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Worship
PROVINCETOWN
Board of Assessors: Thursday, 8:30 am, Town Hall.
Finance Committee: Thursday, 2 pm, Town Hall.
Pamet Lens Oversight Group: Thursday, 3 pm, Grace Gouveia Bldg.
Provincetown Public Pier Corp.: Thursday, 4 pm, Town Hall.
Historical Commission: Friday, 9 am, Town Hall.
Shellfish Committee: Tuesday, 5 pm, Town Hall.
Planning Board: Wednesday, 7 pm, Town Hall.
TRURO
School Committee: Thursday, 12 pm, Truro Central School.
Pamet Lens Oversight Group: Thursday, 3 pm, Provincetown DPW.
Golf Course Advisory Committee: Friday, 3:30 pm, Library.
Recycling Committee: Monday, 2 pm, Town Hall.
Conservation Commission: Monday, 7 pm, Town Hall.
Board of Health: Tuesday, 4 pm, Town Hall.
Board of Selectmen: Tuesday, 6 pm, Town Hall.
Community Center Landscaping Subgroup: Wednesday, 4 pm, Library.
WELLFLEET
Finance Committee: Thursday, 7 pm, Senior Center.
Zoning Board of Appeals: Thursday, 7 pm, Senior Center.
Conservation Commission: Wednesday, 10 am, Town Hall Parking Lot; 4 pm, Town Hall.
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4-day work week gets nod
PROVINCETOWN Ñ Selectmen ratified a contract with Town Hall union employees Monday night that will result in a four-day work week for most municipal staff.
As a result, Town Hall will be closed to the public on Fridays. In addition, hours at the transfer station will be reduced. Currently the transfer station is open Tuesday through Sunday in the winter from 6 a.m. to 2 p.m. and seven days a week in the summer from 6 a.m. to 2 p.m. Under the tentative new schedule, winter hours will be reduced by one day each week plus one hour each day, open Tuesday through Saturday from 6 a.m. to 1 p.m. Summer hours will also be reduced, with the transfer station open six days a week and one less hour per day.
The department of public works originally proposed closing the transfer station on Sunday in the summer but selectmen vetoed that idea Monday night. DPW director David Guertin said he is working on a new proposal for the summer schedule.
In addition, municipal trash collection, which now stretches over five days a week, will be condensed into four days but all the properties currently receiving pick-up will continue to do so on a weekly basis.
ÒTheir Friday [trash pick up] may become a Thursday, or Wednesday may become a Tuesday,Ó Guertin said, adding that the new schedule will be publicized as soon as it is approved.
In addition to the shorter work week, union members will receive a 4.5 percent salary increase in both year two and three of the three-year contract. The contract will take effect Nov. 12.
Members of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) union local, which represents 48 non-management municipal staff members, voted 30-2, with two invalid votes, to approve the three-year contract.
ÒI canÕt believe two people even voted no,Ó said Joyce Matthews, president of the AFSCME local. ÒEverybody else realizes itÕs a good deal.Ó
The terms of the new contract call for union employees to work nine hours over a 10-hour work day, four days a week; the 10 hours includes a paid lunch hour each day. As a result, they will be working 36 hours Ñ four fewer hours each week, a 10 percent decrease. Union staff currently are paid to put in eight hours over a nine-hour day, five days a week, and are not paid for their lunch hour, resulting in a 40-hour work week.
Town Manager Sharon Lynn said the new contract was a fair deal for both the town and union. She had originally asked voters to approve a Proposition 2 1/2 budget override, raising taxes by $106,340 to pay for a three-percent salary increase. While the measure passed at April Town Meeting, it resulted in a tie ballot vote in the May election, causing the measure to fail. As a result, there was no money to fund a salary hike in FY 2009, and Lynn asked the union to Òget creativeÓ in its contract demands, Matthews said.
As for giving union staff an effective pay increase by reducing their hours by 10 percent, Lynn said the employees had to be rewarded for foregoing a bigger paycheck in the first year of their contract.
ÒThatÕs what negotiations are, a give and take,Ó Lynn said. ÒI donÕt know how much less theyÕre working. Many of the employees work through their lunch hour.Ó
What the town receives in return for agreeing to a shorter workweek is it does not have to raise $106,340 this fiscal year. However, funding for the 4.5-percent salary increase in year two of the contract will have to be found in FY 2010.
