Rescinders Blocked

Posted on June 22, 2012 by Susanna J. Sturgis

Sometimes all a writer can do is scratch her head and wonder What the hell just happened here?

At its regular meeting last night, the Martha’s Vineyard Commission (MVC) considered commissioner Lenny Jason’s motion to rescind the roundabout vote. Lenny introduced a similar motion last November 3.  The tally was 6–5 in favor of rescission, but current MVC chair Chris Murphy then cast his vote, making it a 6–6 tie and thus defeating the motion. Commissioner Brian Smith, an articulate voice against the roundabout, was unavoidably out of the country at the time. Had he been present, the vote would have been 7–5 and the vote would have been rescinded.

Need we say more?

Mr. Murphy played a similar role at the initial vote on October 6, 2011. He broke a 6–6 tie to cast his vote in favor  of the roundabout — “for the Oak Bluffs selectmen,” he said. The Oak Bluffs selectmen, officially “the applicant,” are nominally responsible for this mess, but they’ve been royally enabled by, among others, MVC executive director Mark London, the Martha’s Vineyard Joint Transportation Committee, and the state Department of Transportation (MassDOT). At the time, in “Would Clicker Training Help the MVC?,” I noted that Mr. Murphy had “once again snatched stupidity from the jaws of reason” and that the word that came to mind was “schmuck.”

Anyway, Lenny Jason offered the MVC another chance to do the right thing. Once again they ducked it. Back in November, Mr. Jason noted that he was raised to believe that when one made a mistake, the honorable thing to do was acknowledge it. Several of his fellow commissioners were evidently raised differently. At the time, and again last night, they expressed concern that the MVC would lose credibility if they admitted that they’d goofed. I’m with Mr. Jason. If it turns out that my opinion of Mr. Murphy is unfair, I will certainly admit that I made a mistake.

This discussion was not a rehash of the last one, however. This time Chairman Murphy ruled Mr. Jason’s motion out of order, based on the opinion of MVC legal counsel that the MVC’s bylaws did not allow a vote to be rescinded. Counsel’s letter, which circulated at the meeting and of which I’ve just requested a copy, did not claim to be definitive, but that didn’t keep Mr. Murphy from hanging his hat on it. So Mr. Jason moved to overturn the chair’s ruling. This led to some pretty unfocused discussion, and a claim by commissioner Erik Hammarlund that a rescission vote would be illegal.

Said Sandra Lippens (right) after the meeting, “It isn’t over till the fat lady sings, and I’m the fat lady.” She runs Tilton Tents, which is ground zero for the proposed roundabout. At left is Trip Barnes. He was there too.

Mr. Hammarlund is a lawyer, which may explain why several commissioners took his opinion so seriously. Running through my mind, however, were the famous words attributed to Patrick Henry: “If this be treason, make the most of it.”

Patrick Henry isn’t on the MVC, sad to say. Four commissioners did vote to overturn the chair’s ruling and thus consider the rescission motion on its own merits: Lenny Jason, Brian Smith, Camille Rose, and Christina Brown. Bravo for them. They lost, 4–9.

No one mentioned that the move to rescind was purely symbolic, since the MVC had no standing to approve or reject the project in the first place.

The referendum results were barely mentioned: clearly the Vineyard public has no standing with the MVC.

The concerns raised by Messrs. Jason and Smith about the sloppiness of the MVC’s handling of the roundabout project were not addressed, or even acknowledged. I’m having a hard time mustering any confidence that the same sloppiness will not be repeated again. It’s probably being repeated even as I type these words.

It’s only just now dawning on some commissioners that they should have made the roundabout a development of regional impact (DRI) back in 2006 — before the Oak Bluffs board of selectmen sold our sovereignty to MassDOT for — what? not even a mess of pottage as far as I can tell.

The good news is that I came home 100% convinced that I’m doing the right thing by running for the Martha’s Vineyard Commission. I can make a positive contribution to the discussion, and support the others who think clearly and understand the implications of what they do. And one more thing: Every town must have at least one elected rep on the MVC, and no town can have more than two. My town, West Tisbury, already has two. The one I have the best chance of knocking off his stool is Erik Hammarlund. It would so be my pleasure to do exactly that.

My gut still says that this thing will never be built, but it’s also not telling me how it’s going to be stopped.

P.S. For good coverage of this portion of last night’s meeting, see Sonia Groff’s story in Martha’s Vineyard Patch.

Posted in Martha's Vineyard, public life | Tagged , , , , , , | 6 Comments

SMF’s Land Grab Continues

Posted on June 20, 2012 by Susanna J. Sturgis

The Sheriff’s Meadow Foundation (SMF) — a Vineyard conservation nonprofit that has long since lost sight of its founder’s mission — is still trying to steamroller Ben Ramsey and Nisa Counter into giving up their land on Blue Barque Road in Chilmark.

For a summary of the case, see “Slantwise.” It includes links to all my previous reports on the topic at the end.

Through the winter and spring I’ve been often asked what was going on with the case. Through the winter, the answer was “Not much.” Ben and Nisa were in Panama, where Nisa’s family lives and Ben had work. With the advent of spring, the slow grinding of Land Court law resumed.

