You've heard the one about firefighters rescuing a cat from a tree, but how about a bird? Well, here's something different.

Southampton Fire Department volunteers helped wildlife rescuers free a hawk from 35 feet up in a tree in Water Mill on Monday night. Bette Lou Fletcher of Sag Harbor, a volunteer with the Evelyn Alexander Wildlife Rescue Center in Hampton Bays, said the Cooper's hawk, a medium-sized hawk often seen in the area, was found hanging upside down.

Bob Rossetti, an employee at a beverage distributor on Montauk Highway, was closing up for the night and heard an animal in distress, Ms. Fletcher said. "He spent some time trying to find the source," she said. He spotted the upside-down bird in the branches of a tree on private property next to the shopping complex and called Southampton Town police.

Officer Steve Frankenbach responded and saw that the hawk was "very much alive." He called the wildlife center for assistance and was put in touch with Ms. Fletcher, a retired Suffolk County police detective who has been a wildlife volunteer for three years. "I told him, 'There's no way I have the equipment to get 35 feet up the tree,' " she said. The officer called the Fire Department, and Chris Brenner, the second assistant fire chief, brought in a ladder truck that has a bucket at the end.

"We rendezvoused in the parking lot behind the post office" about how to get access to the tree on the neighboring property, Ms. Fletcher said. No one was home at the time.

"When I got there, the hawk wasn't moving, but we proceeded because it was recently alive and it could have been unconscious and in shock," she said.

The ladder was extended not only up 35 feet, but laterally about 35 to 40 feet over a fence and into the yard in order to get to the hawk. A few branches had to be cut down. "It was quite the maneuver," Ms. Fletcher said. As the firefighters got close to the bird, they found that it had already died, but they cut the branch it was caught on and brought the bird down.

Though wildlife rescuers occasionally see birds, particularly waterfowl, wrapped up in discarded fishing line, they found none attached to the hawk. It looked as if it had gotten its foot tangled in the branch and broken its leg, she said. Even if they had been able to get to the bird while it was still alive, it would have had to be euthanized because of the injury, she added.

While the outcome was unfortunate, Ms. Fletcher said it was heartwarming to see so many people come together for the rescue. While the animal rescue center has had other instances of tangled birds getting stuck in trees, as strange as that sounds, "I've never seen the Fire Department come out and help get it down."

When Ken Dodge graduated from the physician assistant program at Stony Brook University — a member of the program’s first graduating class in 1973 —the job title was a new one and the concept was relatively unknown. “Nobody knew what we were, what we could do. Every hospital we went to for training was a training for them as well as us,” he said. Forty-one and a half years later, as he retires from the field, not only has the concept been embraced, but people are often more familiar with the physician assistants at their doctors’ offices than they are with the physicians.

While many among his legions of patients call him Dr. Dodge, he comes instead from a profession borne of a desire to utilize the skills of hospital corpsmen like himself, people who had returned from Vietnam with considerable on-the-job experience. He and other early entrants into the profession were a solution to a problem in American health care at the time — a shortage of physicians. “A good triage officer is what a physician assistant is,” he said.

The first physician assistant program started at Duke University in 1965. Stony Brook’s, at what was then called the School of Allied Health Professionals, began six years later with a class of 17, including Mr. Dodge and half a dozen others with military experience.

“I got into the field by accident,” he said two weeks ago at the Montauk office of Meeting House Lane Medical Associates, as he prepared for his Dec. 31 retirement. “In 1964 I tried to get into the Air Force. I wanted to get into firematics and the crash crew.” He went to New York City to get all his physicals, but “the doctor flunked me,” he said.

Not long after that, he got his draft notice. Not wanting to go into the Army, he volunteered for the Navy and became a corpsman with the Fleet Marine Force, serving two tours in Vietnam. Back home in Bay Shore after his discharge, he was working for Sears, married, and about to become a father when he saw an article on the Stony Brook program. “It was one of those things they call life-changing moments. The first life-changing moment was when that doc turned me down and kicked me out from the Air Force.”

He wasn’t interested in becoming a nurse, and medical school was too much of a commitment. “To get into medical school, you had to have a four-year degree. I would have had two and a half more years of schooling before I could even apply, and with a kid on the way, this seemed to be a good alternative.”

