A one-year moratorium on wind turbine applications and an array of housing initiatives, including a bylaw that addresses the thorny issue of inheritance for the children of affordable housing recipients, top the list of business for a double-header special and annual town meeting in Chilmark next week.
The meeting is Monday night in the Chilmark Community Center; longtime moderator Everett H. Poole will preside. The special town meeting begins at 7:30 p.m., immediately followed by the annual town meeting at 8 p.m. There are a total 31 articles on the two warrants.
State police and federal drug enforcement authorities made their annual helicopter sweep over the Vineyard early this week looking for marijuana plants under cultivation.
Sgt. Jeffrey Stone who works out of the Massachusetts state police barracks in Oak Bluffs, said yesterday that 62 plants were found and removed at six sites in Oak Bluffs, West Tisbury and Edgartown.
Compromise and congeniality were the hallmarks of the West Tisbury annual town meeting this year, as 210 voters marched through a 48-article warrant in three hours flat, first pausing at the outset to hear the annual reading from the town poet laureate and shower the retiring police chief with accolades and long-stemmed red roses.
“Isn’t this a great town?” beamed moderator F. Patrick Gregory following the reading by Fan Ogilvie.
There was good news this week for Islanders struggling to pay for child care, including preschool: a state grant has come through that will make child care subsidy money available for income-eligible families in five of the six Island towns.
One letter at a time. That was the drill on Wednesday morning this week as the nameplate went up over the entrance to the new Martha’s Vineyard Hospital. A Columbia Construction worker was perched on a ladder to do the job, while project manager Connie Bulman looked on, standing in an empty parking lot awash in unseasonably warm April sunshine. It was one of a flurry of final touches underway as the hospital prepares for its grand opening on Saturday night and Sunday morning this weekend.
A nine-month investigation by state and local police into possible fraud at the Edgartown wastewater treatment plant concluded this week with a criminal complaint against an Island septic hauler, alongside allegations of widespread mismanagement at the sewer plant and possible ethics violations by town employees and elected officials.
A long-running effort by an Aquinnah property owner to build a house on a lot off Moshup Trail was blocked by the town planning board plan review committee this week, which found the lot lacks adequate road frontage under new zoning rules adopted by the town eight months ago.
After a series of public hearings that began in October, the committee voted 7-0 on Tuesday night to deny a special permit for James Decoulos to build on the two-plus-acre property.
Whippoorwill Farm, home of the first Community Supported Agriculture program on the Vineyard, will move its operation from Thimble Farm in Oak Bluffs back to Old County Road, farm owner Andrew Woodruff said this week.
Blue Heron Farm, the Chilmark estate that President Obama and his family have rented for the past three summers for their August vacation, has been placed on the market for sale, Wallace and Co. Sotheby’s International Realty announced on Thursday.
A title dispute between the Sheriff’s Meadow Foundation and two Vineyard residents, both sides believing they own the same piece of property in Chilmark, moved into the Massachusetts Land Court this month after the foundation sued the two year-round residents who had begun to clear the land and build on it.
