The adoption on Tuesday of a capital improvement plan for East Hampton Airport has fanned fears that the outgoing administration will attempt to answer the controversial question of whether the town should accept new grants from the Federal Aviation Administration by taking federal money before the end of the year.

       Extending the obligations to the F.A.A. that come along with accepting the agency’s money for the airport, in effect for 20 years from each separate airport grant, has been central to arguments over how the town might obtain more control over airport use in order to reduce aircraft noise.

       Aviation interests have asserted that federal money is needed to maintain the airport, and that it would make no difference, while noise control advocates have pointed to different standards that would be applied if the town is “grant obligated” or not, as far as defending the enactment of local restrictions such as a curfew on helicopters.

       In recent weeks, the town’s aviation attorney has advised the town board that, under forthcoming F.A.A. rules, being less beholden to the agency’s oversight may be critical to the ability to enforce noise-control measures.

       The airport capital improvement plan, approved on Tuesday by a split 3-to-2 vote along party lines, includes a list of projects, such as repair of runway and taxiway pavement, runway lighting, and the construction of a perimeter and security fence, with an estimated total cost of approximately $5 million. Supervisor Bill Wilkinson and fellow Republican majority members, Councilwoman Theresa Quigley and Councilman Dominick Stanzione, who are leaving office at the end of the month, voted in favor of it.

       An additional approximately $5 million worth of projects was removed from an earlier draft of the capital plan after a hearing last month, when it was determined that only projects already included in the town’s airport layout and master plans, for which a general environmental impact evaluation has been done, could properly be listed on the capital improvement plan.

       Those projects that were removed have been listed on an airport maintenance plan presented to the town board this week by Jim Brundige, the airport manager. Both lists, Mr. Brundige said, are key to helping town officials develop a roadmap for airport upkeep and repair. No major capital improvements have been made to the airport during his nine-year tenure with the town, Mr. Brundige said.

       According to the resolution approved Tuesday by the board, the capital plan will be submitted to the F.A.A.

       A previous board, in 2011, unani mously approved the submission to the F.A.A. of a request for money for an airport fence design, which has been pending.

       The agency had indicated it was willing to fund the fence project, but wanted the town to commit to constructing the fence before it would pay for its design.

       In October, Councilman Stanzione offered a resolution stating the town’s commitment to completing the fencing project, with or without money from the F.A.A. He has made no secret of his opinion that new F.A.A. grants should be accepted and has accused those opposing accepting them of wanting to shut down the airport.

       That October commitment could have set the federal agency’s wheels in motion for issuing a grant to the town.

       “It is definitely a possibility,” said John Jilnicki, the town attorney, yesterday. “I don’t know, frankly, if it’s a reality, but it’s a possibility.”

       However, he said of the F.A.A., “I have heard nothing from them at all.” In past years, Mr. Jilnicki said, F.A.A. officials, “aware of the fact that the town board changes its composition every few years,” have held off on decisions affecting the town when a new administration is poised to take office.

       Another factor, he said, may be the availability of money. The F.A.A. has a finite amount of airport improvement grant money for each calendar year, and may have exhausted the coffers for 2013.

       “I would like some assurance,” that the board does not at present intend to pursue F.A.A. funding, Kathy Cunningham, president of the Quiet Skies Coalition, told the town board on Tuesday, before the airport capital plan was adopted.

       “This is a roadmap for projects that might be done in the future, and might not be done,” said Councilwoman Quigley. “I don’t know how to make it more clear that all we’re doing is approving a roadmap. There’s nothing about funding here,” she said.

       On Tuesday afternoon after the vote, the East Hampton Aviation Association issued a press release thanking the board and in particular Mr. Stanzione for adopting the “repair plan.”

       “Next year, the town can decide whether it wants to pay for the repairs itself or apply to the F.A.A. for the funds to do so,” the organization wrote.

       Anyone living in East Hampton for any length of time probably drives right past the big blue gas ball on Railroad Avenue and Fresno Place in East Hampton Village without batting an eye.

