CHATHAM – Town officials have asked Congressman William Keating to refile legislation to define the western boundary of the Monomoy National Wildlife Refuge. In September Keating filed a bill to reverse the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service's claim to between 3,000 and 4,000 acres of submerged lands in Nantucket Sound west of the refuge. But the legislation expired when the last Congress adjourned and has to be f...

CHATHAM – The value of commercial shellfish landed in town grew last year, but officials are concerned that the shifting sands along the east coast could make the most productive areas inaccessible. The 7 percent increase in the value of the catch is based on a per-pound price assigned by the state division of marine fisheries, according to Shellfish Constable Renee Gagne. Chatham's numbers are probably a bit ...

CHATHAM – Legend has it that it was the late boatyard owner Skip Hall who gave Paul Lucas the nickname Captain Eelgrass. The fisherman's boat, is seems, was notorious for the amount of sea vegetation that clung to its hull. It was in 1983 that the name gained notoriety after a cooking fire nearly burned down Mr. Lucas' house. Friends took an ad in the newspaper for the “Captain Eelgrass Cooking School” featuri...

CHATHAM — Driven by personnel costs, and particularly overtime expenses, the town's public safety budget requests are up 5.92 percent over the current year's spending plan. The police and fire department budgets make up the majority of the $6.18 million request, though the figure also includes the animal control officer, emergency management, oil pollution control and a contribution to the Cape and Islands e...

HARWICH — When it comes to drafting permanent regulations governing potential marijuana retailers in town, selectmen are seeking a one-year moratorium on pot shops, giving time for the legislative smoke to clear. Selectmen Monday voted to seek a zoning amendment designed to temporarily keep marijuana retailers from setting up shop in town. If approved by town meeting voters, the moratorium would ban recreati...

HARWICH — Housing is getting too expensive to sustain an adequate service provider population, and that's likely to get worse as the population ages. That message came through loud and clear during a presentation on the latest version of the town's housing production plan. There is a great need to provide affordable housing here and across the Cape, but communities should also address the need for workforce ho...

HARWICH — The Stone Horse Motel property is back on the market. Outer Cape Health Services, which had planned to convert the former motel to new medical offices, will instead move its health care facilities into the former BackOffice building across from Saquatucket Harbor. OCHS purchased the Stone Horse more than two years for $1 million and set its sights on building a 25,000 -to-30,000-square-foot facility ...

HARWICH — The landside plans for redeveloping Saquatucket Harbor is rapidly taking shape. With the architectural design work almost 75 percent complete, the Saquatucket development committee will be bring the project before the board selectmen next week. The landside project, which incorporates the 5.2 acre town-owned harbor site and the newly acquired 2.2- acre former Downey property, will provide additional ...

Firefighters everywhere know that, when it comes to fires or injuries at home, senior citizens are particularly vulnerable. A successful state grant program is helping to ensure that firefighters and elder advocates continue to team up to keep seniors safe. The Senior SAFE grants are an offshoot of SAFE, the Student Awareness of Fire Education program that has provided millions of dollars for fire safety educa...

HYANNIS ─ Senior Night is always a memorable evening for student athletes, and for those on the Mashpee-Monomoy Monarchs boys varsity ice hockey team, Senior Night proved one they'll remember for a long while as the home team triumphed with a 5-2 victory against Cardinal Spellman. Five different Monarchs players tallied in the outing, which saw the Blue and White skate with intensity throughout the game's th...

HARWICH ─ For the second consecutive season, the Monomoy girls basketball team has qualified for the postseason, this time with a thrilling 48-39 victory against Nantucket on Feb. 2. The win marked No. 10 for the team, earning them a tourney berth as their regular season winds down. “We've made the playoffs two years in a row, which is a great accomplishment for the seniors, so they should be very proud of t...

As I write this, it's Tuesday somewhere around noon. On my laptop screen is the live stream of the New England Patriots celebratory duck boat parade. While it's cool to see the players enjoying their moment, I'm actually on the lookout for my predecessor, Eric Adler, who is traversing the route alongside Tom Brady himself. I couldn't be happier for both of us. As many of this paper's faithful readers know, Eri...

HARWICH ─ There was paint everywhere in Carol Trull's art classroom at Monomoy High, and she wouldn't have had it any other way. Neither would the student members of the National Art Honor Society and the Art Club who were happily hosting the last class in their Art 4 Kids series, which introduced area children ages 3 to 6 to various forms of creativity. An extension of last year's “Play With Clay” series...

HARWICH ─ Dissections are a typical part of most high school biology classes, but thanks to a special partnership between Monomoy Regional High School and the Mass Audubon Wellfleet Bay Wildlife Sanctuary, students in Adriana Picariello's Marine Science class recently had the unique opportunity to necropsy a quartet of Kemp's ridley sea turtles. “The Audubon rescues the stranded turtles and sends them off to...

Chatham Elementary School In Spanish: Kindergarten and first grade students have been learning parts of the face with our friends at Monsters Inc. Second graders have been learning the days of the week with dialog and many songs. Third and fourth graders learned months in Spanish while doing the Macarena and fourth graders went a little further to say their birthdays in Spanish. Last week students took a qui...

Conflicted. That's how we feel about the prospect of the new administration in Washington being more amenable to rolling back the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service's claim to somewhere between 3,000 and 4,000 acres of the waters and submerged lands west of the Monomoy National Wildlife Refuge. We've already stated our agreement with town and state officials that the federal agency overreached by including ownersh...