Board of selectmen chair Michele Couture said the contract eliminates the need for selectmen to go to Special Town Meeting this fall to ask voters to approve a tax hike to pay for a union member salary increase.
ÒThe town is not paying out tax dollars. ThatÕs my reality,Ó she said.
The board voted 4-0 Monday night to approve the contract, with Selectman Mary-Jo Avellar recusing herself because her husband is a town employee. Selectman David Bedard said the new contract was in the best interests of the town.
ÒI thought Sharon did the best job she could with the contract,Ó he said.
psowers@provincetownbanner.com
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Banner Online continues shift to Wicked Local
This week Aug. 28-Sept. 3 on our Wicked Local sites there will be daily news and arts updates including web only content. See an interview with artist Robert Cardinal (posting on Friday); and a look at Flying NeutrinoÕs Ingrid Lucia (also posting on Friday) along with daily happenings of interest.
Each day on the Wicked Local sites there are two to four updates and breaking news as it happens. Stories from the Provincetown Banner print edition are posted throughout the week of publication. There are also postings of stories to come in future issues and web-only content.
The Wicked Local sites also have video and slideshows to give our reader-viewers more information than ever. Readers can comment on individual stories as they appear online. Readers can register on the Wicked Local town sites and upload photos.
As the transition continues certain features still will be found on the Banner Online site. We will post a news story and an arts story each week along with items only found on the Banner Online site at this time: specifically, weekly classified listings; posted meetings; the portal to the Banner electronic edition; access to PDF versions of our special sections and an easy, direct subscription link.
Thank you for all your support for the Banner Online site over the years. We look forward to serving you even better in the future, with more content and more multimedia.
The four websites are:
Cape Cod http://www.wickedlocal.com/capecod
Provincetown http://www.wickedlocal.com/provincetown
Truro http://www.wickedlocal.com/truro
Wellfleet http://www.wickedlocal.com/wellfleet For more on this story
Wind and fury, then the levee broke
By Reva Blau
Banner Correspondent
The broad strokes of the story are now familiar, and yet are no less shocking. Three years ago this Friday, Hurricane Katrina, one of the deadliest hurricanes in American history, made landfall aimed at New Orleans. After the levees burst, around 1,500 people died in Louisiana. Over the course of the storm, the flood and its aftermath, Katrina caused a diaspora of epic proportions. The numbers of the mass exodus from the city of New Orleans are difficult to pinpoint, but close to half a million people were displaced, scattered over the entire U.S. The home of a vibrant jazz center and Mardi Gras celebrations was, for several weeks, simply gone, submerged under water. The city has yet to heal, the process made difficult by recovery efforts that are considered to be grossly insufficient.
Wrapping up a busy summer, artistic director Kevin Rice marks the third anniversary of Katrina at Payomet Theater with a three-day-long festival celebrating New Orleans that will take place over the course of Labor Day weekend. It will feature film and music (see story this weekÕs Banner), a hybrid program that is the perfect symbol for what the curator of the films, Maia Harris, calls the Òbittersweet essenceÓ of New Orleans. ÒOn the one hand,Ó she said by phone, Òyou have the tremendous appreciation of life, its joys and celebration. And on the other you have decay and decline in a city that is forever sinking underwater. New Orleans is never just tragic or never just joyous. ItÕs always both.Ó
New Orleans before and after
Maia Harris moved to New Orleans in the early Õ90s to work on her documentary film, ÒStoryville,Ó which tells the story of a fictional prostitute living in New OrleansÕ notorious red-light district. Harris ended up staying in New Orleans until 1999. She met many of the filmmakers whose work she has brought together for the Payomet screening.
A film, ÒThe Eye of the Storm,Ó by photographer-filmmaker Neil Alexander records the storm itself and its direct aftermath. Alexander was in his office when the storm hit. Since his office was on high ground, he decided to stay and document the storm. Gaining access onto the flooded streets, the photographs he took are heart-stopping reminders of the footage that was played on CNN continually over the course of that fateful week. The film shows footage from before and after the storm, with residents packing bags, the deserted streets, and some moments of humor to offset the portrait of crisis when a loose donkey appears.
