Town meetings are organized around warrants. The warrants can be obscure and exhausting for all but hardcore town government junkies. The dozens of warrant articles, many driving town budgets, are usually about the routine care and feeding of ongoing town operations. This year in Oak Bluffs, there are at least three issues among many warrant articles dealing that are too important to obscure or delay (and that have been unresolved for way too long) that made it to the draft warrant approved by Oak Bluffs selectmen this week.
The Oak Bluffs Town Hall occupies an almost irredeemably unsuitable structure. It has been cited for a slew of health, environmental, access, and safety violations. The option of repairing and renovating the building has been exhaustively reviewed, and dismissed based on costs alone. Earlier plans for a replacement building, approved at the 2014 town meeting but never funded by voters too concerned with undertaking both the new fire station building and a new town hall, have been haggled over and whittled down by a special committee, without actual cost reductions, resulting, of course, in long delays. There’s no argument for further delay other than the position that town business, and town employees, should continue to be housed in a decrepit facility.
There may be an inevitable taxpayer aversion to major investments in management and bureaucracy, but selectmen and town administrators are responsible for selling this project. There’s no reason for delay.
The Island Theater has become a town burden while remaining a part of the Hall family’s real estate portfolio, an empire of almost Gothic decay. The theater is a shabby eyesore, and has been judged unsafe by the town building inspector. But citing the owners and waiting for a voluntary plan to ameliorate the mess has proven to be as fruitless in Oak Bluffs as it has in Edgartown and Vineyard Haven; the Halls’ business interests simply don’t run in that direction.
The town has the option to tear down the building and bill the owners, but apparently, not the heart for the likely endless litigation that would bring. So the selectmen have decided to punt, and are asking for authority to spend $200,000 on the Halls’ building to make repairs, eliminate violations, and possibly throw in some interior cosmetic improvements. Presumably the $200,000 will be collected from the Halls by adding it to their tax burden.
Apart from the suspension of disbelief required to imagine the Halls paying this bill (about as likely as asking the Mexican government for reimbursement), it would use town funds to improve the property of civic antagonists. In all, this seems like a colossally bad movie script, worthy of screen time at the theater itself. Instead, the town should take steps to condemn and take the building, and tear it down, and use the prime location to serve the town’s overall interests.
Moped rentals: Despite years of accumulating injuries and deaths, moped rental businesses have remained in operation in Oak Bluffs. Efforts going back to 2004 to enforce moped rental bylaws have been halfhearted, and have ultimately failed. Complaints filed with selectmen bring hand-wringing admissions of failure, but still continue to get chewed up by delay and apparent indifference. The license-violation status of the three remaining moped rental businesses merits the revocation of those licenses, and creates the opportunity for the town to do a great good deed.
Moped rentals are a heedless and unsafe enterprise. But they continue to command inexplicable protections from the selectmen. Despite the total absence of any credible argument in favor of continuing moped businesses, selectmen refused on their own to take up the question on this year’s warrant, except for an article laying out more efforts at regulation. The selectmen seem to feel that the answer to moped mortality and morbidity follows this line of thinking: Despite uniform acknowledgement that a passenger on the back end of a moped makes it much more difficult to control, the selectmen have favored rules that determine a cutoff of 4 feet, 8 inches in height for passengers. Feel safer?
Organized and intense community effort across the Island and in Oak Bluffs is forcefully bringing moped rental practices into public view, despite the bureaucratic quagmire set out by Oak Bluffs officials. Two articles will appear by petition (meaning not as a result of selectmen action or leadership), largely through the work of the Island-wide citizen group Mopeds Are Dangerous Action Committee (MADAC). One is a nonbinding petition article asking, “Are you in favor of eliminating rental mopeds from Martha’s Vineyard”? The same question is being put to voters in each town.
The other, essential article, and the one that wouldn’t have been necessary had the selectmen years ago done their job of protecting public safety, reads, “To see if the town will vote to revoke licenses of the three moped rental businesses based on violations of 2004 bylaws.” It’s hard to understand why this dangerous form of visitor entertainment should survive, and even harder to understand why it enjoys town protection. In the face of common sense and tremendous and organized community sentiment, any further delays to ending moped rentals anywhere on the Island shouldn’t be tolerated.