Voters in the East Hampton Library District, which includes the East Hampton, Springs, and Wainscott School Districts, will vote on Saturday on a nearly $2 million budget for 2013, an increase of just over $120,000 over this year’s budget.

    According to the proposed budget summary, personnel expenses comprise the largest increase in spending, $105,000 more than this year for a total of almost $1.4 million.

    The library has begun construction on its 6,800-square-foot addition, which will include dedicated space for young adults. It plans to hire a part-time librarian to work with them. “That age group has never had its own place in the building,” said Dennis Fabiszak, the library’s director. “During finals, we would close the entire library for students to come in and study after school and there was a huge response.”

    Mr. Fabiszak expects construction of the new wing to be completed by Memorial Day 2013.

The library also plans to hire a part-time custodian.

    Materials make up the second highest increase in the 2013 budget, $10,900 more for a total of $135,000.

“When it’s broken down by the three districts, it’s only about a $7.50 rise in an individual’s tax,” said Mr. Fabiszak. “Since 1995, many residents and library board members have donated close to $15 million, which has lessened the need for taxpayer assistance.”

    “This is only the third time we’ve asked for an increase,” said Mr. Fabiszak. “We didn’t ask for an increase at all last year.”

    Voting will be from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. at the library.

    The Thomas Moran Trust is fine-tuning a site plan for the restoration of the artist’s house and studio on Main Street in East Hampton, a National Historic Landmark.

    The trust began the public phase of its $4.5 million fund-raising campaign this year. It has raised approximately the same amount since its inception in 2007, according to its first newsletter, The Studio, published on Sept. 18. Most recently, the trust received a $500,000 gift from the Joseph and Sylvia Slifka Foundation.

    On Sept. 19, the East Hampton Village Design Review Board discussed some of the nuts and bolts of the restoration. Dunn Engineering Associates, consultants to the village, weighed in on drainage plans and a lighting scheme for the property, which is in the Main Street historic district.

    Due to driveway improvements, as well as paving additional walkways and parking areas, the firm suggested that all water runoff be contained onsite, rather than be allowed to take its natural path toward Main Street, and potentially Town Pond. Although there is a state-maintained drainage basin at the front of the site, the firm said it strongly suspects water there drains into Town Pond. The existing driveway, in its original location, will not be moved, but “should be brought up to state standards at a minimum,” said the firm.

    Stephen Tilly, an architect for the Moran Trust, has submitted drainage plans and is currently working on groundwater drainage calculations. Were the Moran Trust to add paved connections between Main Street and the property, a permit from the New York State Department of Transportation could be required, according to the document. Steven Tekulsky, an attorney for the trust, said no such work will be done.

    Dunn Engineering praised the proposed lighting scheme, which will blend with the surrounding residential area, as well as the stormwater pollution plan for capturing rainwater on the roof with “state-of-the-art” leaders, gutters, and dry wells.   

   East Hampton Town Councilman Peter Van Scoyoc has gotten the ball rolling again, so to speak, on the renovation of the Montauk Skate Park on Essex Street.

    The East Hampton Town Board liaison to the Town Parks and Recreation Department, Mr. Van Scoyoc met on Sept. 19 with employees of the department to identify issues still needed to be addressed at the town-owned park.

The town has been sitting on $30,000 in grant money obtained by former Councilwoman Julia Prince for the work several years ago. The town also received a pledge of $32,000 for the project from a benefit in 2010 when artists and skateboarders joined forces to raise money through an art show and cocktail party at the Out East gallery in Montauk.

    Employees of the town’s Building and Grounds Department are expected to swarm the property today to repair the damaged edges of the north side of the site, which will be transformed to a basketball court from an open court that has been used in various ways, including roller skating, handball, and as a dog run.

    Mr. Van Scoyoc said this week that the first order of business after the cleanup will be to resurface the grounds. The work was not expected to begin until October, but it has been rescheduled and will start immediately. The Highway Department is supplying the materials.

    It was also reported this week that a new, appropriate boulder has been found for an already finished plaque in honor of Lars Simonsen, a young man who often used the park and was killed in a construction accident in June 2007. The park is to be dedicated in his name.

    Bailey Marie Thompson and Jeremy Ryan Somero of Beach Plum Road in Montauk were married on Sept. 14 at St. Therese of Lisieux Catholic Church in that hamlet. The Rev. Mike Rieder officiated. A reception catered by the Harvest restaurant followed at Montauk County Park.

    The bride, who will keep her name, is a daughter of Deborah Thompson of Montauk and the late Larry Thompson. A massage therapist at the Deborah Thompson Day Spa, she graduated from Colby Sawyer College in 2003 and from the Finger Lakes School of Massage in 2007.