His first job out of the program was with the East Hampton Medical Group under Dr. Robert Sucsy. “I believe I was the first physician assistant working in a private practice on Long Island,” he said. Two months before he was hired, two of the three family practitioners in the East Hampton Medical Group retired.

“We did emergency medicine,” he said. “Back then, there weren’t even emergency room doctors at the hospital. An ambulance brought patients to the medical center and some of us in the medical group would just go out to the ambulance and take a look at the patient. Sometimes they would be wheeled into the office.” When the group broke up around 1980, he moved on to work with Dr. Raymond Medler doing internal medicine.

After that he worked for 20 years with Dr. Michael Israel in East Hampton, and finally with Dr. Kristy Chen in Noyac, before joining Dr. Anthony Knott in Montauk. (Dr. Knott left the practice last month.) Many patients have followed him from East Hampton to Sag Harbor to Montauk.

“I love my patient population. It’s been a pleasure seeing people and being able to do it. I’ll miss them. . . . A big part of why my patients like me, I like to think that almost all of the time I can sit there and talk to them a bit. . . . The business part of medicine is sort of interfering with that. The push is to see more, move more patients in less time. It cuts into the time to empathize, explain . . . console them. . . . It’s not the era of managed care, it’s the era of mismanaged care.”

Mr. Dodge did house calls until just a few years ago, but they were “time-intensive” and hard to continue with a full schedule of patients.

When he wasn’t working, he seemed never to be idle. He volunteered for almost 30 years with the East Hampton Ambulance Association, five of them as its chief. He served on the East Hampton School Board for nine years, six of them as president, coached summer soccer for 25 years, and was a scoutmaster for the Boy Scouts in the late 1980s. He also worked briefly for the Suffolk County Medical Examiner’s office in the early 1980s, handling “basic stuff” on the South Fork.

At home, he raised four children, divorced, then remarried, adding five stepchildren to the family. “Now I’ve got nine kids, plus nine grandchildren, eight of them within two miles of us.” His wife, Ruth Dodge, is deputy chief dispatcher for the East Hampton Town Police Department, and he proudly pointed out that she was “the first woman to get a supervisor position ever in the department.”

While he’s ready to retire — “They say when you start to think about retirement, it’s time to retire” — at an energetic 70, he hardly looks or seems ready to slow down. “In retirement I will do more fishing, clamming, stuff like that.”

“I won’t miss the business of medicine,” he said, “but the practice of medicine, it’s going to be hard to give that up.”

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Correction: The original version of this story online and in print gave Mr. Dodge's retirement date as Jan. 31. In fact, it was Dec. 31. 

The Trustees of the Freeholders and Commonalty of East Hampton, the nine-member board having authority over common lands under the Dongan Patent given them by the king of England in 1686, may be on the move.

At the body’s final meeting of 2014, held on Dec. 9 in its offices at the Donald Lamb Building on Bluff Road in Amagansett, Diane McNally, the trustees’ clerk, told her colleagues that they might be relocated to an as-yet-unspecified building on the Town Hall campus in East Hampton.

Consideration of a move resulted from a space-needs study led by Drew Bennett, a consulting engineer, and Marguerite Wolffsohn, the town’s planning director. Supervisor Larry Cantwell alerted Ms. McNally to the possibility at a meeting last summer.

The purpose, Mr. Cantwell said, would be to consolidate all staff and boards in one location. “For ease of access for the public,” he said, “I think it would be more efficient.”

The room in which the trustees hold their twice-monthly meetings is small. The meetings usually include standing-room-only crowds, be they contractors or shoreline property owners seeking to rebuild a bulkhead or otherwise alter property under trustee jurisdiction, commercial fishermen or sportsmen, or concerned citizens who want to listen to the group’s deliberations. Recently, some observers have implored the trustees to televise their meetings, which would be technically challenging in their present quarters.