A film by Luisa Dantes documents the controversial plans for New OrleansÕ recovery, particularly the public housing crisis that has prevented more than 20,000 people from returning to long-term housing. As reported on NPR, New OrleansÕ city council had voted to demolish 218 public housing buildings, inciting demonstrations among residents who were barricaded out of their homes. To residents such as Bart Everson, who writes about living in New Orleans on his blog, ÒLife in the Flood Zone,Ó many of the public housing buildings were in decent shape. By replacing public housing with mixed income (the buildings have yet to be built), city and state government are preventing evacuees from returning to their homes and families. Harris spoke of the significance of this loss in the film: Òwhile many people of these communities do not have a lot of material possessions, what they have is their social ties.Ó
Remembering the culture of the Big Easy
The most festive aspects of New Orleans culture are the subject of the film by filmmaker Royce Osborn. In a live interview produced by National Black Programming Consortium, Osborn talks about how, the year after Katrina, a nervous police force shut down street festivities on St. JosephÕs Day, asking Indians to shed the feathered costumes that they had made. Meanwhile, costume dolls of Indians were being sold in tourist shops. As a filmmaker OsbornÕs mission is to preserve a black culture that is vulnerable, as he puts it, to Disney-fication.
Against the grim reality of Hurricane Katrina, Osborn spotlights the festive plumage worn by parade goers. Many people Ñ African Americans and Native Americans uniting under a common identification of ÒIndianÓ Ñ have returned to New Orleans to parade in Mardi Gras and St. JosephÕs. For Osborn, the elaborate feathered dress, along with the music and dancing in the streets, is an act of will and a sign of the indomitable spirit that is New Orleans.
Film salvaged from flood
One of the most chilling films in the series is less than three minutes long. Courtney Egan teaches in the Media Arts Dept. at the New Orleans Center for Creative Arts. Music makes this high school famous across the country; jazz giant Bradford MarsalisÕs father, Ellis Marsalis, started the jazz department there.
After the storm, Egan led the students in media projects that allowed them to represent their experiences in the storm. Egan was friends with well-known artist, experimental animation artist and filmmaker Helen Hill. Hill was murdered by an intruder into her home in early 2007 in a spate of six murders that occurred in her neighborhood. Since Katrina, the homicide rate in New Orleans has soared.
With her husband and infant son, Helen Hill had evacuated New Orleans because her home was in the flood zone. For several weeks, her house was in five feet of water. After a year in her home state of South Carolina, she returned to New Orleans as a sign of her support and love for the city. She believed that the city could be revitalized. Her husband, a physician, had founded a clinic to help those in greatest need. She continued to use film and video to reflect the cityÕs anxieties and to teach residents to express themselves artistically. She also spent the next year sending off reels of 8 and 16 millimeter film that had been damaged.
She produced ÒA Monster in New Orleans,Ó a film about experiencing Katrina in which a hand-painted green monster comes in and out of the images of the city. This film, described by Egan as an upbeat music video that is also a dirge to the carefree spirit of the city, will also be screened in the series.
EganÕs own film uses footage that Hill had taken of her New Orleans neighborhood before the storm. It was one of the films that Hill had gotten restored. HillÕs footage is in black-and-white, but its scene of her family playing outside is laid-back and happy. Egan returned to HillÕs neighborhood after her friend was killed and shot the street in color. She puts HillÕs pre-Katrina footage with her own post-Katrina footage together for her two-minute, 45-second short. In HillÕs black-and-white footage, there is an intricate pattern that intrudes onto most of the frames. It is a pattern created by the water from the flood seeping onto the film tape, marking in the celluloid a dark and persistent shadow.
The series of shorts will screen at 6 p.m. Friday, Saturday and Sunday of Labor Day weekend (Aug. 29-31) as part of the ÒTruth and Justice for SomeÓ series at Payomet Theater. For tickets and information, visit www.ppactruro.org or call the Payomet Box Office at (508) 487-5400. Tickets are $10 with reductions for students and seniors.
Neil Alexander and Maia Harris will be at the screening for discussion.
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Aug 28th, 2008
