The Polly Hill Arboretum has received a grant of $200,000 from the Foundation Franklinia for 2009. The grant includes $100,000 toward the arboretum’s seeds for the future capital campaign endowment and $100,000 toward operating costs in support of the living collection.

Aquinnah Library Hours

The Martha’s Vineyard Commission last week unanimously approved plans to convert the old industrial building next to the Oak Bluffs library on Pacific avenue, formerly used as a trash hauling depot, into a place of worship for the Igreja Evangalica Assemblia de Deus church, whose congregation is predominantly Brazilian immigrants.

Although Island construction has been sluggish recently, the business of Brazilian churches has been robust. The newly approved church in Oak Bluffs is one of four Brazilian churches to be built here in recent years.

Frustrated up-Island cell phone users may be getting an early Christmas present this year: a deal is nearing completion with a Boston-based telecommunications company for a series of remote antennas to be built on existing utility poles to enhance cellular reception in Aquinnah, Chilmark and West Tisbury.

A bare quorum of Edgartown voters ran through a packed warrant at a special town meeting Tuesday night, approving all 20 articles in under an hour, most with little discussion.

At final count 196 voters turned out to the elementary school cafeteria to approve spending for an eminent domain purchase for more town cemetery space and research for a public-private sewering partnership with the Island Grove subdivision, among other issues. Town moderator Philip J. Norton Jr. presided with typical efficiency.

The future setting of the Martha’s Vineyard Museum is the subject of a meeting tonight of its board of directors. The 26-member board will discuss whether to continue with an ambitious $27 million capital plan to relocate the museum to West Tisbury, or to move operations to the Edgartown school. Alternatively, the board could scrap both proposals and stay put at its original campus on the corner of School and Cooke streets in Edgartown.

A West Tisbury school teacher was arrested on Tuesday amid charges that he provided alcohol and pornographic materials to minors and hosted underage parties at his Vineyard Haven home.

Daniel K. Johnson, 43, was arrested by Tisbury police at his home on Mariner’s Road and charged with five counts of furnishing alcohol to minors, one count of assault and battery and two counts of dissemination of obscenities to minors. Police also confiscated a personal computer from Mr. Johnson’s home.

The Dukes County treasurer warned this week that with revenue from the registry of deeds sharply down from last year, county department heads will be required to cut their budgets both during the current fiscal year and the following year as well.

Brad Fligor is a captain who steers the three-car ferry that plies the narrow channel between Edgartown and Chappaquiddick.

He has never considered himself a national security risk.

But under a new set of little-known Homeland Security regulations passed by Congress, Mr. Fligor has had to go through a rigorous background check to acquire an identification card from the federal government. The card, the size of a credit card, is called a Transportation Worker Identification Credential, or TWIC for short.

Across about 40 acres of forest land at Polly Hill Arboretum, some 40 per cent of the oak trees are dead. Just like tens of thousands of trees on other conservation, town and private land across Martha’s Vineyard.

Maybe enough trees to cover 1,000 acres, if you put them altogether, have died off in the past couple of years. That’s a big dying on a small Island.