“It would be nice to have more space,” Ms. McNally said of a potential move. “The upside would be that we would be closer to all the other town agencies — like planning, zoning, the town board — that we interact with a lot. It could be an improvement. A downside, she said, “is finding a place appropriate for our records. We do have records that we want to lock up and keep secure ourselves.” Several tall, fireproof filing cabinets line one room of the Lamb Building.

There is also symbolic importance, Ms. McNally said, to the trustees’ physical separation from the town board and the agencies she referred to. The trustees often disagree with other local governing bodies: They were harshly critical of the East Hampton Village Zoning Board of Appeals’ determination to grant permission to a West End Road property owner to construct a rock revetment on the beach in 2013, and opposed a ban on alcoholic beverages at Indian Wells Beach that the town board authorized and was in effect last summer.

“I’m trying to be cooperative and within the loop of the town, yet still maintain that independence,” Ms. McNally said. “It is very hard to reconcile the two.” The trustees also own two boats. “I don’t want them left here while we’re somewhere else,” she said. “I do like this building because I’m told it’s an old Coast Guard building. It has a cement floor and is a secure little spot,” she said of the brick building. “Maybe we could just reconfigure our space here.”

Stuart Vorpahl, a trustee in the 1970sand ’80s who still attends some of the group’s meetings, felt that a move to the Town Hall campus might be acceptable if trustee records were kept secure, but expressed irritation with other town agencies. “This non-recognition of the town trustees is ridiculous,” he said. The trustees’ contract, he said, “is with the King of England. That has been upheld by the Supreme Court many times.”

But Stephanie Forsberg, the trustees’ assistant clerk, was supportive of a move, provided the new space met their needs. “It would need to be larger than our current footprint regarding space and utilities, while also providing room for our growing clerical staff and of course an office space for the full-time clerk,” she wrote in an email. “It would be even better if there was room to accommodate the public for our meetings. . . . I think if any space could provide that, then the move would be just fine.”

A 54-year-old East Hampton man has been indicted on two sex-crime charges involving a minor after allegedly convincing an out-of-state teenager to take and send him nude cellphone photographs of herself in April.

According to East Hampton Town Detective Sgt. Greg Schaefer, police received a call from the girl’s school principal “in reference to some disturbing emails sent through a school laptop” to Jeffrey R. Card of Collins Avenue.

A complaint filed in East Hampton Town Justice Court by the police states that Mr. Card convinced a girl under the age of 16 to take the photographs using a cellphone he had provided to her. His alleged possession of those photographs after she sent them to him is also a crime.

The alleged victim’s name was not included in the court documents, which is standard under New York State Law for sex-crime victims.

In addition to the felony charges of using a child under 17 years old for a sexual performance and possession of such images of a child under 16, Mr. Card is charged with two misdemeanors: acting in a manner injurious to a child under 17 and tampering with a “computer program of another person,” apparently for accessing her personal information.

The first felony charge is the most serious, carrying required prison time if he is convicted.

After being questioned by detectives, Mr. Card was arrested at about 2 a.m. on Nov. 10. According to the accusatory document, Mr. Card admitted committing the crimes when he told police, in part, “I deleted all the nude photos that she sent to me.”

He was arraigned in East Hampton Town Justice Court in front of Justice Lisa R. Rana later on Nov. 10. The district attorney’s office asked bail to be set at $100,000. However, citing Mr. Card’s lifelong residency in the town, Justice Rana set bail at $25,000, not believing him a flight risk. It was an amount he could not meet.

After five days in custody, he was released, because he had not been indicted in that time period, as proscribed by state law. The indictment, however, came three days later.

Detective Schaefer said Mr. Card was using Facebook and other social media sites to cultivate relationships with young women, and that there “could be numerous victims.”

East Hampton Town police did not release any information on Mr. Card’s arrest at the time, apparently because the investigation was ongoing.

The case has been turned over to John W. Cortes of District Attorney Thomas Spota’s Child Abuse and Domestic Violence Bureau.

“This was excellent detective work and we feel fortunate that no other victims have come forward as of now,” East Hampton Town Police Chief Michael Sarlo said Tuesday, via email. “There is a potential for other cases resulting from the forensic work” being done by the Suffolk County Police Department’s crime lab, the chief said, but added that “no other local cases are currently pending.”