Judge Alexander Sands has been consistently urging the parties to mediate. SMF has just as consistently refused. When the land dispute arose, Ben and Nisa tried to persuade SMF to agree to mediation. No dice, said SMF. They sued Ben and Nisa instead.

“Land Grab,” my first report on SMF vs. Ramsey & Counter, broke and still holds this blog’s record for most views — and it’s still being read.

Through its high-powered lawyer, Diane Tillotson, SMF said it wouldn’t mediate because it was afraid that the mediation sessions wouldn’t remain confidential. It fingered blogs (including this one) and “social media” as the potential blabbermouths. This is transparently a crock. (1) Ben and Nisa’s supporters (including me) have been using blogs and social media to get the word out because the island media, notably the Martha’s Vineyard Times, have been such staunch cheerleaders for SMF. (2) SMF’s real problem with blogs and social media seems to be that SMF can’t manipulate us the way it does the print media. (3) If small-town living teaches you nothing else, it teaches you when shutting up is the best thing to do. We’re not going to endanger the mediation process by spilling any beans.

Nevertheless, I and others decided to lay low. We didn’t want to freak Ms. Tillotson out. Maybe if Ms. Tillotson wasn’t freaked out, SMF would agree to mediate?

In your dreams, honey. Hasn’t happened. All that’s happened is that many people who’ve been following the case and haven’t heard anything in months think it’s all over and that Sheriff’s Meadow won.

Not so. The case is plodding its way toward a trial date in the fall. Ben and Nisa can’t afford counsel. Ben’s been doing the research and they’ve been representing themselves. SMF is still resisting mediation because it knows that mediation will focus on the facts of the case, rather than legal razzle-dazzle, and the facts are not on their side.

Now another summer is upon us. Many visitors and summer residents want to support organizations that promote conservation and try to protect everything that makes Martha’s Vineyard special. This is great! There are several worthy alternatives to SMF. Check out the Vineyard Conservation Society or the Vineyard Open Land Foundation or the Martha’s Vineyard Agricultural Society.

If you’re disturbed by SMF’s attempt to bully an island couple into giving up the land they purchased from Ben’s aunt, tell them so. Ask them why they’re so afraid of mediation. Hell, ask where they’re getting the money to pay their fancy lawyer. SMF executive director Adam Moore can be reached by phone at 508-693-5207 or by fax at 508-693-0683. SMF can be snail-mailed at:

Sheriff’s Meadow Foundation
Wakeman Conservation Center
57 David Avenue
Vineyard Haven, MA 02568

Or you can use the comment form on the SMF website.

Posted in Martha's Vineyard, public life | Tagged , , , , , , , | 6 Comments

On the Ballot

Posted on June 19, 2012 by Susanna J. Sturgis

It took less than a week for the town clerk to certify my signatures and get my nomination paper stamped by three of the town’s registrars of voters. Why does it take three registrars to certify that a candidate is registered to vote at the address she says she’s registered at? I don’t know, but as a Massachusetts native I’m sure that past political shenanigans made this precaution seem prudent.

Anyway, the town clerk called me, and I went down to town hall to pick my paper up.

Five of my 29 signatures turned out to be invalid: three because the voters didn’t give their street addresses, one because the signature was illegible, and one (I think) because the voter printed her name instead of signing it. Memo to self: If you ever do this again, pay closer attention to what your signers are doing or not doing.

That still left me with 24 valid signatures, 14 more than I needed, so I photocopied both sides of the paper and mailed the original off to the secretary of state’s office. Massachusetts being one of the four states that is officially a commonwealth, William F. Galvin is officially the secretary of the commonwealth of Massachusetts, but even state documents sometimes call him the secretary of state. The nation’s secretary of state deals with foreign policy. The commonwealth’s secretary of state administers elections, publishes and distributes an array of documents, and manages all sorts of written records, among other things.

Yesterday I received confirmation that my papers had been received on June 15. I am now officially “on ballot unless otherwise notified.”

The first item on the checklist is my signature following the statement “I accept the nomination.” The enrollment certificate is those three registrars swearing that I live where I say I live. The ethics receipt signifies that I’ve filed the Statement of Financial Interests with the State Ethics Commission. That’s the biggest hurdle this newbie candidate has cleared yet. A gold star would have been appreciated, but I’ll settle for the checkmark.

What’s really astonishing about this is that nomination papers aren’t due at the town clerk’s office till July 31 and they don’t have to be filed with the secretary of the commonwealth until August 28. I’m a chronically just-under-the-wire girl, and not infrequently I’m a little bit late. (Fashionably late? Never!) This time I’m two and a half months early.

This is good. Thursday night I’m going to my first Martha’s Vineyard Commission meeting since last fall. Commissioner Lenny Jason plans to introduce another motion to rescind the roundabout vote. If I weren’t on record as having accepted the nomination, I might decide (not for the first time) that running for the MVC is a monumentally stupid idea.

Or maybe I’ll decide that running is a good idea and it would even be OK if I got elected. I hear there were some fireworks at the last meeting, when Lenny merely announced that his intention to file another rescission motion. This part of the meeting seems to have gone missing from the MVTV video record. I’m taking my Flip camcorder just in case.

