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The
Martha's Vineyard Times is a weekly publication.
July 14 - July 20, 2005 Edition
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Editorial
Good news
July 14, 2005
Who says newspapers never report good news?
The menu this morning is in bloom with it.
Aquinnah selectmen re-engage
Aquinnah will rejoin the lawsuit that will help to clarify the relationship
between the town and the Wampanoag tribe, with regard to development
rules, permitting, and enforcement. The state Supreme Judicial Court
found that the tribe had waived its sovereign immunity from lawsuits
to enforce such building and zoning rules. The SJC sent the dispute
over the construction of a shed on tribe property without a town
permit back to Superior Court. Following the tribe’s decision
not to ask the nation’s Supreme Court to take up the SJC ruling,
the selectmen, who had declined to participate in the appeal to
the SJC, have reconsidered their unfortunate position, in consultation
with town counsel Ron Rapport. They will now pursue their constituents’
interests in the state court, as they should do.
Hope in Edgartown
Now assured of nearly $4 million in state funding for the Edgartown
Library’s broadly supported plan to modernize and expand the
library, there is fresh momentum behind the project. Talks among
the library trustees, members of a selectmen-appointed ad hoc committee,
and the town zoning board of appeals, which shockingly rejected
the library plan despite several town meeting votes in favor, appear
to be focused on finding the way to a happy ending. The size of
the planned expansion and the parking issues the plan presents are
the chief concerns of zoning board members, but determination by
the library trustees and reasonableness by the zoning board ought
to combine to defeat these obstacles.
Making health care work
The hospital and other health-care providers have received a substantial
grant to consider how the virtual network of health services offered
to Islanders might really become an actual, functional, coordinated,
and accessible network. This page has argued for a decade now that
health-care providers, no matter how skilled, compassionate, well-equipped
or handsomely housed they may be, are not the network of care that
Islanders need. Such an integrated system will certainly require
a team spirit that continues stubbornly to be in desperately short
supply, but the inquiry that this grant will finance promises to
point the way to approaches that will reorganize the delivery of
health care so that its consumers – namely, us and our neighbors,
relatives, and friends – will end up being winners.
Photo by
Ralph Stewart |
Harvest
Donald Spargo lost his wedding ring 30 years ago while gardening.
His neighbor Kenneth DeBettencourt has often looked for the ring,
and recently Ken’s daughter Roberta found it, while working
in her father’s garden on Wing Road in Oak Bluffs. The gold
band memorialized the wedding of Mr. Spargo, now 82, and his wife
Millicent, on Oct. 4, 1958. In gardening terms, the ring was a volunteer,
a hardy perennial, and a delicious reward at harvest time.
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