“Obviously, there is concern over the local connections and the use of social media. Today’s Internet and the availability of access to personal information need to be on the minds of everyone, particularly the parents of teens.”

Mr. Card has been in county jail in Riverside since being arraigned on the felony charges before State Supreme Court Justice Barbara Kahn on Nov. 24. Justice Kahn set bail at $25,000, which has not been posted. Douglas O’Connor of the Legal Aid Society, Mr. Card’s attorney, entered his not-guilty plea during the arraignment.

He is next scheduled to appear in court on Jan. 21.

The most recent test results from several bodies of water in Montauk were released this week. The samples, part of the nationwide Blue Water Task Force, a federally mandated program for all bathing beaches that is conducted monthly, weekly, and sometimes daily after a heavy rainfall, show that the site with the highest levels of the bacteria enterococcus was an area called West Creek, which is just west of the beach known as South Lake on Lake Montauk.

The Concerned Citizens of Montauk and the Surfrider Foundation released the results. Jeremy Samuelson, the executive director of C.C.O.M., said that all states with public bathing beaches are required to conduct such tests. On eastern Long Island, Suffolk County is charged with the testing.

Trained volunteers from the citizens group and Surfrider collect samples that must sit for 24 hours before the results can be read. The data are then posted to the Surfrider website and linked to C.C.O.M.’s.

In the testing, which took place during the week of Dec. 11 to Dec. 15, lower levels of the bacteria were found in water on the east side of South Lake, the causeway near Star Island, Coon’s Foot Cove, and Fort Pond near Industrial Road. Little Reed Pond off East Lake Drive produced a medium level of the bacteria.

For the last few years civic groups have been urging East Hampton Town officials to warn those who use the beach at South Lake of its bacteria pollution. The shallow beach with calm water makes it ideal for families with young children. But it was not until this past summer that a sign was finally posted there and the lifeguard pulled from the site, although that did not seem to be a deterrent — on summer days the parking lot and beach were full.

The type of bacteria that is tested becomes more prevalent in warmer weather. The testing does ot distinguish what is causing the enterococcus, which can be can be found in all types of waste from warm-blooded animals, including birds. Though the bacteria levels rise and fall with rain, South Lake has repeatedly produced levels that can be unsafe for bathers.

“It’s not a huge crisis, but we need to do a better job in getting the information out to people,” Mr. Samuelson said. The results are available at surfrider.org/ blue-water-task-force/chapter 37.

Independent tests of the soil around three of the new utility poles installed by PSEG Long Island in East Hampton Village and Town to support a six-mile, high-voltage transmission line have revealed high levels of the toxic chemical pentachlorophenol, which was used to treat the poles.

In a statement released Monday, the municipalities called on PSEG to sample soil around all 267 of the newly installed poles and to remove contaminated soil where levels of the chemical, also called penta or PCP, exceed New York State Department of Environmental Conservation standards.

Soils from all three of the sampling locations along Cedar Street near North Main Street, within a foot of each pole, exceeded levels at which the D.E.C. requires cleanup. The chemical was not detected in the underlying groundwater. According to a report by FPM Group, the engineering and environmental science firm that conducted the tests, penta binds to soil and therefore is unlikely to dissolve into rainwater migrating through the ground to the groundwater.

According to a PSEG spokesman, Jeffrey Weir, the migration of penta into the soil surrounding treated utility poles is expected and desired “to protect against insect infestation, and for longevity.”

Mr. Weir said Tuesday that the testing results were “very consistent with what the United States Environmental Protection Agency and experts in the field expect.”

Nonetheless, he said, the company is “absolutely going to review the report in much further and greater detail” to determine how it would respond to the town and village’s request.

Penta has been banned in more than two dozen countries worldwide and is among the chemicals being considered at the United Nations’ Stockholm Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants for inclusion in a global treaty limiting or outlawing the use of listed substances.

The substance has been classified as a probable human carcinogen and labeled “extremely toxic to humans from acute (short-term) ingestion and inhalation exposure” by the E.P.A. But it is still authorized for industrial use in this country, where it is applied as a wood preservative.