P.S. an hour later: I just watched the last few minutes of the June 7 MVC meeting. Lenny gets the floor around 2:52 and the tape ends when the chair closes the meeting at almost 3:08. Most of the discussion is about procedure. If there were any fireworks, they happened after the meeting. I’m taking my Flip anyway.

Posted in Martha's Vineyard, public life | Tagged , , | 6 Comments

No Dogs! No No No!

Posted on June 16, 2012 by Susanna J. Sturgis

Trav and sign #1

So last December the West Tisbury Parks and Recreation committee threw up a NO DOGS sign on the new public basketball court near the West Tisbury School. Trav and I had been using it a few mornings a week for short, five- to ten-minute off-leash training sessions. The court had several advantages: it’s within a half mile of where I live, it’s securely fenced and gated, and when we were there — usually before 8 a.m. — there was never anyone playing or practicing basketball.

I went to a Parks & Rec meeting to see if they’d lift the ban on dogs and let Trav and me do our thing there when no one was shooting baskets. No way.

I went back to using the tennis court, which is right next to the basketball court and has all the same advantages. I’d been using it without incident since the fall of 2009; I only started using the basketball court because the tennis court is padlocked in the summer and last summer the newly built basketball court wasn’t. In December, Parks & Rec had only come up with two reasons for NO DOGS that held any water at all: (1) that the court was brand-new (what if my dog pooped on it??), and (2) that if people saw me and Trav training there, pretty soon everybody else would want to do likewise.

Tennis, anyone?

Neither reason applied to the tennis court. (1) The tennis court is in crappy shape, and (2) in the nearly three years that I’ve been using it, people have not been queuing up to use it with their dogs. Tennis players aren’t queueing up to use it either, even in the off-season, when the gate is unlocked and no fee is charged. When someone does show up to play tennis, Trav and I are outta there: it is a tennis court, after all, and we can come back anytime.

Well, until yesterday we could come back anytime. Yesterday this sign went up on the tennis court.

Since I’ve yet to see anyone biking, skateboarding, or rollerblading on the tennis court, and Trav is the only dog I’ve seen there in months, I assume that the sign’s primary purpose is to keep me from training Trav on the tennis court.

Why? Good question. We always make way for tennis players. In nearly three years we haven’t damaged anything: the surface and the nets are deteriorating without anyone’s help. (I do pick up trash that other people leave behind, but since the court is so rarely used, this doesn’t amount to much.) No one has ever questioned my presence there — not to my face, anyway — but I have had plenty of conversations about dogs and dog training with people who’ve stopped to watch us.

It’s a good question for other reasons too. As noted in “Dogged,” which I posted earlier this month, tensions have been running high in town where dogs are concerned, especially about dogs on Lambert’s Cove Beach, dogs killing livestock, and unrestrained dogs in general. Travvy is an Alaskan malamute, a breed noted for its prey drive, and Travvy’s prey drive runs strong. We’ve got free-ranging fowl in my neighborhood, not to mention cats, so when we go out Travvy is either on-leash or attached to the Springer that’s clamped onto my bicycle.

Trav and I compete in Rally obedience. (See “Rally Off-Island” for more about “Rally-O.”) Although I’m very new to dog training and Alaskan malamutes are not noted for their aptitude for obedience, we’ve been having modest success in off-island competition and in Cyber Rally-O, an ingenious Rally venue where you set up a prescribed course, video yourself and your dog doing it, and submit the video for judging. At the level we’re at, all competition is off-leash. You see where I’m going with this? I rent. I don’t have a fenced-in yard. Securely fenced areas and large indoor spaces are very hard to come by on Martha’s Vineyard.

The tennis court was perfect: secure, big enough, usually vacant, and (icing on the cake) close to where I live.

And now it’s no dogs allowed.

Yes, we could work off-leash in an unfenced area. Eighty, 85, maybe even 90 percent of the time Trav would be fine. I, however, would be a nervous wreck. One rustle in the underbrush, a rabbit, squirrel, cat, or skunk, and he’d be gone. His reflexes are much better than mine. And when I’m uneasy, Trav picks up on it and wonders what’s so scary; he becomes hyper-aware of every sound and smell around him.

I want to continue training and competing with my dog. I’m trying to be a responsible dog owner. Parks and Rec is making this very difficult.

And for no good reason.

Don’t panic — this was taken before the sign went up.

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I Hate Fresh Fruits & Vegetables

Posted on June 13, 2012 by Susanna J. Sturgis

The other day X declared that she’d taken to her bed with raw spinach poisoning. A friend noted that X’s symptoms sounded suspiciously like those of the nasty stomach bug she herself had just gotten over, and she had not recently consumed any raw spinach.

X may have been joking, but I suspect she wasn’t. Some days Martha’s Vineyard seems like a parody of itself, and the parody factor runs especially high where food is concerned. Among a certain segment of the island population, food has become the basis of a secular religion, and with good reason: it offers many of the attractions of the non-secular kind, not least a crack at salvation and many opportunities to preach, or at least feel superior, to the non-foodie heathen. Among whom, of course, I count myself.