       Until now. Recent passers-by have no doubt noticed the huge National Grid crane at the site and the fact that the sky blue steel ball, which is also known as a Hortonsphere, is missing its top half and more accurately resembles a hemisphere.

       According to Wendy Ladd, a spokeswoman for National Grid, the gas ball, which was used to help maintain pressure in natural gas lines, was decommissioned about six weeks ago and will be just a memory by the end of the year.

       “As far as we know, it’s the last one on Long Island,” she said.

       Although not much of a fuss has been made about the gas ball’s demise, at least one resident, David Collins, is sad to see it go.

       Mr. Collins said when he heard the gas ball was going to be removed, he asked the village board to consider preserving it as a historic landmark, but to no avail.

       “To me, it’s industrial architecture,” he said. “So is the Hook Mill. The Hook Mill was not built to be a historic monument. What time period does the village want to preserve? If it’s not made out of wood, they aren’t interested.”

       Mr. Collins said the gas ball was hand-riveted by teams of workers in the days before welding was a common construction practice and built to last.

       “It kind of breaks my heart to see it go,” he said.

       A larger gas ball on the Sag Harbor waterfront was disassembled in 2006, much to the consternation of many residents who had come to view the structure as a fixture on the village skyline.

       The East Hampton gas ball, which was built in 1928, became obsolete with the expansion of natural gas lines on the East End and the construction of updated regulating equipment.

       During periods of low demand, natural gas was pumped into the ball and held under pressure until it was released during periods of high demand.

       The tank was constructed of threequarter-inch-thick steel panels that were riveted together. Workers are using acetylene torches to cut the panels, which will be removed from the site and recycled.

       The name Hortonsphere is a trademark held by the Chicago Bridge & Iron Company, which manufactures all sorts of energy-production infrastructure and is named after one of the company’s founders, Horace Ebenezer Horton.

      A lone grave off Morris Park Lane in East Hampton was the burial site, it is believed, of “Ned, Faithtul negro manservant to Captain Jeremiah Osborn,” according to the marker that was once there, which stated his date of death as Aug. 8, 1817.

       Not much else is known about Ned, and, until recently, what became of his grave was unclear as well.

       In 2008, East Hampton Town’s nature preserve committee, under the leadership of Eileen Roaman, who died earlier this year, put together a list of the historic gravesites scattered about town, and members are updating it this year.

       There are over 30 family cemeteries or single gravesites throughout the town, Richard Whalen, the co-chairman of the nature preserve committee, told the town board on Tuesday. Under state law, he said, abandoned cemeteries revert to the ownership of the town.

       But many of the small burial plots, which are primarily in Springs and in the Northwest Woods and are often marked off with low white wood-rail fences, are surrounded by private house lots — and some, Mr. Whalen said, have actually een subsumed by them.

       Ned’s grave appears to be one of them. Mr. Whalen said he had walked into the 15-by-15-foot burial plot in the early 1980s and read the words on the servant’s headstone.

       It is unlikely, he said yesterday, that Ned was a slave, as slavery was abolished in New York State in 1799. And, he said, the inscription on the stone and the burial site in what was then called Freetown indicate that Ned was well regarded.

       The nature preserve committee found in 2008 that, though Ned’s grave was included on a list of those maintained by the Town Parks Department, the once-wooded area was built up with houses, and the grave could not be immediately found. It could not be easily seen, and aerial photographs on Google Earth and other sites did not indicate it was still there.

       A subdivision map and a 1988 survey of the surrounding land were located, both showing the gravesite, Mr. Whalen said.

       But now, Russ Calemmo, another nature preserve committee member, told the town board the area contains plantings and a barbecue pit is nearby. There is no sign of the headstone, he said.

       What appears to have happened, Mr. Calemmo said, is that a previous owner of the land had difficulty selling it, and removed the fence around the burial site, which is essentially in the backyard of a half-acre house lot.

       “We’re suggesting . . . a disinterment, and a reinterment of Ned’s remains,” Mr. Whalen told the board. Under state law, the town would have to apply to State Supreme Court for permission. The remains, suggested the nature preserve committee members, could be buried at a more public site.