Once in the soil, the chemical degrades due to light, so that penta “concentrations in surface soil may decline over time,” the FPM Group said in its report. Given the range of penta levels found, and the potential for photo-degradation, there may never be significant levels of the chemical (exceeding state standards) in the groundwater, according to the report.

However, the consultants said, “It is possible that over time some PCP may migrate from the soil via infiltrating stormwater and eventually enter the water table.”

The elevated levels of penta in the soil close to the poles could be due to leaching from the poles or application ofthe chemical during installation, according to the report.

When concerns arose previously that PSEG may have poured additional penta around the base of the poles, based on surrounding soil discoloration, PSEG denied having applied any of the chemical. The poles are treated with penta during manufacture.

The levels of penta found at depths of 12 to 18 inches below ground, and at or near the surface around the Cedar Street poles, ranged from 1,550 micrograms per kilogram to 79,700 micrograms per kilogram. The D.E.C. standards for cleanup vary: For groundwater protection, cleanup is required at 800 micrograms per kilogram; for residental areas, at 2,400 micrograms per kilogram, and in industrial situations, at 55,000 micrograms per kilogram.

“It is greatly disturbing to see such high levels of this chemical in the soil surrounding these utility poles,” Town Supervisor Larry Cantwell said in a press release issued early this week. “It is imperative that PSEG, as the installer of these penta-treated poles, take responsibility by paying for and performing the necessary cleanup following further testing of the soil surrounding all the new poles.”

East Hampton Village Deputy Mayor Barbara Borsack also called on the utility to act. “While we are grateful to hear our groundwater has not been contaminated, nonetheless, we need to address the elevated penta levels in our soil now,” she said in the release.

Earlier this year, Long Island Businesses for Responsible Energy, or LIBFRE, an East Hampton group that has sued PSEG Long Island over its installation of the new poles and high-voltage line, hired Dermody Consulting to inspect several of the penta-treated poles and their surroundings.

The engineers concluded that “the presence of penta on the poles and in the soil in the vicinity of the poles appears to represent a significant risk to human health and the environment.” Levels were found at 300 times higher than the state threshold for cleanup.

Town officials had forwarded the Dermody report to Suffolk County toxicologists and the D.E.C. But in a June letter to Mr. Cantwell, Dr. Thomas B. Johnson of the state Bureau of Toxic Substance Assessment cited the E.P.A.’s findings that the use of penta as a wood preservative “will not pose unreasonable risks to humans or the environment.”

At LIBFRE’s request, Dermody Consulting also sampled water from a sump in the basement of the village’s emergency services building, which is along the transmission line route on Cedar Street, and detected low levels of penta.

A state law banning utility poles coated with pentachlorophenol has been proposed by East Hampton’s representatives, New York State Assemblyman Fred W. Thiele Jr. and Senator Kenneth P. LaValle. The law also calls for warnings to be placed on existing poles treated with the chemical.

The class-action lawsuit against PSEG and the Long Island Power Authority, which turned over electricity delivery to it last year but retains oversight of its operations, seeks an injunction requiring the utility companies to remove all the poles that have been installed, which are larger in height and diameter than those they are replacing, and to bury the electric lines, at the companies’ expense.

It alleges negative health effects from electromagnetic fields surrounding the transmission lines, and claims the lines and poles have damaged trees and other vegetation, and the scenic quality of residential streets, and that the penta-coated poles will cause harm. Damages of $50 million are sought, due to alleged health impacts, impacts on property value, and emotional distress.

East Hampton and Southampton Towns acted in concert last Thursday to ban the distribution by retail stores of the thin plastic bags typically used to package purchased items.

Southampton’s law will take effect on April 22 next year — Earth Day — while East Hampton’s will be effective on Sept. 22, 2015, in order to provide time for stores to use their inventory of bags and “convert to alternative packaging materials,” according to the resolution approving the ban.

A ban is already in effect in the Southampton and East Hampton Villages. East Hampton Village adopted its ordinance in 2011.

Members of East Hampton Town’s litter and energy sustainability committees who spoke at a hearing last month in favor of a ban on the “single-use” plastic shopping bags cited the persistence of the bags, and their plastic, in the environment; the resources needed for their manufacture, and the short period of time for which they are typically used before they are thrown away.

