With Memorial Day close at hand, town officials in Oak Bluffs are scrambling to remedy a situation at Inkwell Beach where dark sediment has been deposited as part of a beach nourishment project.
Revisiting a controversial issue that has been dormant since summer, the Oak Bluffs selectmen voted Tuesday to approve a set of regulations that prohibit food trucks in the heart of downtown.
Convinced there's no way to make rental mopeds safe on the Vineyard, Oak Bluffs selectmen this week threw their support behind proposed state legislation that would require anyone renting a moped to have a motorcycle license.
The Oak Bluffs selectmen have released the minutes of a May 9 executive session during which the board voted to terminate town administrator Casey Sharpe without cause, triggering a clause in her contract to pay her more than $76,000 in salary, sick time and vacation pay.
After leaving her post July 15, Ms. Sharpe received $45,427 for six months’ salary and $31,449 in unused sick days, for a total payout of $76,876.
Using charts, graphs and an encyclopedic knowledge of sharks, a leading state marine biologist told the Oak Bluffs selectmen this week that the embattled Boston Big Game Fishing Club's Monster Shark tournament is less about drinking beer and killing sharks, and more about providing a rare opportunity to collect vital information for research.
On the surface, the four candidates running for the open seat on the
Oak Bluffs board of selectmen in next week's special election
share the same ideas on most of the major issues in recent town
politics.
Herbert A. (Bert) Combra Jr., Kenneth DeBettencourt, Ronald DiOrio
and David E. Morris Jr. are all vying for the single seat vacated when
former selectman Michael Dutton stepped down to take over as town
administrator.
Like an ominous dorsal fin appearing behind unsuspecting bathers set
to the familiar theme music from Jaws, debate over the Boston Big Game
Fishing Club Monster Shark Tournament resurfaced these past few weeks
just as the countdown to the summer season began in earnest.
Not so long ago, it was commonplace for Vineyard towns to have multiple blacksmith shops: thriving places of commerce that sold items such as bolts, hinges, horseshoes, cooking utensils and iron gates.
But as the all-consuming age of the machine took hold, the old village smithy went the way of the horse and buggy. The last blacksmith on the Island was Orin Norton, who operated a shop in Edgartown for sixty years until his death in 1961.
In a return to form of sorts, Oak Bluffs selectmen on Tuesday clashed over what seemed like a relatively harmless plan to allow principal assessor Dianne Wilson to work a three-day work week with longer days instead of a traditional five-day work week.