       “Ned was respected by the people who buried him almost 200 years ago,” Mr. Whalen said. “And we think he should have the respect of having his burial venerated. . . .”

       Town Councilwoman Theresa Quigley suggested the remains be reburied “someplace very public . . . easily accessible and prominent, and someplace the public will not just stumble upon it, but be drawn to it.” She suggested a new gravesite on the town-owned former Lester farm at North Main and Cedar Streets. “I think it’s an important part of our history,” she said.

       Mr. Whalen said by phone Tuesday that the committee hopes to produce a “master report” of graves tucked away throughout the town sometime next year. Of all of the single graves and family cemeteries the group visited, he said, “none of them was as impacted” by surrounding development as Ned’s grave. “We’re hoping that by having a final, well-documented inventory . . . that this won’t happen again,” he said.

As the pleasant days of early September give way to the biting winds of November, the East Hampton Food Pantry at Whalebone Village sees a spike in the number of people filing through its doors to wait in line for a few bags of groceries to help them get through the week.

“As soon as we hit Labor Day, the numbers start to go up right away,” said Gabrielle Scarpaci, the executive director of the pantry, which, along with its satellite at the St. Michael’s Lutheran Church senior citizen housing in Amagansett, is the largest in town. “They need help.”

So does the pantry itself. With Thanksgiving just around the corner, she said the food pantry’s bank account was down to about $20,000. “This is the lowest we’ve ever been. We’re really in trouble.”

The culprit, she said, is a falloff in donations and a general rise in the number of people relying on the pantry.

Be charitable:

How to Give to the Hungry

Through October, the pantry had already seen 25,464 client visits, or 9,431 family visits. That puts it on pace to hit the 30,000 mark this year, with many of those clients returning week after week.

While that is down significantly from the record set in 2010, when it served 43,519, and even off a bit from last year, when it had 32,701 client visits, it is still three times as many as at the beginning of the recession, when it helped 10,770.

The pantry is open from 2 to 6 p.m. each Tuesday. The Amagansett satellite is open from 4 to 6 p.m.

“The majority of the people who live out here full time are working class,” said Vicki Littman, the owner of Vicki’s Veggies in Amagansett and chairwoman of the pantry’s board of directors. “Many have seasonal jobs; whatever they’ve made in the summer, they live off of in the winter.”

The people relying on the pantry run the gamut from a young man who came to the East End looking for work last summer and instead found himself unemployed and homeless, sleeping in the woods, to senior citizens who live in the town’s subsidized apartments. In between are many families, locals and newcomers, including members of the growing Spanish-speaking community, although Ms. Scarpaci said their numbers had stabilized as many of the day laborers who used to be seen gathering at places like the East Hampton train station have apparently left the area.

It hasn’t helped that the federal government has cut back on the food stamps program. Ms. Scarpaci said she knew of one senior citizen whose food stamps will be reduced by $70 a month. “That’s a lot when you are living on a fixed income,” she said.

Despite a steady flow of donations from food drives like the Harvest for Hunger planned for this Saturday from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. at the East Hampton Middle School, the food pantry still burns through $4,000 to $5,000 a week buying food to keep its shelves stocked, Ms. Scarpaci said.

Besides canned goods and other non-perishables like pasta and cereal, the East Hampton pantry tries to offer its clients a selection of fresh meats, vegetables, and fruits, and even milk and other dairy products, which are stored in a walk-in cooler on the premises.

The pantry’s annual fund-raising letter will be going out soon. “Around the holidays we get the most donations,” Ms. Scarpaci said, but the board of directors of the largely volunteer organization is now turning its attention to ways to beef up its fund-raising efforts.

Ms. Scarpaci said the pantry’s board of directors had decided to discontinue a summertime fund-raiser, movies at the beach, because it does not make any money from it, despite its popularity. Similarly, it is looking for ways to find corporate sponsors to help increase the amount of money raised during the New Year’s Day Polar Bear Plunge.