What follows originally appeared in my old Bloggery on September 7, 2007. September is harvest time on Martha’s Vineyard, hence the anxiety that lurks between the lines.

* * * * *

The other day I read that we’d all be better off if we ate more fresh fruits and vegetables, and despite the eminent rationality of the statement what it made me want to eat immediately was a chocolate bar. There wasn’t one handy, so I poured another beer.

I do eat vegetables, in moderation of course. This is one of my summer staples. All the ingredients came from Reliable Market, with the possible exception of the carrots, which had been in the fridge long enough that I’m not sure where they came from.

It’s fresh-fruit-and-vegetable season where I live. I don’t have to go looking for fresh fruits and vegetables: they come looking for me, fresh vegetables in particular, the excess from friends’ gardens. A surfeit of fresh vegetables makes this single girl anxious. They’re a deadline hanging over my head: Eat me before I transform into a gelatinous mess in your refrigerator. The vegetables I buy are generally the ones that keep, if not indefinitely then at least long enough for me to get around to doing something with them: carrots, potatoes, onions, broccoli. A couple of days ago I made a big bowl of my favorite salad: garbanzos, soaked and quick-cooked; a medium-size red onion, chopped; a pound of carrots, shredded; two or three broccoli crowns, pulled apart into bite-size florets; a half pound of feta cheese, crumbled; and a handful of raisins. After ten days or so in the fridge, it’ll start to look a little mushy, but it still tastes good and besides it’s usually gone by then.

This year my dinghy garden includes lettuce. I can add a few leaves to my supper without the rest of a head going gooey in the refrigerator. This is nice, but my real motive for gardening is year-round pesto.

Notice that my salad doesn’t include lettuce, or anything green and leafy. Fresh vegetables in general make me anxious; fresh leafy green stuff scares me to death. I love spinach, but buying it is like installing a time bomb in my fridge: if I don’t get to it immediately, it’s in there ticking away, wilting and browning and turning gelatinous around the edges. At that point I can barely bring myself to look in the crisper, whereupon the ticking accelerates and the day fast approaches when the spinach I bought in good faith will resemble something that died on the road. There’s currently no spinach in my fridge, but there are lettuce, and fennel, and another leafy thing (chard?), as well as two modest zucchini. Tick tick tick . . .

That’s another thing about fresh fruits and vegetables: they’re labor-intensive. Some more than others, of course: peeling a banana takes no time at all, which is why I’ve usually got a bunch in residence, except when the fruit flies are bad. Grapefruit, on the other hand, is too damn much work. I buy grapefruit juice instead. Ditto spinach: before you can eat it, you have to rinse and spin it, and maybe break the stalks off, and then either put it in a salad or steam it. When I come home from the barn at the end of the day, I’m ravenous, and since I live alone, supper is never ready when I get there. My culinary repertoire runs to the quick (grilled cheese sandwiches, omelets, micro-zapped potatoes) and the long-lived — quiche, casseroles, chili, soup, and the like, which require a considerable initial investment of time but then become fast food for another week or two.

My culinary repertoire also includes, of course, bread. Baking bread is less labor-intensive than it looks, and none of the ingredients are tick-tick-ticking on my shelves: most of them don’t care if I don’t get to them till tomorrow or the next day or two months from now. A thick slice of fresh bread turns a handful of baby carrots or cherry tomatoes into a meal. Baking bread has another advantage. Once people know you bake all your own bread, it never occurs to them that many of your vegetables are frozen and most of the fruit is canned.

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Fear

Posted on June 10, 2012 by Susanna J. Sturgis

I’ve been thinking about fear since last Tuesday’s special town meeting. Well, no: I’ve been thinking about fear since my right retina detached in the summer of 2004 and set me on the road that led to “My Terrorist Eye: Risk, the Unexpected, and the War on Terrorism” (which holds up pretty well, I think; but it is almost 6,000 words long). Probably I’ve been thinking about it a long longer than that, but the nation’s response to 9/11 focused my thinking and made me think harder.

Last Tuesday’s special was mainly about dogs, specifically about the restraint thereof and the picking up of poop therefrom. What got me thinking about fear was a story that one woman told from the town meeting floor. It went something like this:

This woman, I’ll call her Rose, had a friend with several very well trained dogs, all of a breed that is fairly large but also known for its “biddability,” meaning its members are generally predisposed to do without fuss whatever the humans want them to do. (Alaskan malamutes are rarely accused of being biddable. Alaskan malamutes are known for asking “What’s in it for me?”) Rose sometimes looked after these dogs, or went walking with the dogs and her friend, and thoroughly enjoyed doing so.

Then one day, Rose, friend, and four dogs were out walking on the bike path in the state forest. In most places the bike path has wide shoulders, grassy and/or sandy. The dogs were off-leash. A jogger was approaching on the paved path. The dogs, being of a gregarious breed, ran toward him. The man, said Rose, looked terrified. The dog owner called her dogs back, and they returned to her. (Color me jealous, temporarily at least.) But the look on the man’s face stuck in Rose’s mind. She balanced this against the pleasure of watching well-trained dogs running free and decided (1) that she would no longer walk with her friend’s dogs if they were off-leash, and (2) that she was in favor of a leash law, even in open spaces like the state forest (where dogs are already supposed to be leashed but often aren’t).