    Mr. Somero is the son of Deborah Somero of Coco Beach, Fla., and the late Peter Somero. He graduated from Seminole Community College in 1999 and is a service manager at Uihlein’s Marina in Montauk. The two were introduced by Marilyn Behan, who works with Mr. Somero.

    The bride was attended by her mother and her sister, Brittany Thompson, also of Montauk, who was the maid of honor.

    The bride’s mother wore a custom-made dress that she designed herself. The bride wore a dress by Allure Bridal and the bridesmaids wore dresses from Jordan’s Fashion.

    Mr. Somero was attended by his mother. His sister, Jyll St. Cyr, was his best woman.

    Music at the ceremony was performed by Jane Hastay on organ, with Ashley Reilly and Ms. Thompson’s uncle, David Schminke II, as vocalists.

    The newlyweds have not yet taken a wedding trip, but have their sights set on Peru this winter.

    Taylor Kari Vecsey and Nicholas Bryan Hemby of Water Mill have announced their engagement.

    Ms. Vecsey, a former senior writer for The Star, is a local editor for East Hampton Patch, a news media Web site owned by AOL. She is the daughter of Joan and Peter F. Vecsey of Shelter Island and Manhattan and is a graduate of the College of Charleston and the Ross School.

    Mr. Hemby is the owner of Greenlife Solutions, which offers consulting and energy savings solutions and specializes in spray foam insulation and LED lighting. He also owns Hamptons Concierge, one of the first concierge services on the East End. He is the son of Doris and Cordis Hemby of Bridgehampton and Fuquay-Varina, N.C. Mr. Hemby attended Morrisville State College and is a graduate of Bridgehampton High School.

    The couple are volunteers in the Bridgehampton Fire Department, where Mr. Hemby is a captain and emergency medical technician. They met in passing in the 1990s and reconnected through mutual friends in 2007. They remained friends for several months, but Ms. Vecsey recalled that a class at the Loaves and Fishes Cooking School in Bridgehampton, called Date Night in Sicily, was a turning point. “I got to see him doing something he loved and his happiness and enthusiasm was contagious.” They began dating in 2008.

    The couple anticipates an October 2014 wedding.

    Saturday morning is when most of the action will begin on Long Wharf for Sag Harbor’s annual HarborFest weekend, and a lot of it will involve food.

    The Sag Harbor Farmers Market will relocate there at 9 a.m., joined by local artisans and craft vendors, and food vendors, including local restaurants and wineries, will offer their treats on Saturday and Sunday. Main Street shops will get in on the action with sidewalk sales throughout the weekend.

    Saturday will also bring the start of the annual Whalers Cup Whaleboat Races at noon from the beach near the windmill on Long Wharf, with teams of four competing throughout the weekend in men’s and women’s divisions. The finals will be on Sunday at 3 p.m.

    On Saturday at 4 p.m. there will be a lobster roll-eating contest sponsored by Bay Burger. Last year’s winner, Will Millender, consumed six and a half lobster rolls in five minutes.

    For kids, there will be face painting on Long Wharf both days, stories and songs of the sea on Saturday at 10:30 a.m. and 2:30 p.m. courtesy of the John Jermain Memorial Library, and at 11 a.m. that day, a corn shucking contest. Registration is at the windmill on Long Wharf. A tug-of-war will be held on Sunday at 11:30 a.m. followed by a visit from Waldo the Clown.

    There will be music on Long Wharf both days. A traditional seafaring sing-along will take place on Saturday at 11 a.m. with John Corr, and then at 1, the Sag Harbor Community Band will perform. At 3, Hopefully Forgiven, a group featuring Brad Penuel and Telly Karoussos, will perform. The Nancy Atlas Project will play at the Bay Street Theatre at 8 p.m. for $15. Jim Turner will play classic blues and folk tunes on Long Wharf  Sunday from noon to 2 p.m.

    Boat tours aboard Capt. Don Heckman’s American Beauty will explore Sag Harbor’s waterfront on Saturday at 10:30 a.m. and 1 and 3 p.m. Information about the natural and historical evolution of Sag Harbor and its surrounding communities, from the 1600s to today, will be included.

    Those interested in the village’s history can take walking tours of the Old Burying Ground, Sag Harbor’s oldest, on Saturday at 11:30 a.m. At 5 p.m., the Eastville Community Historical Society will offer a tour of the Eastville neighborhood.

    A tour on Sunday at 10:30 a.m. will take in houses of important women, some famous and some not, who were born or lived in the village. Walkers can tour the Oakland Cemetery at 1:30 p.m. that day.

    Festival goers can fuel up for the day Sunday at 8 a.m. at a pancake breakfast at the Sag Harbor Fire Department’s main firehouse on Brick Kiln Road. At noon, local restaurants will offer up samples of clam chowder to be judged by the public, and at 3:30 that day, Pete Ambrose will defend his title as Shucker of the Year at a clam-shucking contest on Long Wharf. Registration will be at the food pantry table.

