Tri-Town Ambulance committee members are calling for major changes in the structure of their organization.

Last week Tri-Town committee member and Chilmark police chief Brian Cioffi met with Chilmark selectmen to discuss a $300,000 or 60 per cent increase in next year’s Tri-Town budget; the increase is aimed at covering the cost of four full-time paramedics to satisfy a state mandate that would allow the organization to continue to provide advanced life support services to the three up-Island towns.

The first in a series of American Heart Association CPR and First Aid courses on Island takes place Tuesday and Wednesday, Jan. 18 and 19 from 6 to 9 p.m. at the Mansion House in Vineyard Haven. Participants attend both sessions.

Edgartown library trustees agreed to back a new library design this week, but tacked on a set of complicated conditions that could still jeopardize the state grant application.

A Christmas day fire that destroyed a West Tisbury home in Deep Bottom started in a chimney, a Dukes County fire investigation team has concluded.

“We know where it started, we just don’t know how it started,” fire investigator James Rogers told the Gazette on Thursday. He said investigators have ruled out foul play.

“There’s no indication that it was other than accidental,” Mr. Rogers said.

Randall Jette

High school senior Randall Jette received a full athletic scholarship to the University of Massachusetts, and has given them a verbal commitment for next year. Randall was the Vineyarders’ starting quarterback this year.

The Martha’s Vineyard Sharks, the Island’s new collegiate baseball team, signed their first Vineyarder to the team this week. Tad Gold will play center field for the inaugural 2011 season starting in June.

“I’m just excited to get started,” Tad said yesterday afternoon. “It’s exciting to be playing in front of my home fans again on the high school field . . . I don’t know what to expect. Go out there and win games is what it’s all about at this point.”

The Martha’s Vineyard Commission’s so-called DRI checklist — which determines what projects go to the commission for review as developments of regional impact — is under pressure from all sides.

Targeted recently by businessmen and elected leaders who feel it is chilling commercial growth in the down-Island towns, the checklist was the subject of lively discussion this week — but not only by those who would loosen the rules for referring development projects to the commission.

High winds, raging seas and strong currents have been hard on Chappaquiddick this winter. Large areas of beach down at Wasque have been moved and removed, lately at the rate of a foot a day. But the latest changes are at the other end of Chappy, where the post-Christmas northeaster cut a new opening on a barrier beach at Cape Pogue Pond.

Technology changes every day, there’s no getting around it. One day we’re sporting the latest flip phone and the next we’re having a video conference call on our smart phones. Young people grow agitated when Facebook changes profile settings, while many of their parents grow frustrated just trying to navigate online shopping.

Katie LeClerc Greer is working to bridge the gap and reassure kids, parents and teachers that technology is not so scary after all.

Acting well out of the public eye, Dukes County sheriff Michael McCormack quietly agreed last month to allow Kelly McCarron, the young woman who was drunk and driving the car the night 18-year-old Jena Pothier was killed in June 2009, to leave a Barnstable correctional facility for women less than seven months into a one-year term. Ms. McCarron has returned to the Vineyard to serve out the remainder of her sentence at home under electronic surveillance.