After 148 Acres And $19 Million CHATHAM – Tax bills sent to property owners in May will be the last to include a 3 percent surcharge for the Cape Cod Land Bank, which ended Jan. 1 after 20 years. During those two decades, the town used more than $19 million in Land Bank funds to preserve 148 acres of open space. The latest and last purchase through the Land Bank, 4.17 acres of waterfront land on Goose Pond,...

CHATHAM – Monomoy Regional Middle School Principal Mark Wilson has thoroughly enjoyed his more than 34 years in education, but the time has come for a new adventure. On June 30, Wilson will retire in order to spend more time with his family. “For half my life I've been an administrator,” Wilson said in a Feb. 11 phone interview. “To do this job well you have to give the gift of time: coming in early, staying l...

CHATHAM – The town has had no word from National Grid regarding the incorrectly buried gas lines within the West Chatham Roadway Project area, and officials say work on the road reconfiguration may not resume until the fall. If that happens, the project may not be completed until December 2022, more than a year later than originally projected. The current schedule posted on the project's website shows utili...

CHATHAM – Shifting sands make for unstable ground, as the operator of a bulldozer working on the Outermost Harbor dredging project found out Saturday. The bulldozer was moving sand at a dewatering pond set up just outside and south of the harbor, the entrance to which is being dredged by Outermost Harbor Marine. “The sand just gave way underneath the bulldozer,” said Harbormaster Stuart Smith, and the machi...

CHATHAM – Shareen Davis announced this week that she will seek a second three-year term on the board of selectmen. Davis said she'd like to continue working on several initiatives that are important to her, including Chatham 365 and a new senior center. She also said she'd like to work to try to attract academic institutes to the town as a way to help focus on climate change. “We're really set here in town ...

CHATHAM – Selectmen set Saturday, March 7 as the date for a special town meeting to address a petition to consider property off Stepping Stones Road as a possible location for a new senior center. The board has yet to take a position on the proposal, submitted by a group of residents who say the site at 1610 Main St. in West Chatham currently being studied as a senior center location will be too expensive to d...

CHATHAM – A special town meeting will be held to consider an alternative site for a new senior center. A group of residents filed a petition last Thursday to investigate land off Stepping Stones Road that is part of the Monomoy Regional Middle School campus. The wooded 1.599 acres sits between the road and the Old Colony Rail Trail and is not currently being used by the school. Town Clerk Julie Smith certified...

CHATHAM – Juliet Bernstein remembers riding with her family in a horse-drawn surrey so that her mother could vote for the first time, following the passage of the 19th Amendment in 1920. “I was 7 but it truly impressed me,” she said in a recent email. Bernstein, who holds the Boston Post Cane as the town's oldest resident, suggested that the 100th anniversary of women gaining the right to vote would be an a...

Traveling Old Queen Anne Road and Route 137 over the next few months will take a bit of planning as sewer work moves into one of the area's busiest intersections. Sewer installation has pretty much closed down both the Chatham and Harwich sides of Route 137 for the past several weeks—or longer—but the advancement of the work into the intersection promises even more complications, detours and the need to plan y...

CHATHAM — At least on a trial basis, there are likely to be food trucks in a few locations in Chatham this summer. Working on a model regulation from Needham, selectmen are drafting a policy to allow mobile food vendors to operate with minimal impact on traditional restaurants, likely as part of a one-year pilot program. Chatham lacks a mechanism for specifically regulating mobile food vendors, and selectmen a...

CHATHAM — Construction of the new observation deck at the fish pier has missed its latest deadline for completion. The general contractor for the $1.6 million project, Sciaba Construction Corp., expected to have the job “substantially complete” by the end of January, Chief Financial Officer Michael Sheehan told The Chronicle last month. At their regular progress inspection Monday, railings had yet to be ins...

CHATHAM — The Chatham 365 Task Force and the town’s economic development committee have already identified steps the town can take to make itself a friendlier community for young families and other year-round residents. Now they’re seeking assurances that there’s a plan for implementing those ideas. On Monday, selectmen reviewed a list of recommendations it received from the task force in September and an anal...