    To work off Sunday breakfast, people can join in a stretch and tone class at Windmill Beach at 9:30 a.m., and at 10 a.m., a paddleboarding demonstration and impromptu short-course race will take place. Those interested should take a bathing suit and a board.

    On Sunday at 2:30 p.m., a JY-15 Women in One Design Regatta will be held by the Breakwater Yacht Club. The regatta is open to men and women of all ages and experience levels, but a woman must be at the helm. The entry fee will be $10 per boat, and the club will provide boats for an additional $25. Breakwater Yacht Club membership is not required. Races will be held in the waters off Havens Beach.

    The East End Classic Boat Society will display all manner of classic wood vessels on Long Wharf all weekend, and the Coast Guard Auxiliary will offer boat inspections and knot-tying demonstrations on the floating dock adjacent to the wharf. A deep sea rescue boat from the Coast Guard station in Montauk will also be on the wharf, conditions permitting, with service men and women available for a tour and to answer questions.

    Not only was August free of coastal storms, it had no heavy 4-to-6-inch rainfall like has been seen in Augusts of past years, according to Richard G. Hendrickson, the United States Cooperative weather observer in Bridgehampton.

    Rain fell on four days last month, with the heaviest — .66 inch — coming on Aug. 19. The total for the month was 1.48 inches, well off the long-term average of 3.4 inches. In August 1952, the wettest August ever recorded in Bridgehampton, rainfall was a whopping 13.19 inches.

    Mr. Hendrickson recorded no rains with thunder and lightning last month. However, the weather observer, who has been keeping weather records for over 80 years and celebrated his 100th birthday just last week, recalled thunderstorms of years gone by when he was a farmer and lightning might kill chickens while they rested in the high grass or down milk cows “while waiting to enter the barn to be milked.”

    He remembered a time when the daytime farm help sought shelter in the machine shed and “witnessed electric lightning in all its glory, dancing all over the stored iron farm machinery.” As a 10-year-old, he wrote, he saw “a ball of St. Elmo’s fire rolling, hissing in the sky, going from telephone pole top to the highest lightning rod on the farm home to the ground.”

    The warmest day of August was the 8th, when the thermometer hit 90 degrees, Mr. Hendrickson reported. It was in the 80s or higher on 17 days. The coolest day of last month was the 1st, when it was only 70, and on the coolest night, Aug. 30, it was just 49 degrees.

    “These are low August temperatures for this period of years, because we are in a period of global warming, but such is weather,” Mr. Hendrickson wrote. “Mother Nature is boss.”

    “Local sweet corn and melons are now at their best,” he said, and described how coastal storms, “each laden with a small amount of ocean saltwater in their clouds,” have deposited their water on our sandy soil, “giving an impeccable flavor to the vegetables grown” here.

    The Amagansett Historical Association will host a “mini barn-raising” on Saturday at 2 p.m. on its property at 129 Main Street, at the corner of Windmill Lane. Volunteers have been invited to help raise the beams and hammer in the trunnels (oak pegs), using simple hand tools, the way they used to.

    The event is intended to demonstrate, albeit on a small scale, how post-and-beam structures are assembled, said Peter Garnham, the association’s director.

    “There’s quite a bit of interest in that type of framing now,” he said, “not just for historic-type structures but as houses, small houses, and barns. We thought it was an appropriate place to do it because we’re a historical association, and this is a historical method of framing houses.”

    Mr. Garnham noted that the Miss Amelia Cottage, which is on the site, was built by a similar method in 1725.

    David and Jeanie Stiles of Stiles Designs, authors and publishers of how-to books about similar structures, such as tree houses, sheds, and cabins, will be on hand at the event. The Stileses, who have written 22 books on wooden buildings, were inspired by a visit to an Amish community in upstate New York to design a timber-framed shed “small enough that it could fit on a flatbed truck, less expensive than adding on to your existing house, and simple enough to construct that it could be put together in a day simply by hammering in wooden pegs,” they wrote in a e-mail.

    The structure that will be assembled on Saturday could serve as an artist’s studio, a writer’s retreat, a pool house, a home office, a guesthouse, or a yoga-meditation sanctuary, the Stileses suggested. What the historical association will use it for remains to be seen.

    Refreshments will be served. The rain date is Sunday. 

    The Sag Harbor Village Planning Board may hand down a decision involving Harbor Heights, the Hampton road service station that wants to add a convenience store, on Tuesday at its 5:30 meeting, after evaluating the project through State Environmental Quality Review Act guidelines. The board may be ready to declare a negative SEQRA evaluation, having in hand a new traffic study and modified lighting and landscaping plans.