Ms. Littman said that last year participation in the plunge dropped off when the event was moved from Main Beach in East Hampton, which suffered serious damage in Hurricane Sandy, to Atlantic Avenue Beach in Amagansett. It did not help that the weather, which had been downright balmy in previous years, did not cooperate.

Still, they said, they are grateful for the substantial help they get from service clubs and schools as well as local grocery stores and farmers.

This Saturday, for instance, members of the East Hampton Rotary Club will be posted at grocery stores in town to collect food that will be distributed among local pantries. The Girl Scouts will join the effort. Recently, students at the Ross School ran a food drive to help stock the pantry’s shelves for Thanksgiving, and many local businesses make regular donations and have collection boxes on site.

The pantry also is helped by Island Harvest and Long Island Cares, which contribute to pantries across Long Island.

Springs

The Springs Community Food Pantry, housed at the Springs Community Presbyterian Church, typically serves on average about 60 families from the Springs community each week, said its coordinator, Dru Raley, although it had obtained 70 turkeys for Thanksgiving meals it plans to distribute. The number of families stopping in on Wednesdays from 2 to 6 p.m. can peak at more than 100 in the winter, she said.

Springs, like other pantries in town, typically relies on its own fund-raising efforts, although it does share in some of the major drives and will be a drop-off point for Saturday’s Harvest for Hunger drive.

In the middle of the winter, the pantry can spend $1,500 to $2,000 per week on food. “In the summer, we’re in better shape because we get produce from the Food Pantry Farm [at the East Hampton Community Organic Farm on Long Lane] and other farms,” Ms. Raley said.

“We have trucks coming in with food almost every week. It’s like a business,” she said. “When you are feeding that many people you can’t just go to Waldbaum’s.”

Families can expect to get enough food for three or four meals a week, including meats, dairy products, and fresh fruits and vegetables, when available.

“We’re not feeding them for the week, but we are certainly helping them along the way,” she said.

Montauk

Unlike the town’s other food pantries, the Montauk Food Pantry is only open for six months a year, from November through April. “That’s when the people around here lose their jobs,” said Alice Houseknecht, a volunteer, of Montauk’s resort town economy. She added that a small army of volunteers helps out. “As they say, it takes a village,” she said.

The pantry is open in the basement of the school building at St. Therese of Lisieux Catholic Church on Essex Street from 6:30 p.m. until people stop coming, according to Fran Ecker, the organization’s longtime president.

“We get over 100 families when we do it,” said Mrs. Ecker, noting that the pantry only serves Montauk residents, who are asked to sign in.

Mrs. Ecker said Montauk is fortunate because so many residents, year-round and part-time, contribute to its annual appeal. Plus, she said, the pantry receives donations from a variety of other sources including the Chamber of Commerce’s summer farmers market, a parish flower and vegetable garden at St. Therese, food drives at the Montauk School, donations from local restaurants and stores, and events like the annual Turkey Trot run on Thanksgiving. “Everyone pitches in,” she said. “It’s beautiful.”

Wainscott

Living Waters Church at 69 Industrial Road in Wainscott also runs a pantry that is open from 6:30 to 7:30 p.m. on Wednesdays and from 10 a.m. to noon on Fridays, although clients are asked to come only once a week unless they are facing an emergency, according to Corinne Alversa, a volunteer and congregation member.

She said that the pantry serves on average 70 families a week and was preparing Thanksgiving packages this week.

Like other pantries, the one at Living Waters Church sees its client base swell as seasonal work dries up, despite a slowly improving economy.

Sag Harbor

The Sag Harbor Community Food Pantry is open on Tuesdays from 10:30 a.m. to 1 p.m. at the Old Whalers Church.

“It’s the same old story,” according to Evelyn Ramunno, one of the pantry’s coordinators, who said the number of people relying on the pantry spikes as seasonal work ends.

If the pantry saw an average of 45 families a week during the summer, it is now seeing somewhere in the high 80s.

Like other pantries, Sag Harbor tries to provide nutritious food, including meats, dairy products, and fresh fruits and vegetables, whenever possible.