The hearing was held open and reconvened last Thursday night. At both meetings, Jay M. Peltz, a vice president of the Food Industry Alliance of New York State and its general counsel, was the sole speaker against the ban, saying it has been cast as a panacea to the environmental issues raised by plastic bags without a thorough investigation into its actual effect.

The net result, he said, could be increased use of paper bags, which require extensive resources to manufacture.

East Hampton Town Councilman Fred Overton voted last Thursday against enacting the ban, because, he said this week, the board had not taken time to discuss the public hearing comments and information Mr. Peltz had provided.

“It’s a pretty significant piece of legislation,” said Mr. Overton on Monday. “I thought it would warrant a little discussion before we cast a vote.”

Mr. Overton said that, ultimately, he might have supported enacting the ban. But, he said, “I didn’t see what the rush was.” He said he was disappointed that a vote was called when normally issues are slated for further discussion at a board member’s request.

After two hearings on the proposed ban, East Hampton Town Supervisor Larry Cantwell said Monday, “the boardwas ready to act.”

Eastern Suffolk supervisors and mayors have been discussing acting regionally on a plastic bag ban during regular get-togethers, Mr. Cantwell reported earlier this year.

“When you look at what’s happening globally with plastic products in the environment . . . it’s having a devastating impact,” he said.

According to calculations by the town’s Natural Resources Department, based on a federal Environmental Protection Agency estimate that 104 billion of the bags are used each year in the United States, there are 10.7 million such bags used in the town every year.

Each is used for an average of only 12 minutes, Frank Dalene, the chairman of East Hampton’s energy sustainability committee, said at a town board meeting earlier this fall. “But they remain in our landfills for years,” he said.

The plastic, which does not disappear or break down in the environment, “is now entering the human food chain,” Dieter von Lehsten, a co-chairman of Southampton Town’s Sustainable Southampton Green Advisory Committee, had told the board.

The bag ban in the village, where Mr. Cantwell served as administrator before running for town supervisor, “worked well,” he said.

Town officials sought input from retailers and other business owners, who were largely in support, before enacting the ban last week.

Nationwide, 133 municipalities have adopted bans on the use of thin-ply plastic bags, Mr. von Lehsten said at a recent meeting. Bans on single-use plastic bags are already in place in several big cities, including Washington D.C., and Philadelphia, he said, and were passed in 103 California municipalities before a statewide ban was enacted there.

An amendment that would update East Hampton Village’s lighting code was put on hold at the village board’s meeting on Friday when the executive director of the East Hampton Business Alliance asked, on behalf of the group’s membership, that the hearing remain open.

The proposed amendment to a code enacted in 2004 was drafted by the village’s design review board in consultation with the village board and Susan Harder, the state representative of the International Dark Sky Association. It is intended to address “light trespass,” or lighting that intrudes into neighboring properties, as well as technological improvements including those allowing energy conservation.

Margaret Turner of the business alliance asked the board to reconsider an addition to code defining landscape lighting as nonessential. In many cases, she said, such lighting “could actually work very well as essential,” such as when illuminating walkways. “In many cases, it’s low to the ground, there is no upward lighting, and virtually no glare and generally no light trespass onto other properties.”

Ms. Turner also told the board that input from the Police Department was critical to the public-safety aspect of lighting regulations. The population is aging, she said, “and with that comes diminished eyesight, especially in the evenings.”

Donald Hunting, president of the East Hampton Library’s board of managers, also asked the board to keep the hearing open, conveying the wishes of Dennis Fabiszak, its director, who was out of town.

Drafting the proposed legislation had been “a learning experience for the design review board,” said Carolyn Preische, that board’s vice chairwoman. As an example, the board had worked closely with the library to modify lighting in its recently renovated parking lot when the approved lighting “turned out to be a brighter, harsher light than we anticipated it was going to be.” Library officials were cooperative, she said, with only the addition of a small filter required to mitigate the fixtures’ brightness. “It all goes back to the original code,” which said that light shall not trespass over property lines. The proposed legislation, she said, is simply an expansion of the code as enacted in 2004.