    The original traffic report was unacceptable, as it analyzed the property as a convenience store only, rather than a gas station with a store as a subordinate use.

    Stonefield Engineering and Design, which did the second study, monitored the road for two weeks in July, including the July 4 holiday, and found about 16,000 vehicles on the road on a typical Tuesday-through-Thursday  weekday over a 24-hour period, distributed evenly in both directions. That is twice the average of off-season traffic, said Larry Perrine, a board member, at the board’s August meeting, referring to the original traffic study.

    According to current calculations, there are 54 vehicles stopping at the station during weekday morning peak hours, 61 at midday, and 50 during peak evening hours, with a noticeable increase on Saturdays.

    The planning board was also concerned about minimizing the impact of lighting on nearby properties while still providing safe access. The new lighting plan eliminates free-standing light poles, cuts in half the number of fixtures under the fueling canopy, and reduces the intensity of bulbs used to the lowest available.

    A new rendering shows 50- to 80-foot eastern white pines and 35- to 60-foot leyland cypresses, proposed as a double row to surround the “country market” style store and service station.

    The public hearing will be left open to further comment. A final decision may be made at the board’s October meeting.

    Sister Ann Marino, the director of Cormaria, a retreat house in Sag Harbor, knows that people passing by often wonder about the mansion with a wraparound waterfront porch and extensive gardens barely visible from Bay Street. In celebration of her 30 years as director, Sister Ann will welcome the public to explore the compound on Sunday from 2 to 4 p.m.

    Sitting near a large picture window with a view of the bay in the building’s oversized dining room, Sister Ann said on Monday that she had no idea how long she would be at Cormaria when she arrived from a mission in Rome in September of 1982. She thought she had been sent to Sag Harbor to facilitate retreats, but learned upon arrival that she would be in charge.

    Knowing no one in the area, Sister Ann said she was embraced by women from Montauk, East Hampton, and Sag Harbor, who helped her settle in. Today, Cormaria offers retreats for persons of all religious faiths who are “looking for direction and a closer connection to their spiritual lives,” she said.

    The house was built in 1905 by Frank Havens, whose fortune was made in real estate. Before becoming a retreat house in 1946, the property had been a finishing school for young Catholic women. During her time as its director, Sister Ann has renovated the house and chapel, which is now connected to a small building with living accommodations, expanded the retreat programs, and worked with landscape artists to create calm and peaceful gardens.

    The gardens are dedicated to the many friends of Cormaria, including of a woman who lost her life helping others escape from the twin towers on Sept. 11. A block from one of the towers is in a meditation garden.

    Sister Ann speaks of the “very special sea” and the sunsets as part of Cormaria’s magic, and she enjoys sharing them with visitors. “You can see the stars at night and hear the whisper of the wind,” she said. No matter what religion, she said, you can meet your inner spirit at Cormaria.

     “We have a gift,” she said. “Summer people try to get that,” she said, which is why they come to the East End. She also loves the hamlets and villages here, where she said people support each other.

    Growing up in the Bronx, Sister Ann said she was not aware of the changing seasons. Nor had she ever known a farm stand. “For everything there is a season,” she said, explaining that she especially enjoys the beauty of snow, and hopes it for this winter.

    “I try to teach what is really important in our lives,” she said. “How to be at peace with ourselves in a world of chaos.” She said she had heard a loud voice early in life that told her to become a nun; she made the decision at 18.

    Now, 57 years later, after having had a varied career — she taught second grade internationally, was a school principal in Barcelona, and a teacher in a rough inner-city New York neighborhood for 12 years — she is pleased as she looks back at what she has accomplished.

    Cormaria offers a safe haven at which to recover from substance or domestic abuse and provides quiet contemplation time during lifetime transitions or difficult periods, including medical issues.

    It also runs 12-step programs, as well as retreats for young people and women, whom Sister Ann said she guides to “Walk tall in their truth, and realize they are a gift.”

    Cormaria can accommodate up to 72 guests. The facilities include several conference rooms and a professional kitchen. It has had approximately 4,000 visitors each year.

    With the recent closing of several retreat houses, such as St. Gabriel’s Passionist Center on Shelter Island and the Dominican Sisters complex in Water Mill, Cormaria is now the only retreat house on the East End with a year-round schedule.

    It is entirely self-funding, with an annual strawberry tea and fashion show, golf benefits, and small and large donations. Its newest fund is named for the director, the Sister Ann Marino Endowment Fund, which will be used for maintenance. Donations can be sent to Cormaria, P.O. Box 1993, Sag Harbor 11963.

    As for how long she will be at Cormaria, it will depend on what her Provincial order decides. She may go to Africa as an AIDS worker. For now, she stays focused on the present. “If I find myself bored, it will be time,” she said. “God of surprises calls the shots.”