Villages

    Don Horowitz, a co-owner of Wittendale’s Florist and Greenhouses on Newtown Lane in East Hampton, took more than a wealth of knowledge home from the Cornell Floriculture Field Day, held Aug. 13 at the Bluegrass Lane Horticultural Research Facility in Ithaca, N.Y. He also brought back a medal, awarded for his winning entry in the Kathy Pufahl Container Design Competition.

    In its first meeting of the new fiscal year, the East Hampton Village Board considered and quickly adopted three laws aimed at tightening existing regulations and reducing vehicular traffic on Huntting Lane, and fielded a request for new signage regarding pets in cars.

    The Springs Fisherman’s Fair is taking place Saturday on the grounds of Ashawagh Hall and the nearby library and Parson’s Blacksmith Shop.

The longstanding annual event will offer food booths, with homemade jams and jellies, a bake sale, hot dogs and corn on the cob, and seafood delicacies including mussels and clam pies, as well an opportunity to buy produce and other items from Springs Farmers Market vendors.

    The Long Island Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, and Transgender Network will open its first East End center  at the Old Whalers Church in Sag Harbor on Saturday.

    The G.L.B.T. center will offer year-round programs for students, adults, and families, and it has been predicted that over 1,000 East End residents will participate within the next year.

    The Montauk Village Association, which is responsible for the flowering plants sprinkled about the hamlet, including those in the trees, is getting ready for its annual Greenery Scenery party. It will be held at the Montauk Lake Club on Aug. 16 from 6 to 9 p.m. Mickey Valcich Vanessa Trouble and the Red Hot Swing will provide the music, and the event will include a live auction and dinner. Tickets are on sale at $125 per person. Mickey Valcich is this year’s honoree.

    On July 14, Lenny Ackerman, whose wife faced life-threatening heart complications last year, held a celebration at his house in honor of the Stony Brook University Hospital staff who cared for her during her medical journey.

    East Hampton Village Mayor Paul F. Rickenbach Jr. announced Monday the village board’s adoption of a bicycle policy that aims to create a safer environment for cyclists and pedestrians. This followed the board’s vote to adopt the “General Principles for Introducing Bike Lanes in East Hampton Village” at its fiscal year-ending meeting of July 31.

    The mayor’s statement described the policy as a template in which “the village commits to do the utmost in working with the cycling community” to ensure safe roadways.

    The Amagansett Presbyterian Church, founded in 1860, will hold its 100th annual summer fair on Saturday from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. on the church grounds.

    If you are looking for some deep thoughts after your beach time, the Watermill Center’s lecture series may have something to offer. 

        Tonight at 7:30 it continues with “A Parallel Universe: Alternatives to Conventional Performance Spaces.” In a multimedia presentation, Victoria Newhouse will discuss unconventional spaces being used for operas and concerts and how they compare to more traditional venues.

    The Village of East Hampton has started an effort to comply with the federal Americans With Disabilities Act, which it incorporated into its code in 2005.

Topping the weekend’s agenda here in the village must be the Ladies Village Improvement Society fair on Saturday, the organization’s 117th, by the way. The gates at 95 Main Street open at 10 a.m. One can also enter via a gate in Herrick Park near the basketball courts.

All the usual attractions, including for the young ones, games, a carousel, a petting zoo, pony rides, and children’s authors are being prepared. For adults there will be vintage goods, select highquality clothing, plants, and a range of raffle items. Food choices will range from hot dogs to gourmet.

    Larry Cantwell, the Democratic and Independence Party candidate for East Hampton Town supervisor, will lead a Montauk “listen in” with his Democratic running mates, Job Potter and Kathee Burke-Gonzalez, on Monday at 6:45 p.m. at Gurney’s Inn. They have invited residents to discuss their concerns about the hamlet and share ideas for what town government can to improve things.

    This will be the second in a series such events the candidates are holding in East Hampton Town’s various hamlets. It will begin with refreshments, with discussion slated to run from 7 to 9 p.m.

    Dennis Downes, the attorney representing the restaurant Page at 63 Main, returned to the Sag Harbor Village Planning Board on Tuesday evening with threats and photographs in response to an ongoing discussion of the restaurant’s request to renovate the rear of its property to create a courtyard for takeout food and drink.

    The area is currently used for Dumpsters and a driveway.

    In an ongoing attempt to encourage more people to use the ocean beach at Kirk Park in Montauk, East Hampton Town officials have embarked on a restoration project there. The plan is to widen the beach’s main sandy path across the street from the parking lot, where parking was made free last year, reduced from a $10 fee for those without East Hampton Town resident parking permits.

    The path will be widened and clearly defined with wooden slats over the sand. Rope railings, nautical in style, will help senior citizens and others unsteady on their feet.

    Jeffrey M. Smith, a leading consumer advocate for non-genetically engineered foods, will be the keynote speaker at a preventive health and sustainable technology expo this weekend at the Dodds and Eder store at 11 Bridge Street in Sag Harbor.

    General admission tickets, at $25, will include a screening of a documentary, “Genetic Roulette: The Gamble of Our Lives,” based on Mr. Smith’s best-selling book, on Sunday at 1 p.m. A question-and-answer session will follow.

