The West Tisbury assessors have made public their first round of real estate abatements, applying reductions in valuations from 10 to 60 per cent on seven of 57 properties in the Tisbury Great Pond and Seven Gates Farm neighborhoods, the areas in town hit hardest by revaluations.
Abatement applications are taxpayer requests for lower valuations, thus lower tax bills. They challenge real estate values assigned after revaluation occurs.
A meeting at Oak Bluffs town hall on Wednesday was as much about a plan to mend the crumbling town waterfront as it was to mend frayed relations between certain town officials who disagree over what approach should be taken after a 30-ton retaining wall along Sea View avenue suddenly collapsed nearly a month ago.
Oil prices sitting stubbornly at more than $10 per barrel above budget forecasts. Cost overruns on capital projects totaling almost $3 million.
It was a sober March meeting for the governors of the Steamship Authority this week.
The good news was that the actual and projected traffic on SSA ferries remains strong. But it was the bad news which took up most of the time at Tuesday’s meeting.
The Vineyard Nursing Association (VNA) and Martha’s Vineyard Community Services met this week to develop a transition plan for the care of 66 patients now served by the Community Services Visiting Nurse Service.
Officials of both groups said real progress has been made in developing a plan to provide service continuity followed by an unexpected announcement by Community Services last week that it would shutter its nursing service on June 30 to focus on other areas, including behavioral health services.
After serving 21 years as Oak Bluffs selectman and eight years as Dukes County commissioner, Island political mainstay Roger Wey this week announced his intentions to run for the soon-to-be vacated seat in the Massachusetts House of Representatives now held by Eric Turkington.
In the summer months, Island cook Jan Buhrman starts her days early. After waking her two sons, feeding her two pigs, checking on her 12 ducks and saying goodbye to her one husband, Ms. Buhrman gets into her car. Rather than head straight to work, many mornings she seeks out the farmers who sell to her. More often than not, these farmers are women.
It’s 8 p.m. on a Sunday inside the brand new World Revival Church — a colorful, million-dollar building on the Edgartown-Vineyard Haven Road in Oak Bluffs. Weeping men, women and children are belting out popular Brazilian evangelical songs. At the pulpit, a dozen harmonizing singers are accompanied by electric bass guitar, keyboards, and a full drum kit, while band leader Jorge Silveira plucks an amped-up Spanish guitar in front of an arcadian painted backdrop.
The Martha’s Vineyard Hospital is ready to pour the foundation for construction of its 90,000-square-foot expansion.
The site has undergone nearly six months of preparation for the construction, a project for which more than $46 million has been raised.
The expansion is on schedule for completion in late 2009.
The state-backed home insurance provider of last resort for most Vineyarders is called the FAIR plan, but most Island residents readily complain that their ever-increasing premiums and deductibles are anything but fair.
In fact, at a special public forum at the Tisbury Senior Center on Monday, many Vineyarders were crying foul about their FAIR plan rates.
Though it is brief and stated without much detail, an article on the warrant for Tisbury’s special town meeting on Tuesday puts forward a radical idea.
The proposal foresees an energy future for this part of the world in which the people would own the means to produce their own electricity.
All the article seeks is approval to apply for membership in the Cape and Islands Electric Cooperative Inc., and authorization for the selectmen to negotiate terms and conditions.