ORLEANS — By a 3-2 margin last week, the select board approved a three-year contract for Town Administrator John Kelly. “I’ve served the town for nearly 24 years,” Kelly told the board, “and I remain committed to the town of Orleans… I expect this will be my final contract in Orleans and I want to see a smooth transition go forward.” That transition is something that board members Mark Mathison and Cecil ...

ORLEANS — There’s an old-timey feel about the town’s commercial wharf at Rock Harbor, but that’s not necessarily a good thing. Instead of enjoying end-in docking like the nearby area for charter boats, fishing vessels may have to tie up side to side. There are no floating docks for easy access; ladders are required to carry on equipment. The narrow channel between the Orleans and Eastham sides of the harbor ...

ORLEANS — F.W. Webb won’t build a 38,000-square-foot commercial building on the site of the old Underground Mall on Route 6A. Chief Operating Officer Bob Mucciarone confirmed Monday that the project will be withdrawn from review by the zoning board of appeals, and that last week’s denial by the Old King’s Highway Regional Historic District Committee will not be appealed. Asked if the company would try to fin...

Not only will the students at Cape Cod Regional Technical High School in Harwich have a new building to check out on their first day of school, but they’ll also have a new way of doing pretty much everything, as will students at Nauset Regional High School in Eastham. The new routines are part of the districts’ plans for the reopening of schools, which they must send to the state no later than Aug. 14. The ori...

ORLEANS — More than 13,000 herring disregarded pandemic travel advisories and swam and wriggled their way to Pilgrim Lake to spawn this year. “This is the largest run we’ve observed since I’ve been observing, 13 years,” Judy Scanlon told fellow members of the marine and fresh water quality task force July 27. She said herring warden Scott Johnson, who’s been keeping track of them even longer, agreed. “Thi...

ORLEANS — Greetings, Chronicle readers of the year 2070! You have just opened a time capsule that includes this newspaper, which was published on Aug. 6, 2020. Fifty years ago, elementary-age children in the town’s summer recreation program looked to the future and wrote cards and letters about their lives in the midst of a global pandemic, including pictures of themselves and their activities. Perhaps, afte...

NORTH EASTHAM – A surge in COVID-19 numbers on Cape Cod has necessitated another cancellation, this one impacting Nauset Regional High School’s Class of 2020, which had its planned July 28 commencement ceremony called off. In the wake of stories regarding an uptick in new cases following a July 12 party in Chatham that has so far resulted in 13 new COVID-19 cases, Nauset administrators, including Principal Chr...

ORLEANS — At an extraordinary online meeting of the town’s and regional school system’s leadership July 22, Nauset Superintendent Tom Conrad pledged that he and his colleagues will be “good partners and find ways to help each other in terms of saving precious dollars we have coming in from the community.” “We’re anxious to brainstorm with others and find ways to find savings to still serve educational needs ...

On Friday, Gov. Charlie Baker announced a new travel order that requires travelers coming to Massachusetts from most U.S. states to quarantine for 14 days or face fines of up to $500 per day. But with most of this season’s summer visitors to the Lower Cape coming from elsewhere in the state, the economic impact of the new order is expected to be minor. With limited exceptions, the order targets travelers comin...

ORLEANS – Painter Patty Barnes will be Eastwind Gallery’s featured artist through Saturday, Aug. 1 as the gallery presents the first showing of her series “Cape Cod Pandemic Heroes.” The series of oil paintings celebrates brave Cape Codders in many different occupations who have continued to work throughout the COVID-19 crisis. Barnes, who describes herself as primarily a landscape painter and whose work incl...

ORLEANS — Eastham and Orleans continue to struggle to find common ground on how to dredge the clogged-up Nauset Estuary. When it met July 23, the Nauset Estuary Dredging Stakeholder Group found agreement over the area to dredge but not the width of the new channel. “I was under the impression that we kind of sorted this out,” Eastham member and commercial fisherman Jonathan Granlund said, noting previous dis...

ORLEANS — Snow Library has been fighting back against the pandemic with on-line programs and curbside pick-up, the latter just expanded to six days a week. But the global crisis has prompted the state's library commissioners to forgo a new round of planning grants, one of which Snow trustees intended to seek in their effort to expand or build a new library. “We have been told by the Massachusetts Board o...