As home heating costs continue to squeeze consumer budgets, the
blame game also escalates.

Homeowners fault the weather - here and elsewhere - as
home heating fuel originally intended for the Northeast is diverted to
the Midwest and other regions where last summer's heat and this
winter's single-digit temperatures have spiked the demand.

Steamship Authority governors unveiled an ambitious business vision
for the 21st century yesterday that calls for a new emphasis on summer
visitors to both Islands with more passenger service, reduced car
service, streamlined high-speed ferries from distant ports and a price
tag that is potentially sky-high.

And when they exhaled from that, the boat line board voted to ink a
$1.75 million deal to buy the New Bedford passenger ferry Schamonchi.

Community Soup Supper

By COLE LOUISON

Though many shops lining the once-crowded streets of Vineyard Haven
closed months ago, the doors and kitchen of Grace Episcopal Church have
remained open.

Each Friday, from 5 to 6:30 p.m., the church hosts a winter soup
supper where anyone can sit down, have dinner and find respite from the
coldness and isolation which affect so many each Vineyard winter.

Skateboarders and their backers have high hopes for a meeting this Tuesday when board members at the Martha's Vineyard Ice Arena are expected to decide whether to lease arena land for use as a skateboard park.

The new sewer system in Oak Bluffs was supposed to begin operating
by late June, but top officials in Oak Bluffs now say there is almost no
chance it will be finished by then. The project is more than a month
behind schedule.

A contractor in financial crisis is to blame. Workers abandoned the
site at the old landfill for most of the last three weeks, leaving the
bulk of the treatment plant phase of the job undone.

It takes dedication and hard work to achieve Dr. Martin Luther
King's goals and visions.

Which is exactly what some Vineyarders are willing to offer.

The leading spokesman for the Herring Creek Farm Trust told the Edgartown planning board this week that the sale of the farm to a private buyer now hinges on the board's approval of a luxury home subdivision plan for the farm.

Teachers who do their math might be smiling this week, knowing that
their new salary contract will boost wages by as much as 27 per cent
over three years, turning today's $50,000 job into a $63,893
position by the fall of 2003.

NANTUCKET - Placing a surprise trump card on the table in the
testy and complicated match over opening up ferry service from New
Bedford, Steamship Authority governors announced yesterday that they
will take immediate steps to buy the ferry Schamonchi, a privatepassenger ferry that operates between New Bedford and the Vineyard.

There is a proposal before federal and state fisheries managers that
will make it a crime to possess scup next summer. If the regulation is
adopted, youngsters all along the Atlantic seaboard won't be
allowed to keep their catch.