But Kathleen Cunningham, executive director of the Village Preservation Society, supported the amendment. “Light trespass is a big issue for a residential community such as ours,” she said. “I applaud the board for beginning this process.”

Ms. Harder, who is also a lighting designer, said that intrusive lighting impacts both the environment and human health, while new technologies allow far greater control over energy use. Even “the City that Never Sleeps and the “City of Light,” New York and Paris, have enacted lighting ordinances, she said. Further, she added, there is no documented proof that all-night lighting deters crime.

“There is nothing whatsoever unsafe that’s proposed in your amendments,” Ms. Harder said. “These adjustments will save everybody money and reduce not just light pollution, but also air pollution and water pollution,” given that electricity is generated by the burning of coal and oil. She said she was willing to consult with the village should adjustments to the code be necessary. “My hope is that you will enact this. It sets a good example for the town, who I hope will consider similar legislation.”

The hearing was adjourned until the board’s next meeting, on Jan. 16.

The board did adopt, with a slight modification, an amendment to village code requiring a public hearing prior to the issuance of a permit for the erection of new utility poles. An exception was added exempting applications for installation of poles that are so minor as to require no environmental assessment.

As it has with other several residential streets, the board adopted an amendment reducing the speed limit on Dayton Lane to 25 miles per hour.

Since starting kindergarten at the John M. Marshall Elementary School in September, Atilla Secim’s English has improved by leaps and bounds.

Atilla, 5, who speaks Turkish, Arabic, some French, and is now nearly fluent in English, has lived in three different countries over the past five years. He was born in Turkey and most recently lived in Saudi Arabia. He and his family relocated to East Hampton just before September’s start of school.

“We came here for the future of our kids,” said his father, Murat Secim. He, his wife, Ayse, their children, Atilla and Cengiz, their 19-month-old son, are temporarily living in his sister’s weekend house until they establish more permanent roots. “We think they are going to get a better education here.”

Atilla is one of 18 children in Kristen Tulp’s kindergarten class at John Marshall. It’s his fourth school in three years.

The East Hampton School District, like many districts on the South Fork, has undergone a rapid transformation over the past few decades — from enrolling a vast majority of white students to one where Spanish is increasingly the primary language spoken at home. This is the third article in a series that examines the changing face of East Hampton by following a diverse group of kindergartners from a single class at John Marshall Elementary School through the school year and beyond.

According to John Marshall’s 2012-13 New York State school report card, enrollment is 51 percent Latino, 40 percent white, 5 percent black, 2 percent Asian, and 2 percent multiracial. Among the 621 students that school year, 21 percent had a limited English proficiency.

In addition to spending his day in an English-speaking classroom, Atilla meets with an English as a second language teacher several times each week, when he receives targeted instruction. Though Turkish is still the language with which he is the most comfortable (and what is generally spoken at home), his parents have recently noticed that when talking with his American-born cousin, the two speak freely in English.

Mr. Secim, 39, a native of Turkey, works in the home textiles business, selling upholstery and fabrics. A two-year contracting job recently took the family to Saudi Arabia, where Cengiz was born, but they hoped to move to the United States once their children (both have American passports) were oldenough to enroll in public school.

Ms. Secim was also born in Turkey. At the age of 9, speaking not a word of English, her family moved first to Brooklyn and then to Queens in search of economic mobility. Though her father worked as an electrician in Turkey, once in the U.S., he painted houses. Her mother stayed at home, looking after two children and taking on sewing jobs to help make ends meet.

After attending Forest Hills High School in Queens, Ms. Secim graduated from Stony Brook University with a degree in economics. After college, she worked for Turkish Airlines and later for A.I.G., the insurance company. Once her two children are in school full time, Ms. Secim plans on returning to the work force.

In 2004, based on the recommendation of a family friend, the couple struck up an email correspondence. They first met in September of that year and by July of 2005 had married in Istanbul. Ms. Secim promptly moved back to Turkey, where they spent the first seven years of their marriage.