    An informational meeting on the future of police service in Sagaponack and a hearing on limiting yard sales to one per year were scheduled on Monday at a meeting of the village board. The board has been discussing the cost of its contract with the Southampton Town Police Department for some time. “I think it’s time for us to make a decision,” Mayor Donald Louchheim said on Monday.

The Great Bonac Fireworks Show, an annual event at Three Mile Harbor in East Hampton, will take place on Saturday, beginning at about 9:15 p.m.

    Weekend access to public bathrooms at the Sag Harbor Municipal Building was on Nada Barry’s mind when she spoke to the Sag Harbor Village Board on July 9, hoping that new board members might listen to her pleas. By Tuesday, a few possible solutions were on the table, according to Kelly Connaughton, president of the village’s Chamber of Commerce.

    Ms. Barry, a co-owner of the Wharf Shop, joined Ms. Connaughton and Robert Evjen to represent chamber members at a meeting on the subject with the village trustees Ken O’Donnell and Robby Stein.

    It seems as if someone has been taking it upon him or herself to remove no-parking signs from a stretch along the south and north sides of Industrial Road in Montauk. The signs were posted two years ago to prevent patrons of the Surf Lodge from parking their vehicles on the environmentally sensitive strip of land that borders Fort Pond on the south and a smaller pond on the north.

    The biggest summer fund-raisers for the Montauk Playhouse Community Center start tonight with a show at the Playhouse by Break8, a group of roller-skating breakdancers who have performed on “America’s Got Talent.”

    The event is part of a four-part FamilyFest that, in addition to tonight’s performance, will happen on July 25, Aug. 8, and Aug. 22. Tickets for each show cost $15 per person or $50 for the entire series, and each starts at 7 p.m. Tickets are available at the door, at Willow, a gift shop on the south Plaza, or in advance at montaukplayhouse.org.

    The seventh installment of the Accabonac Protection Committee’s Long Live Accabonac film series, “Grasslands,” will be screened on Friday, July 19, at the Springs Presbyterian Church. The free showing will start at 7:30 p.m., followed by a panel discussion and refreshments.

    In the movie, several of Long Island’s grasslands are depicted, as well as many of the various species of plants and wildlife living in them. “Grasslands” mainly emphasizes how the grasslands and all of their plants and wildlife are in danger of extinction today.

    East Hampton Village Mayor Paul F. Rickenbach Jr. announced last week that Moody’s Investors Service has assigned an Aa2 rating with a positive financial outlook to the village’s proposed $3.3 million serial bond offering, and affirmed the Aa2 rating on current outstanding obligations. The rating represents an assessment of high quality and very low credit risk.

    A brief power outage on Tuesday affected Sag Harbor Village’s sewer plant and the Sag Harbor Yacht Club, as reported and discussed at a meeting of the village board that night. A generator kicked on, according to Dee Yardley, the superintendent of public works.

    Mr. Yardley explained that a fuse was tripped in one of the Long Island Power Authority transformers, resulting in only partial power to the plant. The outage was reported at 7 a.m., and power was restored just before 9 a.m.

    The Sag Harbor Community Housing Trust, a sort of think tank set up by Gregory Ferraris shortly after he left his post as the village mayor when plans for the Bulova Watchcase condominium development were still under review, has been reawakened after a five-year slumber and is looking for help, Mr. Ferraris told the village board on Tuesday.

   The Village Preservation Society of East Hampton will host an informational forum on deer control next Thursday at 5 p.m. at the Emergency Services Building on Cedar Street. Dr. Anthony DeNicola, president and co-founder of White Buffalo Inc., will be the forum’s guest speaker. White Buffalo, a nonprofit wildlife management and research organization, is dedicated to conserving native species and ecosystems through damage and population control, according to its Web site. Dr.

    Alfredo Corchado, the prizewinning Dallas Morning News journalist, whose beat is the dangerous border between the United States and Mexico, returned to the Rogers Memorial Library in Southampton recently to suggest, along with Shannon K. O’Neil, a senior fellow for Latin America studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, that Mexico and the United States each stand to gain appreciably if the relations between the two “distant neighbors” are strengthened.

    Invasive species are a growing problem in East Hampton and the rest of Long Island. The remaining untouched land here — woods, marshes, beaches, and grassy fields — are being taken over by non-native plant varieties.

    Invasive species pose not just ecological threats, but economic and health threats as well. One of the worst invasive species affecting the Town of East Hampton is the mile-a-minute weed, also known by its scientific name, Persicaria perfoliata.

    A loan taken out several years ago to pay for repairs and renovations to Ashawagh Hall, a Springs community building, has been paid off thanks to a $60,000 donation from the Alec Baldwin Foundation and Capital One Bank.

    Johnson Nordlinger of Montauk has been working since April as the assistant site manager of the Montauk Lighthouse, a spot that has long been special to her.

    Raised in Montauk, she remembers playing there as a girl with her good friend Caroline Driscoll, whose father, Paul Driscoll, was the officer in charge of the Lighthouse from 1979 to 1983. And as an adult, she said, she drove there almost daily to walk the wooded trails and ocean beach.

On a Saturday smack in the height of a hot, hectic, summer season, traffic will come to a halt to make way for a bicycle brigade of more than 50 wounded soldiers from the United States and United Kingdom along with hundreds of their supporters.