The Martha’s Vineyard Commission has an important role to play when it comes to planning and protection of the Vineyard environment, a majority of people polled by the Vineyard Gazette Harris Interactive survey said.

The commission was singled out for special questioning in the survey which polled more than 500 seasonal and permanent residents on issues ranging from quality of life to cell phone service.

The Vineyard was a different place 25 years ago.
The Martha’s Vineyard Land Bank was barely two years old. The Martha’s Vineyard Commission, a unique regional planning agency founded by an act of the Massachusetts legislature with special powers to plan and regulate development, was a little more than a decade old. These were the late Reagan years and the national economy was booming, as the U.S. had entered one of the longest periods of sustained economic growth since World War II.

In the late 1980s, with real estate prices on the rise and new building starts at an all-time high on Martha’s Vineyard, the Gazette commissioned a poll of seasonal and permanent residents to gauge public sentiment around development. The results revealed a deep and widely-held concern about the fast pace of growth and its implications for the Island environment and quality of life, a concern that cut across every demographic category, part-time and full-time residents alike.

On Wednesday for her last day of
preschool, my daughter Pickle and I discuss what music to play on the drive from West Tisbury to Chilmark. The drive takes about 15 minutes and over the last two years we have enjoyed a long musical journey together. It is just the two of us and so I have had no censors or suggestions of what is appropriate or even good.

Pickle fell in step with my groove early on, leaning heavily toward men of the late 1970s. In our hermetically-sealed musical education chamber, a Honda Fit, one could say she had no choice.

My wife is from Tennessee and before serendipitously landing on the island where we met, to her a boat trip was something you took on two aluminum pontoons, a platform covered with indoor/outdoor carpet, a small outboard engine, frilly canopy and a few cases of beer on a flat, calm pond on Sundays somewhere out in the country, maybe rafting up with a few other families for a party. Once on Cuttyhunk, her assumption was that if anything ever happened to our boat, we would each take two kids in life jackets and swim for shore.

O beautiful for spacious skies

is broken, angry, out of work.

Our alabaster cities clang

with voices split and shrill.

Lobbied, pledged, our leaders strut

they shame the patriots’ dream.

Election more than country love

they poke the public wound.

Where are courage, statesmanship

a majesty worth sacrifice

a reason we should live with less

and strive for something more?

Show us the strength of compromise

that differences can mend.

Relinquish stubborn rhetoric

The Gazette turns back the page in this week’s edition as it revisits the Harris Poll, a first-of-its-kind scientific public opinion survey the results of which were published by this newspaper twenty-five years ago. What follows is an editorial from July 4, 1987, the year the Harris Poll survey was taken.

This is for the young cowboy who drives eastward on South Road mornings between 6 and 6:30, speeding: You will have noticed, perhaps, that I don’t go that way anymore. You win. A car always does, against a bicycle.

Suddenly the Edgartown-Vineyard Haven Road is transformed into an ugly, urban wired and poled road. From one day to the next greenery has had to make way for those ugly long poles now dominating the landscape. Where are we, on the Vineyard, or in some industrial backyard where ugliness triumphs over nature and aesthetics?

I would like to convey thanks to some members of your community. I reside in Edinburgh, Scotland and in June 2013 had the chance to visit Martha’s Vineyard for the first time on the 20th anniversary of my wife’s first visit (she has been visiting on and off for 20 years now).