It is a violation of the Massachusetts Ethics Law for a member of a town community preservation committee who also sits on a private nonprofit board to participate in a decision that grants Community Preservation Act funds to the nonprofit.

This is the opinion of Edgartown town counsel Ronald H. Rappaport, who was recently asked by the town administrator to research the question.

A budding plan to allow two Aquinnah concert promoters to build a summer outdoor performance center at the Gay Head Cliffs has begun to draw more darts than the P.A. Club on a Friday night.

A public hearing was set for last evening and Aquinnah selectmen moved the location to the old town hall because they were expecting a crowd.

Money to rebuild stone walls and jump-start building design for the Middle Line housing project, shared spending on health care access and rodent control, and a $6.6 million annual town budget are the central items that will come before Chilmark voters at their annual town meeting Monday night.

The 32-article warrant reads much like a profile of Chilmark itself: spare and threaded with Yankee thrift. The annual operating budget is a slight decrease from last year, making Chilmark the only town on the Island to see its budget go down instead of up this year.

Scores were released this week for the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System (MCAS), the annual testing in commonwealth public schools that measures student performance in math, reading and science.

Trading democratic squabbles for efficiency, Edgartown voters marched resolutely through a 52-article annual town meeting warrant in just over two hours on Tuesday night, stopping briefly along the way to debate the merits of renovations to the free public library and adding a finance director to the town employee roster.

Voters said yes to the library improvements and no to the finance director.

Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, the senior Senator from Massachusetts whose broad vowels were synonymous with Boston and whose liberal legislative record towered over all others, died late Tuesday night at his home in Hyannisport after a 14-month battle with brain cancer. He was 77 and had served in the U.S. Senate for 46 years. And he had long been a familiar presence on the Vineyard, where he is both credited for the infamy of Chappaquiddick and for the pioneering federal land trust bill that ultimately led to the creation of the Martha’s Vineyard Commission.

The Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court last week upheld the town of Aquinnah and the Martha’s Vineyard Commission in a key leg of a complicated and long-running property rights case that will ultimately decide whether a large swath of rare coastal heathland along Moshup Trail remains forever wild or is opened up to private development.

The bureaucratic red tape has been unsnarled and last week the Steamship Authority learned that it would receive $5 million in stimulus money from the Federal Highway Administration, which will allow three terminal construction projects in Hyannis, Oak Bluffs and Woods Hole to proceed on schedule.

At a special meeting Friday in Hyannis boat line governors voted to award contracts for the three projects. The Oak Bluffs project, which has been in the works for more than 10 years, is now expected to be completed on time in April of next year.

The Vineyard Nursing Association has announced a plan to expand its services to include hospice care, directly competing with Hospice of Martha’s Vineyard, a 28-year-old Island institution which operates solely on donations, unfettered by the constraints of insurance regulations.

Vineyard Nursing Association has applied to become a licensed hospice provider certified under Medicare.

Monday morning, just after dawn at Cedar Tree Neck Sanctuary. The dense forest canopy refracts the early morning sun into a thousand butter yellow shafts of light. The shards fall randomly and at odd angles in the hushed woodland, illuminating the gnarled ancient trunk of an elephant gray beech tree here, a patch of soft emerald moss underfoot there. The terrier races down the Irons Trail path, stopping to bury her nose in a muddy place by the stream, still fat and gurgling in a cool summer with so much rain. A blue jay scolds from overhead.