disputes last Tuesday evening. Held at the Wakeman Center in Vineyard Haven, the lecture was sponsored by The Nature Conservancy, The Wampanoag Tribe of Aquinnah and the Martha’s Vineyard Commission.
The developers who want to build a golf course along the Edgartown Great Pond jacked up the pressure this week in an attempt to gain favorable votes from members of the Martha’s Vineyard Commission.
Opponents of the golf course project also are waging a lobbying campaign, including a series of paid advertisements, but the campaign by the developers is now clearly accompanied by high-pressure tactics more commonly seen in Boston than on the Cape and Islands.
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.
The trees have been cleared, the land smoothed over; the contours of a new 18-hole golf course in Edgartown are taking shape. While it is months before grass seed takes root, the landscape already presents vistas never seen before. The Vineyard Golf Club project is well under way.
Mother Nature is keeping the Vineyard Golf Club under construction until the next summer season.
Even though the fairways and contours of the course are beginning to glow in a shade of bright green, the caretakers of Vineyard Golf Club refuse to open the 71-acre facility until they know it can sustain foot and cart traffic.
“We agreed to do this the right way. It’s really a labor of love,” said Owen Larkin, managing partner of Vineyard Golf Club.
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.