The pantry, which can spend up to $1,200 a week on food in the winter, has been fortunate to receive a generous response to its annual appeal letter, she said.

      At a “demolition sale” Saturday at a property on Meadowlark Lane, off Ocean Road in Bridgehampton, an army of bargain hunters descended upon a house fronting Sagg Pond and carted off assorted treasures from a washing machine to the blue stone walkway surrounding the pool. (John Buckheit, a mason, was the lucky one who got the stone at an unbelievable $1,200.)

     The house will be torn down to make room for a bigger abode. It is a nice house, and was just renovated, but it’s a generic barn-like contemporary.

      As people left the house, a side path led to a second house on the property, a sweet antique farmhouse, probably used in its most recent incarnation as a guest house. At about 11 a.m. a woman standing in the kitchen was heard to say, “I feel sick; I feel like throwing up.”

      Her ailment?

      “They’re going to tear down this house,” she wailed. A hubbub of “Oh nos” ensued as the woman, who identified herself as Pam DeFronze, walked through the house pointing out the original 12-over-12 windows with price tags of a measly $100 per. “You can’t get those anymore,” she said. Then she pointed out a built-in corner cupboard, wide plank floorboards, ancient ceiling beams. “I’m numb,” she said. “This is an 18th-century house.” She added that she may know, at least she hoped, someone who would buy it.

        A man in an apron, one of the workers for Hampton Estate Sales, said he had heard that the house had been moved from Sagaponack. Then Denise Stephens, the proprietor of the company, appeared and in defense of the homeowners stressed that they had tried to donate the house to the historical society and the town.

       People milled about scavenging what they could. Everything was for sale from the mantelpiece to the floorboards. Blake Fleetwood, a writer who lives in an 1830 house in Amagansett, put in his two cents: The hand-chiseled 8-by-8 timbers were indicative of a structure dating from the 1830s. No matter how you look at it, the structure has housed local families for two centuries. 

    “Houses like this are our physical connection to our history,” said Sally Spanburgh, a local historic preservation advocate. “Along with farmland and open space and natural resources, historic structures are integral to the sense of community character, sense of place, and identity. They provide us with a lot of education about the skills and trades and owners, and not just of the English settlers, but also African-American families, and Polish and Irish, all those diverse groups that came here. . . .” 

    Ms. Spanburgh makes it her business to keep abreast of endangered historic houses, yet she had not heard of the plight of the Meadowlark Lane house. “As of last week I worked at the Bridgehampton Historical Society and I have no knowledge of that being offered to the society.” Nor had the director, John Eilertsen. It wouldn’t have made much difference. “Unless they also offered us land,” said Mr. Eilertsen, “we have nowhere to put it.”

    Ms. Spanburgh also said that South­ampton Town’s Landmarks and Historic Districts Board, of which she is chairwoman, had not been approached. Among the many goals of that entity is to protect “historic landscapes, settings, and structures,” according to its website.

    “We could have done a press release and helped them out,” said Ms. Spanburgh. She was also unaware of any application for a demolition permit for the property. “If a house is 75 years or older, landmarks has to review it.” Is there anything they can do to stop the process? No. But they can alert the owners to incentives that have been established to encourage preservation of old structures. A yearly $20,000 maintenance grant is just one of several incentives the town instituted.

    If only this were the sole historic house currently endangered. “We’re coming out of a slump so [demolition] is picking up,” said Ms. Spanburgh. 

    The threat to historic structures is what brought Robert Strada, a designer whose passion is to restore historic buildings, and his wife, Michelle Murphy Strada, an actress, to form Peconic Historic Preservation Inc., a not-for-profit whose mission it is to promote the preservation of historic buildings on the North and South Forks. The 501c3 got federal approval in March.

    The couple, who live in an Amagansett house built by Capt. Sam Loper in 1894, began their crusade in 2006 when, at their own expense, they saved a 1740 house on Little Plains Road in Southampton, just outside the historic district.