Rose told her story clearly; her words were heartfelt, but she wasn’t condemning anybody, even the friend who continues to let her dogs run off-leash. Part of me was persuaded: Yes, a leash law is justified if it saves one passerby the rush of adrenaline that comes from being terrified. And yet, and yet . . .

Me and Allie at a M.V. Horse Council pace ride, ca. 2005.

Between 1999 and 2010 I spent a lot of time riding horseback on dirt roads, even paved roads, and all over the state forest and all the Land Bank and other trails I could get to. My mare, Allie, was sensible but a bit spooky, and she was only three and a half years old when I got her. I don’t think I ever rode out without being aware that a situation might arise that I couldn’t handle. If you ride, you’ve heard all the horror stories, and you probably know the people who survived them (and, in one case, the person who didn’t).

Often enough a real situation made my heart start to pound. Hearing a dirt bike heading possibly in my direction, and making so much noise that the biker could have no idea that I was around the next bend in the trail — that would usually do it. A few times my adrenaline went way over the top. Once the flag in front of the Granary Gallery blew out just as I was riding past it; Allie jumped three feet sideways into Old County Road, missing a passing car (which had not slowed a whit when it saw a horse up ahead) by about 18 inches. One of Allie’s biggest freakouts came the first time we encountered a fellow in a wheelchair wheeling at speed on the bike path. Fortunately we knew him, and he knew horses well enough to recognize an equine freakout when he saw one: he stopped till I could get Allie under control.

During last Tuesday’s town meeting, I thought about quite a few of these incidents. I remembered the two Jack Russells that regularly came barking after us at the end of Tiah’s Cove Road, near the trailhead for the Land Bank’s Sepiessa Point property: the proposed leash law wouldn’t have stopped them from terrifying a horse because they did their barking from the edge of their owner’s property. As Rose told the story of the terrified jogger, I realized that it had never occurred to me to demand a ban on roadside flag flying or wheelchairs on the bike path, or double-wide baby strollers on the old Holmes Hole road, or anything else that had ever scared my horse and threatened my peace of mind.

Travvy, me, and the Red Menace when both the bike and the Springer were new, late 2009.

Dirt bikes were a slightly different matter. They weren’t supposed to be there, but that sure didn’t keep them off the trails, byways, and bike paths. Enforcing the law is pretty much a joke because the territory is large and dirt bikers can go places that law enforcement can’t. So whatever the potential hazard, legal or illegal, it was up to me as a trail rider to weigh the risks against the benefits and make my own choice. I chose to keep riding. These days I choose to keep bike riding with Travvy hooked to the Springer even though he’s reactive and there are plenty of potential hazards out there. You bet I get nervous sometimes, and I can cuss a blue streak when someone does something really stupid or even just unexpected in my vicinity. But I continue to do it, and I’m not ratting on the unleashed dogs I see in the state forest or anywhere else.

What it comes down to, as so many issues do these days, is what we’re willing to give up for — not safety, really, but the illusion of safety. In the end, though I’m moved by Rose’s story, I don’t believe that sparing one person the rush of adrenaline that comes with being afraid is by itself a good reason for enacting a law without examining it critically first. Leash laws, on Martha’s Vineyard and elsewhere, are very small potatoes, but the Patriot Act, passed in the wake of 9/11, certainly isn’t. I continue to believe that it resulted from a cosmic freakout by very privileged people — mostly white, mostly male, and all USian — who until 9/11 thought they were safe. Most of the rest of us knew better and had already learned to deal with it.

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A Candidate’s Progress

Posted on June 9, 2012 by Susanna J. Sturgis

One month to the day after I picked up the instructions and a blank petition (see “Rumor Control” for the backstory), I filed my nomination papers to run for the Martha’s Vineyard Commission (MVC). This required a trip to Town Hall. The town clerk doesn’t come in on Thursday, but her assistant skimmed my petition and duly stamped it at the top with Thursday’s date.

It’s not due till July 31, and since the 10 signatures required seemed ridiculously low, I filled all the blank spaces, for a total of 29 bona fide if barely legible signatures of West Tisbury voters. There would have been 30, but I had to cross out the nice fellow from Chilmark who didn’t realize that my petition was for West Tisbury voters only. Candidates can collect signatures from any town, but each town’s voters have to be OKed by their own town clerk. So it’s easiest to get them all in one town.

Collecting signatures, it turns out, was the easy part about getting myself duly nominated. Along with your 10 signatures, you have to present a receipt certifying that you’ve filed the Statement of Financial Interests (SFI) required by the State Ethics Commission. Yeow! Being an editor by trade and a writer by avocation, I expect that with some effort I will be able to decipher most documents written in English. The SFI totally buffaloed me. It buffaloed me worse than anything I’ve tried to read since the last time I tried to read the instructions for Form 1040, and that was a long time ago: the tax forms are easier to fill out if you don’t read the instructions.