Though Mr. Secim studied journalism at Istanbul University, he eventually joined his family’s textile business. Over the course of his career, he estimates that he’s traveled to nearly 50 countries. After living in Saudi Arabia for two years, moving to New York made sense, particularly since his sister lives in Battery Park and owns a spacious weekend house in East Hampton. Ms. Secim’s brother and parents live in New Jersey.

Still, the cold weather and long distance from Kennedy International Airport have prompted the family to go in search of more convenient options. They are exploring other parts of Long Island and possibly Florida.

“There are a lot of opportunities here,” said Ms. Secim. “I finished college and would like them [her children] to get their master’s degrees and hopefully succeed in whatever they decide to do.” She sees Atilla, who likes to make people laugh, as a natural-born entertainer.

Since starting kindergarten, bananas are still a favorite snack and Jake, a classmate, is still his closest friend. Atilla is learning to count and memorizing his letters. Blue is his favorite color, and he wants to be a police officer when he grows up. During after-school hours, he takes soccer and in-line skating classes.

A sensitive, inquisitive boy, Atilla’s mind is always fast at work. “Where does water come from? Where did the trees come from?” he wonders. Lately, he peppers his parents with questions, wanting to know what happens when they get older — worrying, too, about death.

“When he comes home from school, he used to tell me about his day in Turkish. Now, he’s telling me everything in English,” said Ms. Secim, during bites of homemade revani, a sweet Turkish cake. At night, when Atilla is fast asleep, she now hears him uttering phrases in English. “When I first came to the U.S., I would translate everything in my head from Turkish to English. Eventually the new language takes over. That’s what he’s going through.”

A proposed offshore wind farm to be situated 30 miles east of Montauk is in doubt in the wake of the Long Island Power Authority's decision on Wednesday to reject the proposed installation. LIPA will, however, pursue 11 land-based solar farms in Suffolk County. The wind farm, to be constructed and operated by the Rhode Island company Deepwater Wind, was prohibitively expensive, according to LIPA officials.

When completed and operational, the solar projects LIPA voted to pursue are projected to provide 122 megawatts of power, a figure that falls short of the 280 megawatts of clean, renewable energy the authority announced as a goal in 2012.

Reaction from stakeholders was swift. Jeffrey Grybowski, chief executive officer of Deepwater Wind, issued a statement on Wednesday in which he said that the power company had "missed an opportunity to build a 21st-century energy supply for Long Island and a new local industry employing hundreds for years to come."

Mr. Grybowski pointed to a report issued by Stony Brook University concluding that construction of a wind farm and LIPA's purchase of energy from it would have no impact on ratepayer bills. "Long Islanders suffer from some of the highest energy costs in the Northeast," he said, "and the region trails the rest of New York State in renewables." LIPA's decision, he said, "does little to prepare Long Island for the future energy needs, save ratepayers money, or put Long Island laborers back to work."

Last month, Mr. Grybowski announced a partnership with the Nassau-Suffolk Building and Construction Trades Council and the Long Island Federation of Labor, A.F.L.-C.I.O., to develop a local offshore wind industry. At that time, he said that he anticipated some 300 jobs would result from the offshore wind farm's construction project. "We believe offshore wind has the potential to start a new clean-energy industry on the island," he said.

Bonnie Brady, executive director of the Long Island Commercial Fishing Association, had a different take on yesterday's announcement. On behalf of commercial fishermen, Ms. Brady was concerned about the proposed project's potential impact on marine habitat, spawning, and migratory patterns.

It was hypocritical, Ms. Brady said, to fear environmental degradation through the burning of fossil fuels while damaging the environment that sustains an essential industry for Long Island's economy and many of its residents. "We've got a renewable resource in our fisheries," Ms. Brady said, "and it's not just for commercial guys, it's for the charter guys, recreational guys, lobstermen." The proposed 256-square-mile wind farm site, she said, "is a very important area. It shouldn't be 'alternative energy at all costs,' as in, 'destroy an ecosystem so we can have it.' "

"I'm relieved that LIPA made a measured decision," Ms. Brady said. "I want to believe it's based upon not wanting to degrade an environment in the name of green energy."

While recognizing the concerns of commercial fishermen, Mr. Grybowski disputed the degree of disruption or degradation construction of the offshore wind farm would have caused.