Correcting a Correction
To the editor:
I take exception to Art Autorino’s Sept. 7 letter in which he “corrects” my comments that were accurately quoted in “A Holdout Survives on Eastham’s Shurtleff Road” [Aug. 31, front page]. As your article reported, the huge mansions on our shore’s edge are incongruent with the neighborhood and separate the area’s smaller homes from the sunset.
In his so-called correction, Autorino refers to the number of year-rounders and 10-weekers on Shurtleff Road itself. But I was speaking of the entire neighborhood built on the former Shurtleff land, which goes many house lots back towards Herringbrook Road. Three years ago, you reported that Autorino (who was then chair of the Eastham Planning Board) said of the teardowns and large houses being built on Shurtleff, “Unfortunately, people from the other side of the road are partially blocked from the view.” Indeed.
The owners of property on Shurtleff Road may be happy that, as Autorino said of his own house, “the value of my home has increased because other people on the street have built bigger homes.” Others of us, on “the other side of the road,” will continue to wonder what the future holds for the view and for our treasured bluff and beach.
Tom Ryan
Eastham
RTE Disappointment
To the editor:
I feel like a broken record. Once again, I must express my extreme disappointment in the Eastham Select Board’s decision not to adopt a residential tax exemption [“No Exemption for Residents,” Aug. 31, page A19].
Again, Art Autorino, Aimee Eckmann, and Gerald Cerasale have chosen to bury their heads in the Cape Cod sand and deny assistance to working families in Eastham. While Provincetown is moving in the right direction by increasing its existing RTE to 35 percent, the leaders of Eastham can’t make even the smallest of gestures to repair the damage done by investment and vacation property owners.
We have a housing crisis, and I will not wait for Eastham to become another Nantucket, Martha’s Vineyard, or Provincetown without taking action. Vote. Them. Out.
Josiah Cole
Eastham
Expedient Promotion
To the editor:
Re “Supt. Carlstrom Is Promoted to a Job in Denver” [Aug. 31, front page]:
In World War II, generals who bungled on the battlefield, causing massive loss of life and defeat, were quickly “promoted” and sent stateside for an “important” new assignment. This hid the disaster from public view.
It looks as if the National Park Service has taken a page from that book.
The Cape Cod National Seashore was created to help preserve the vanishing landscape and its local culture, not to seize it and sell it to the highest bidder.
David Rowell
Wellfleet
