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.
The Vineyard Gazette, the family-owned weekly newspaper that has been a prominent, much-decorated and enduring chronicle of Island life for 164 years, will be sold to new owners, the newspaper’s publisher Richard Reston announced today.
Edgartown police have identified a person of interest in the arson and burglary case on Dunham Road; police also have seized cutting tools they believe may have been used in the early morning hours of Sept. 27 when a fire was deliberately set and propane gas lines were cut in the guest house owned by E. Burke Ross.
Police said this week they are focusing on a person who lives on property owned by the Vose family trust at 41 Dunham Road, directly next door to the Ross home. No names have been released and no arrests have been made.
Farm Pond, the 42-acre great salt pond that hugs the edge of the Harthaven section of Oak Bluffs along Beach Road, is ailing and at risk due to too much nitrogen, a draft study for the ongoing Massachusetts Estuaries Project concludes.
The draft report, which is now circulating among town leaders and water quality planners, also finds that rehabilitation of the pond is easily within reach and could be largely accomplished by significantly widening the culvert that allows tidal exchange between the pond and Nantucket Sound.
Police, firefighters and the state fire marshal are investigating a rare arson in the Tower Hill neighborhood of Edgartown, and the owner of the home is offering a $10,000 reward for information that leads to an arrest in the case.
After a flurry of emergency preparations that went on through the week, Hurricane Earl was downgraded to a tropical storm by the time it arrived on the Island late Friday night, sparing the Island any damage save from drenching rains that flooded some cellars and washed out driveways.
The Vineyard was in a state of emergency and high alert at nightfall yesterday as Hurricane Earl crawled up the Eastern Seaboard, a category three storm packing winds up to 111 miles per hour with drenching rains, its huge eye pointed straight at eastern Cape Cod, the Vineyard and Nantucket.
The Massachusetts Land Court has upheld the town of Aquinnah in a pivotal case that will ultimately decide whether a large swath of rare, salt-blasted coastal heathland along Moshup Trail remains forever wild or is opened up for development.
