Using new lawyers but spelling out the same themes, the developers
of the Down Island Golf Club filed a lawsuit against the Martha's
Vineyard Commission late last week, attacking everything from the recent
vote to reject a luxury golf course project in the southern woodlands to
the enabling legislation that created the commission.
Listening to the banter of benchwarmers in front of the Edgartown town hall, it's hard to tell if it's 1972, 1982, 1992 or 2002.
The characters have changed, but the themes stayed the same. The building trade is booming. There's a new home on every corner. The town can't house its young people.
"We've always been talking about growth. We've always thought we're growing too fast," said Larry Mercier, lifelong Edgartown resident and respected town official.
Emotions ran high throughout the final night of public testimony regarding a Chapter 40B affordable housing development that, if approved, would place 20 homes on 4.9 acres of land near Tisbury's center.
The Martha's Vineyard Commission backed away Thursday night from a push to redraw the Vineyard Golf Club's Island membership plan.
Commission members dropped the issue of the subjective selection process citing not principles, but politics. Commissioners openly acknowledged that pushing for a lottery system could do more harm than good, threatening an already strained relationship with a town board.
The way golf enthusiasts talk about the Island’s newest course — which officially opened just over a week ago off Edgartown-West Tisbury Road in Edgartown — you expect to see guys walking around the clubhouse wearing kilts.
Well, don’t worry. The course at the Vineyard Golf Club may be unforgiving Scottish-inspired design, but the garb is just the kind of pastel microfiber blends you’ll find on most any golf course in the country.
Make that private course. A membership costs about $300,000.
Getting out was hard.
When Tisbury and Edgartown voted to withdraw from the Martha's Vineyard Commission in the late 1970s, what followed was a procedural and political tangle that went on for years.
In Tisbury, the fight was over the second slip for the Steamship Authority. In Edgartown, it was about the rules for the coastal district of critical planning concern.
By the time both towns rejoined the commission in 1984, the tumult had died down, deep political divisions had faded and few people remembered what the fight had been all about in the first place.
