ORLEANS — It's a numbers game for the Snow Library facilities advisory committee these days. Looking 20 years into the future, members are debating the number of square feet library users will need in meeting and reading rooms, how many study carrels for individuals versus open tables for cooperative work, and how many adult seats for parents and grandparents in the children's room. It's all part of creating a ...

ORLEANS — The Friends of Pleasant Bay says it has identified a private backer/buyer to purchase Sipson Island. By January 2020, the group hopes to buy most of the 24-acre island from that backer for public open space and recreation, tapping $1.25 million to $1.75 million from the town's community preservation funds. It intends to bolster the CPC money with private fund-raising that will include a major contr...

ORLEANS — This town is known as the business hub of the Lower and Outer Cape, but it's also the human services hub. And that's due in no small part to the business community. With the holidays approaching and the need increasing, the Homeless Prevention Council (HPC) and the Lower Cape Outreach Council (LCOC), both headquartered in Orleans, are working hard to keep Cape Codders from Brewster and Harwich to P...

ORLEANS — They won't have a common plan when they meet with regulators to discuss dredging Nauset Estuary, but the selectmen of Eastham and Orleans will have a common purpose. The boards came together at Eastham's library Nov. 26 to air concerns about the key resource they share, one that Orleans fisherman Bill Amaru called “the prime jewel of the Outer Cape.” But the estuary has lost its sparkle, shoaling u...

ORLEANS — With no simple answers for how seals and sharks are affecting swimming off Outer Cape beaches, the best approach may be coming up with more complex questions. Shark and seal experts joined Cape Cod National Seashore leadership at Nauset Regional Middle School Nov. 14 for a public forum that laid out possibilities for better understanding the animals' behavior and using that knowledge to inform deci...

ORLEANS — The town's first taste of food trucks at Nauset Beach satisfied stomachs and, to an extent, revenue expectations. Payments didn't match those of the legendary Liam's, which in its last season before succumbing to erosion generated about $115,000 for the town, but came to around $63,000. The town spent $25,000 to install electricity and do other utility work, but with that in place things should loo...

ORLEANS — The affordable housing committee wants Cape Cod Five Cents Savings Bank to know the town remains interested in reusing the bank's soon-to-be former headquarters off West Road for housing. “It's important that they realize our enthusiasm is still there,” Selectman Mefford Runyon, his board's liaison to the committee, said at the committee's Nov. 7 meeting. The bank, whose new operations center is...

ORLEANS — The veterans memorial stones at Academy Place help townspeople remember those who fought in the nation's wars. And now the time has come to remember the stones themselves. Kevin Higgins, who chairs the Veterans and Memorial Day committee, and member General Jimmy Dishner appeared at last week's selectmen's meeting to ask for approval “to take a long, hard look at the entire memorial,” in the chairm...

ORLEANS — By a margin of 2,726 to 1,048 , voters Tuesday approved borrowing $1.1 million for an early stage of the Nauset Beach Retreat Master Plan, with the remaining $100,000 to come from the town's free cash. The emphatic endorsement means that the town will enhance the dune protecting its buildings and parking lot from the Atlantic Ocean, but it will do little to reduce the swirl of controversy over whe...

“ Tiny bubbles Make me warm all over With a feeling that I'm gonna Love you till the end of time.”                - Leon Pober ORLEANS — The Orleans Pond Coalition may not be prepared to aerate Sarah's Pond “till the end of time,” but it's all in on backing a two-year demonstration project using “tiny bubbles” to restore the pond's health. On Nov. 6, the conservation commission decided unanimou...

ORLEANS — For Charlie McFarlane, the senior center is a good place to visit. The Air Force veteran, who's 86, started coming to a chair fitness class several years ago and now regularly attends Day Center programs. “I haven't met a soul that wasn't a nice person,” said McFarlane. “What's interesting about this place is that it's like someone's standing at the front door saying, 'Come in.'” On Nov. 7 at 11...

ORLEANS — “A house divided against itself, cannot stand,” Abraham Lincoln said in 1858. Yet that's what town meeting did Oct. 29, standing to vote on an article banning recreational marijuana sales and illuminating a deep divide in the community. After more than an hour of passionate, sometimes tearful argument, voters approved the ban by 270 to 255. Then they amended and passed by voice vote rules and regul...