The SFI is written in a legal/financial dialect that I’m barely acquainted with, so filling it out took several days of hair-tearing and procrastination. Fortunately my sister not only has an MBA, she’s been a selectman and a school committee member in her (off-island) town and she’s even run for state rep. The State Ethics Commission was also very helpful. Clearly they’re used to dealing with buffaloed newbie candidates.

The name and address part of the SFI was easy. The rest was hard.

Yes, disclosure of financial interests by various candidates and elected and appointed officials is important, but don’t other unsuspecting candidates find the SFI intimidating? The real high-stakes players, the ones with financial interests hefty enough to influence their politicking, almost surely have lawyers and accountants working overtime to make those interests look as innocuous as possible — and, of course, to tell them how to fill out the SFI.

My “investments” aren’t likely to influence any vote I make if I’m elected to the MVC, mainly because until I filled out the SFI I didn’t know what they were. In late 2009, the house I grew up in was sold, and I, along with my three siblings, each wound up with a chunk of money that was a little too big to stuff under the mattress or put in a savings account. So I marched myself down to Martha’s Vineyard Financial Group, which is affiliated with my bank, and asked if they could do something with this money that would help me ward off destitution as an old person — and maybe even allow me to edit less and write more?

So as of the end of 2011 (the period stipulated by the SFI) these were my financial interests:

My financial interests

I’m a chronic tenant and consider myself landless, but this is not quite true. My parents dragged me to the Vineyard in 1965, when I was 14. I bugged out as soon as I could, but my father loved the place. In the early 1970s he bought four acres of land on Thumb Point, Tisbury Great Pond, and built an old-style summer camp there — for, IIRC, a total of $45,000.

After I became a city girl, in 1969, the Vineyard started to grow on me. In what may have been the biggest mistake of my life — I won’t know for sure till after I’m dead — I moved here year-round in 1985. The family camp, being unwinterized, unelectrified, and down two miles of rough dirt road, gradually moved to the peripheries of my psychic map.

In the early 1990s, my father created the Sturgis Family Trust. He was the trustee, my siblings and I the beneficiaries, and the pond camp the trust’s sole possession. My father died in 2008. My sibs and I are, in effect, the owners of the pond camp. I hardly ever think about the pond camp, but the SFI said I had to deal with it. Fair enough: the pond camp was pretty much the only financial interest I had that might possibly be relevant to a Martha’s Vineyard Commissioner.

Well, it took a consultation with my sister and a couple of calls to the State Ethics Commission, but this is what I came up with:

If you catch me making a sleazy vote against eutrophication of Tisbury Great Pond, that might be the financial interest behind it. Or maybe not.

Finally I got to the end and swore that I’d done my best to come up with the required information and it was all true to the best of my knowledge. Whew. I collected my signatures and took them and the coveted and utterly necessary receipt down to the town clerk’s office on Thursday.

I am, indeed, a candidate for the Martha’s Vineyard Commission.

And you know what? Yesterday morning I woke up to the news that commissioner Lenny Jason had announced his intention to file a motion to rescind the roundabout vote at the next MVC meeting, on June 21. Yesterday was my 61st birthday. It’s an omen. I’m on the right track.

 

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The Politics of Personalities

Posted on June 6, 2012 by Susanna J. Sturgis

Neither the town of West Tisbury, the commonwealth of Massachusetts, nor the United States of America is going to stand or fall based on the votes that were taken at last night’s special town meeting. Most of them were about dogs. One dealt with paving the parking lot shared by the library and the Howes House, home of the Up-Island Council on Aging. Another provided that the town pay its “one-third share of training and related services provided to the Tri-Town Ambulance staff during fiscal year 2013.” The latter was moved, seconded, and approved on a voice vote in less time than it took me to type that quote from it.

On the dog-related issues, though, and even the one about the parking lot, perspectives and positions differed. The voters may have looked like a homogeneous group, but we weren’t. We’re diverse, and our diversity has little to do with sex, race, or how we vote in national elections. And diversity is messy. It’s messy in part because most of us have a really hard time distinguishing principles from personalities, especially when the personalities belong to people we know and, in many cases, like and respect.

Take Article 2, “Restraint of Dogs.” Article 2 was meant to replace a bylaw that’s been in effect since the mid-1970s. That bylaw specified that “All dogs owned or kept within the limit of the Town shall be restrained from running at large or shall be kept within the immediate control of their owners and keepers.” Article 2 struck that sentence and replaced it with this:

“No person who owns or keeps a dog shall allow the animal under his care to run free when not restricted to the premises of said owner or keeper. When off premises of the owner or keeper, all dogs shall be leashed or restricted.”

Is this dog properly restricted?

“Restricted” is terminally vague — is it OK for someone to take her dog “off premises” in a motor vehicle? — and a selectman offered an amendment to clarify it by, among other things, extending an exemption to dogs being used in hunting or herding. This went from vague to vaguer. And none of Article 2’s supporters managed to explain how the new version improved on the old.

While we’re at it — does “leashed” include retractable leads and longlines? I’ve seen a few dogs on Flexis that are pretty much out of control.

But Article 2 got worse. Here’s the second paragraph:

“No dog shall be allowed to deposit feces not removed by the dog’s owner or keeper upon any property other than that of the dog’s owner or keeper.”

