Superintendent Scott Carpenter has presented his draft fiscal 2018 spending plan for the Monomoy Regional School District, including an operating budget that's up nearly 5.5 percent over the current budget. The $38,115,065 draft spending plan includes a $35.5 million operating budget, plus $2.6 million in debt service and $305,000 in capital expenses. All tolled, it would be a 4.8 percent increase over this ye...

Some elementary school students could be boarding buses before 7 a.m. under new starting times announced by the Monomoy Regional School District. Last spring, the school committee endorsed the change, which shifts elementary school start times earlier and moves middle and high school times back. At the committee's meeting last Thursday Superintendent of Schools Scott Carpenter announced specific start times fo...

CHATHAM — Saying he will not be silenced by critics, Seth Taylor intends to seek a second term on the board of selectmen in May. “I believe that the public debate demands that we have as much information and as many points of view expressed as possible,” he said. Taylor said he will take out nomination papers shortly after they become available next Monday. Taylor said his role on the board of selectmen i...

CHATHAM – Several town employees handed out leaflets and wore placards outside of last week's special town meeting to draw attention to the fact that they've been without a contract for nearly two years. “We just want people to know the truth,” said Chatham Municipal Employees Association President Gary J. Kaser, who also picketed outside last Tuesday's board of selectmen's meeting. “Bottom line...this affe...

CHATHAM — Rounding out this year's list of projects seeking Community Preservation Act funding are preservation projects at the Chatham Marconi Maritime Center and various recreation projects, including a pickleball court. The community preservation committee will now begin debating the merits of the dozen different applications, which total more than $615,000. Having already heard presentations on several r...

CHATHAM – Selectman Amanda Love's recent email may have violated the Open Meeting Law, but it also drew attention to the fact that there's only two months to go before Fire Chief Michael Ambriscoe retires. In the email she sent to fellow selectmen, Love asked for a board discussion of promoting Deputy Chief Peter Connick to the chief's job, saying that the town needs to show staff how much they are valued by h...

CHATHAM – A state Land Court justice has ruled in favor of the town in a suit brought by Chatham Bars Inn over the 2014 taking of an easement at the fish pier. The suit involved the terms of a 1956 deed from the inn which gave the town ownership of a 7,130-square-foot parcel south of the fish pier packing building, at the Shore Road facility's lower level, an area known as the south jog. CBI claimed use of the...

“Chatham is the cradle of aviation,” says John Brown, the author of a new book called “Gustave Whitehead and the Wright Brothers: Who Flew First?” Brown came to this conclusion after he studied late 19 th century experiments in glider flight in Chatham that he says led directly to one of the experimenters being the first to fly in a motor-powered aircraft. Brown is a native of Australia living in Germany. ...

CHATHAM — Town Manager Jill Goldsmith presented selectmen Tuesday with a balanced, level-service operating budget for FY18 that's comfortably under the Proposition 2½ levy limit. At $30,124,872, it represents an increase of 3.89 percent over the current year's spending plan. The figure doesn't include the cost of educating the town's children, which adds approximately $9.3 million in assessments to the Monom...

On a cloudy and damp afternoon a few days before the beginning of the second annual knit-a-thon sponsored by A Great Yarn in Chatham, it’s cozy and warm inside Chatham’s two-year-old knitting store and bookstore, where a group of women is knitting together at a big round table. Many of these women, if not all, participated last year in the knit-a-thon by knitting long panels that were eventually crafted i...

CHATHAM – The legal fight between the Chatham Bars Inn and the town – or at least the rhetorical battle – is escalating. In a lawsuit filed in state Land Court Jan. 17, the Shore Road inn charged the town officials instructed then-Building Commissioner Justin Post to issue cease and desist orders in October for activities on its land in retaliation for the inn seeking damages for the town's eminent domain taki...

In Daniel Handler's view, stories with happy endings are just no fun. A prime example is the series of novels Handler wrote under the pen name Lemony Snicket. In “A Series of Unfortunate Events,” bad things happen to three orphans over and over and over again. “It's hard for me to think of a story that doesn't have a threat involved,” Handler, a Chatham summer resident, said last week in a telephone intervi...