Any number of items can be found discarded or stored along the narrow dirt road shadowing the power lines that carry electricity from the shore of Vineyard Sound in the Mink Meadows section of Tisbury to Eversource transformers in Oak Bluffs.
Despite bylaws that prohibit use of a 100-foot easement owned by Eversource, the power lines continue to be a popular area for illegal short- or long-term “storage” and dumping. And in most cases, it is left to the town to police the routes.
From the intersection of West Spring Street and the powerlines, debris is clearly visible looking south to a small rise in the roadway. On Wednesday, just up the track, The Times found a 50-foot Barnes trailer bed, a wooden skiff, a Craftsman tractor, an Avon tire, and five large pieces of plywood. Further along, there was one Bayliner boat, a Hanjin storage container, one smashed TV, an abandoned and disheveled camper, a sail-less sailboat, a boat trailer, and one heavily rusted Giant bike. A trek further into the thorny underbrush revealed two more ramshackle, abandoned boats.
In a phone call Friday, Tisbury building and zoning inspector Ken Barwick said he had just gotten back from court, dealing with an individual he declined to identify who “has quite a bit of a collection down there. I was talking to them, trying to get them to move it voluntarily, but unfortunately they would not do that,” he said. “So I had to give them a little push, if you will.”
Mr. Barwick said he has been dealing with the area for 30 years in an effort to address vehicles, trailers, and other equipment stored in violation of zoning bylaws.
“I used to deal with a lot of unregistered vehicles at one point in time many years ago,” he said. “But that category of activity has seemed to settle itself down. But now I’m bumping into boat trailers and old boats and chippers and Bobcats and trailers for Bobcats, and an occasional dump truck here and there, and that kind of thing.”
Things will often just disappear on their own after a few days, he said.
“They pick it up and it disappears, and you don’t see it again,” he said. “But then something new shows up.”
In some cases, Mr. Barwick just happens upon illegally placed items. He said he travels that area on an intermittent basis, dealing with building permits and inspections of properties.
“In the course of taking a ride down Lake Street and hanging a right by the green rock there, and heading down the power line to get down to Tashmoo East, where we have several permits that are active, I’m bumping into stuff all over the place,” he said.
In other cases, he receives a phone call to come check something out.
“If in fact we get a call from an abutter that has a question or an issue with something that recently arrived or was placed on the power line, we obviously have to track it down and find out who owns it,” he said. “Then we have to contact them and tell them to remove it.”
Other times, he said, property owners think they can use a portion of the privately owned Eversource property, because for some residents it is essentially their backyard.
“They’ve got that 50-foot or 100-foot width, and wouldn’t it be nice to put a swing set out there for the kids, or plant a garden or something,” he said. “But obviously you could go out there one day with a garden and see a nice big bucket truck from Eversource drive by and just kind of plow through it, and that’s the end of your garden, so to speak.”
In general, he said, people are good about respecting the zoning laws and not placing items in the 100-foot right of way.
“People, for the most part, are pretty good,” he said. “But you always get a couple that like to make it more difficult in respect to complying. Obviously the neighbors have to look at this stuff, and it becomes a bit of a nuisance for them to have to be looking at this stuff day in and day out.”
In the case of an “abandoned” item, it’s left to Mr. Barwick to remove the item or equipment, which is an unbudgeted expense for the town.
“Something as simple as a trailer or an old boat or something, there would be a cost associated with calling an appropriate company that does such things, and whatever they charge to pick it up and properly dispose of it,” he said. “And then I would either have to go to the finance committee to take whatever that expense is out of a line item in my budget, or have to start moving my budget around to make up the difference for that cost.”
He said that scenario happens infrequently, but is certainly a hassle he has had to deal with in that area.
“Welcome to my world,” he said.
Trash dumping
Mr. Barwick has to deal with equipment and structures, but it is the Board of Health that addresses the stray mattress, TV, or bags of trash left along the road. Tisbury Board of Health Agent Maura Valley said she has not been called to the area recently, but has dealt with “illegal dumping” along that road in the past.
“Illegal dumping is just when somebody dumps something on either private property or public property rather than bringing it to the dump,” she said. “You see that a lot with people dumping mattresses, couches, furniture, old TVs. You come across it a lot.”
She said she was called out to the power line road near Stone Gate about a year ago to deal with furniture that was dumped there.
“Down at the power line, the calls we’ve gotten have been things like furniture and TVs and things like that, and you really can’t identify who dumped them,” she said.
In a typical dumping situation, she attempts to identify who the trash or items belong to.
“Sometimes people dump trash bags, and we’ll go through it to see if we can find mail, in which case we’ll write tickets and charge them for disposing of it,” Ms. Valley said. “With furniture, there’s no real way to identify who it was.”
Unfortunately, she said, people do tend to target areas like the power line road.
“People tend to dump where nobody is going to see them dump it,” she said. “So it could be the power lines or up in the woods.”
And in that case, the consequences fall back on the town.
“We’ll just have to call the DPW, and they pick it up, and then the town has to eat the expense of disposing of it,” she said.