Does a dog poop in the woods? Trav and me at Sepiessa, January 2011.

Leave aside the clumsy wording, which focuses on the dog’s behavior rather than the obligation of the owner/keeper. Objection #1: I don’t own any property. Does that mean Travvy can’t legally poop anywhere? Objection #2: Did the drafters of this article realize how much scrubby underbrush there is in this town? Some of it is privately owned, some is in conservation, some is open to the public. No one walks on any of it. That’s where Trav likes to poop when he’s on his Flexi lead. Am I going to follow him through the brambles and poison ivy and retrieve the feces he has so discreetly deposited out of sight and way off the path?

I am not, and I said so on the town meeting floor.

Which brings me to the third and last paragraph of Article 2, which begins as follows:

“Any person violating any provision of this by-law shall be punished by a fine of $50 for the first offense, $100 for the second offense, and $250 for the third and subsequent offenses . . .”

So if I decline to pick up poop that my dog has deposited in the underbrush, I will soon be hit with a $250 fine for each offense?

Here’s where the discussion got really interesting. A police officer and the animal control officer (ACO) both strongly implied that they would not in most instances attempt to enforce this part of the bylaw — or, as I understand it, the “leashed or restricted” part either. So the bylaw wanted to turn me and plenty of other responsible dog owners into chronic, albeit unpunished, scofflaws, in the interest of pursuing those other dog owners, the irresponsible ones who let their dogs run loose and get into trouble? And this is supposed to be OK because we trust our police officers and our ACO?

Do we understand what the “rule of law” is about and why it’s important? We all seem to understand it in the abstract, but our understanding flies out the window when people we know and like are involved. A good law doesn’t require stellar individuals to enforce it fairly. A good law can be enforced by the merely competent, and it shouldn’t contain loopholes that the less-than-competent, capricious, or downright unscrupulous can exploit at their discretion. Article 2 was poorly thought out and sloppily written. Saying so and voting against it implies nothing about one’s regard for the ACO and the police force. Opposing the Parks and Recreation Committee’s attempt to ban dogs entirely from Lambert’s Cove Beach implies nothing about one’s regard for the committee or its members.

But in both cases disrespect and even hostility to the personalities have been widely inferred from opposition to the policies they’ve sponsored or supported. This is nothing new. It happens all the time, and not just in small-town government. It’s 100% natural, but it’s also a big problem. It discourages people from speaking up, for fear that even their most tactful criticism of a policy will be perceived as a personal attack. (It doesn’t, however, seem to discourage people from making less-than-tactful comments in private.) It gives public officials an out: if they perceive all criticism as personally motivated, they don’t have to think too hard about the policies they’re pushing.

And that, I suspect, is why Article 2 was so poorly thought out and sloppily written: The drafters weren’t listening to people who would be affected by it. Input from dog owners would have made it clearer, more specific, and better suited to its intended purpose. Input from a competent editor wouldn’t have hurt either. The same goes for the ban-the-dogs effort in general.

Town meetings offer plenty of insight into what democracy is and why it’s important. We get so caught up in high-flown rhetoric about freedom, democracy, justice, etc., etc., that we tend to think of them as shiny jewels that can be ceremoniously presented in a velvet-lined box, or maybe a perfectly prepared turkey that can be carved and served up at a holiday dinner. They aren’t. Self-governance is messy, sometimes contradictory, often infuriating, and very rarely over and done with. It asks a lot of its participants. It’s not hard to see why despots and dictators are sure it’ll never work.

Posted in dogs, Martha's Vineyard, musing, public life | Tagged , , , , , , | 5 Comments

Dogged

Posted on June 4, 2012 by Susanna J. Sturgis

Last November, at a special town meeting (STM), West Tisbury voters very narrowly voted to ban dogs from Lambert’s Cove Beach between June 15 and September 15. Up till then dogs had been allowed on the beach before 10 a.m. and after 5 p.m. No provision was made for enforcing this expanded ban, beyond the implicit expectation that the animal control officer (ACO) or one of West Tisbury’s finest would drop everything and rush to the beach to bust the perp if a violation were reported.

Yeah, right. Like the ACO and the police have nothing better to do, and like Lambert’s Cove Beach isn’t a considerable distance from the nearest road, and like the miscreant(s) wouldn’t be long gone by the time the authorities got there.

Friends of Lambert’s Cove Beach flyer

Dogs on the beach came up again at the annual town meeting (ATM) in April. Over the winter an ad hoc group, Friends of Lambert’s Cove Beach, had been working to come up with a plan that would facilitate peaceful coexistence between canine and human beachgoers during off-peak summer hours. See “Dogs on the Beach” for my take on the issues involved. Town meeting voted to allow dogs on the beach between 7 and 10 a.m.

There’s another STM in my town tomorrow night. Guess what seven of the ten articles on the warrant are about? You got it: dogs. But it’s no longer just about Lambert’s Cove Beach. Article 2 stipulates, among other things, that “No dog shall be allowed to deposit feces not removed by the dog’s owner or keeper upon any property other than that of the dog’s owner or keeper.”

Eh wot? Does this mean that if Travvy poops 15 or 20 feet off the side of a road, trail, or bike path, which is where he usually poops while on his Flexi lead, I’m supposed to bushwhack through the brambles, scrub, and poison ivy to pick it up? Ain’t gonna happen. And when I let that poop lie where my dog “deposited” it, will an ACO, police officer, or member of the town’s parks and recreation committee appear from behind a tree to fine me $50 (first offense), $100 (second offense), or $250 (third and subsequent offenses)? I doubt that too. There’s no way a handful of people can monitor every square foot of off-road scrub in West Tisbury.

And the point of making rules and imposing fines that can’t be enforced is — what?

What Parks & Rec really needs is a weed whacker to get their tennis courts in shape for summer.

Articles 5 and 6 on the STM warrant seek a total of $6,513.21 to pay an assistant ACO to supervise dogs on the beach for the remainder of this fiscal year and the next one. Articles 7 and 8 seek a total of $9,162.94 for additional parking lot attendants for the same period. Some have raised the question of whether the current parking lot attendants are so overworked that their hours can’t be rearranged to cover the morning dogs-on-the-beach hours. What intrigues me is that last fall the Parks and Recreation Committee pushed for a total ban on dogs on the beach from June 15 to September with absolutely no mention of how it was going to be enforced and what enforcement might cost.

I also note that Article 4 asks the town to approve the transfer of $7,000 that wasn’t used in the construction of the new basketball court to fund Parks & Rec’s proposed new basketball program. I suggest that if Parks & Rec really thinks additional parking lot attendants are necessary, it might forgo this new basketball program for another year and spend the money on parking lot attendants.

Wouldn’t it be nice if the Parks and Recreation Committee acknowledged that for many town residents “recreation” includes dogs?

The new basketball court was a great place to do early-morning dog training — until Parks & Rec threw the NO DOGS sign up late last fall.

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Shoelaces

Posted on June 2, 2012 by Susanna J. Sturgis

A summer’s worth of footwear. Shoes are second from right.

Nearly all my shoes are boots. I do possess one pair of genuine shoes (sensible, of course), along with a pair of sneakers and an ancient pair of Birkenstock knockoffs, but most of my shoes are boots.

When I was a kid, I thought I’d know I was a grown-up when I started drinking coffee and wearing high heels. It never dawned on me that these were acquired tastes — that they did not happen automatically like, say, breasts, pubic hair, and periods. My mother drank coffee and wore high heels. I, like my father before me, am a morning tea drinker. I did become a recreational coffee drinker in my early thirties, but to this day I’m baffled that anyone would choose to wear high heels if they weren’t being well paid to do so. Since I’m less than a week shy of my 61st birthday, I’ve pretty much given up on growing up, at least in this lifetime.

A few weeks ago the lace on one of my lightweight hiking boots, the ones I wear on my long morning walks with Travvy, started to come apart: the woven exterior peeled back from the core, making it hard to tie. The tying got harder and harder. 72-inch laces aren’t all that easy to find (surprising, considering how many people around here, male and female, wear work boots and hiking boots), and the selection was limited to rawhide, rawhide, and rawhide. I don’t like rawhide, but hey, necessity is the mother of settling for less, so I bought a pair. One snapped the first time I tightened them up. I knotted it and carried on. Within the week it had broken again. I made another knot. Did I say I don’t like rawhide laces?

Hiking boots with mismatched laces

Thursday at up-island Cronig’s I spotted a few 72-inch laces hanging among the 24s, 36s, and 45s. True, they were more suitable for high tops than hiking boots and only came in bright white, but they sure beat the twice-knotted rawhide so I bought a pair. This morning I managed to replace the broken lace but ran out of steam before I got to the other boot. It takes considerable time to thread a lace through four pairs of lugs, even when the lace has aglets. Aglets are the hard cylindrical tips that make laces easier to lace. Rawhide laces don’t have them. The only way to get them through the lugs on my hiking boots was to wrap the ends with Scotch tape. Did I say I don’t like rawhide laces?

Did you know that there’s a whole website devoted to shoelaces? I discovered Ian’s Shoelace Site while procrastinating resting up after the arduous task of lacing one boot. This is how I can toss words like aglet and lug around like a shoelace pro. Check it out. Ian says that there are two trillion different ways to lace a boot or shoe with six pairs of eyelets but he only illustrates 37 of the more useful ones. As soon as I finish this blog, I’m going to follow the site’s links and see if I can find more interesting laces for my hiking boots.

Plenty of people think shoelaces are too much PITA to deal with and sometimes I agree, like when the crappy rawhide lace broke the first time I tightened it — after I’d wrapped the ends in Scotch tape in order to thread the lace through the lugs. Slip-ons are convenient, but slip-ons tend to stretch with wear and the only way to snug them up again is to wear heavier socks. With laces, footwear continues to fit until it falls apart. Laces will not keep a boot from falling apart, but they will keep it snug across the instep.

Like most devices that hold things together, shoelaces are low-tech. Think about it. Paper clips, clamps, staples, Scotch tape, Band-Aids, wire, baling twine, bungee cords, even Velcro — the only thing digital about them is that they’re manipulated by fingers. They may not make the world go round, but they do make it more coherent.

My malamute sneakers

 

 

 

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