    “It’s tragic that they’re parting it out as opposed to maintaining its integrity,” Mr. Strada said of the Meadowlark house. He would have relished the opportunity to work with the owners to “deconstruct” it: a process to identify and label important components, take the house apart, and move it to another site where it can be reconstructed “in a comparable setting.” 

    “If we had enough time we could have raised the funds and maybe this building wouldn’t be lost,” he said. He is also actively working to save the Southampton house of Pyrrhus Concer, a freed slave and whaler who ran a shuttle service between Lake Agawam and the ocean.

    “The battle lines are being drawn,” he said, adding that those on the side of historic preservation, including Assemblyman Fred W. Thiele Jr., “the driving force behind creating the community preservation fund,” often find themselves up against developers. However, Mr. Strada was careful to single out a couple of developers who have “supported historic preservation,” Jeffrey Colle and Ben Krupinski, whom he commends for restoring the Amagansett Life-Saving Station’s exterior at his own expense.  

    Mr. Strada has joined forces with another historic preservation advocate, Richard Ward Baxter, to form Strada Baxter Design Build. In working with government agencies, they have restored such buildings as East Hampton Village’s newly completed Isaac Osborn House on Newtown Lane, which dates from the 1840s, and the Smith-Taylor Cabin in Coecles Harbor on Shelter Island.

    House preservationists have their work cut out for them. “There’s a stronger desire for something new than there is respect for something original,” said Ms. Spanburgh. “I really wish that people who want to build a new house would not buy a property with an historic structure.”

    Meanwhile, Ms. DeFronze was able to purchase a bit of the Meadowlark house’s history, its handsomely paneled front door.

The owner of a Dodge pickup truck found its engine compartment full of malodorous fish recently. The discovery followed an incident in which he had destroyed two cartons of his own catch by running them over in a restaurant parking lot a day earlier.

Charles Morici told East Hampton Town police that the owner of the Shagwong Restaurant, Jimmy Hewitt, had asked him to bring a load of fish to the Main Street, Montauk, eatery. When he arrived at the back parking lot on the night of Nov. 16, he said, he was told the fish were no longer needed.

As he was driving out of the lot, Mr. Morici told police, both cartons of fish fell out of the back of his pickup. Furious, he ran the cartons over several times, leaving a slippery mess in the lot, and drove off.

The next afternoon he returned to the dock after a day of fishing to find the engine compartment of his unlocked truck stuffed full of fish. He went back to Shagwong and confronted Mr. Hewitt, who told police he knew nothing of the fate of the fish but confirmed that he had declined to buy Mr. Morici's catch the day before.

Police photographed the engine compartment. Mr. Morici said he would clean it himself, and no charges were filed.

      For just the second time in 38 years, Vinnie’s Barber Shop in Amagansett is moving.

       But Vinnie Mazzeo’s loyal clients, many of whom queue up, newspapers and coffee in hand, before the shop’s 6:30 a.m. opening, can take comfort. The new location, behind the Meeting House restaurant on Amagansett Square, is a mere stone’s throw from the comfortable Main Street shop he has occupied since 1980.

       What’s more, Mr. Mazzeo said last week, the new location will be, to the extent possible, a re-creation of the existing one — the photos, news clippings, and collection of paper currency to be transported and displayed as before. He expects to be moved in and open for business by New Year’s Day.

       The building that Vinnie’s has called home for 33 years is for sale. “They’re not throwing us out,” Mr. Mazzeo said. Rather, “we’re doing a proactive thing. Before the place does get sold — and then everybody’s going to be scurrying, especially in Amagansett where there’s not a lot of space available. We gave ourselves an early shot at finding another location in Amagansett.”

       The change of address is, ironically, about maintaining a continuity that few businesses can claim. The son of a hairdresser, husband of a hairdresser, and father of — you guessed it — a hairdresser (his daughter is a co-owner of Capelli Hair and Skin in Bridgehampton), Mr. Mazzeo’s son, Nick, is also a barber and his business partner. “We’re just trying to keep ourselves secure, especially for my son, who’s got three children, a mortgage,” he said of the move.

       That continuity befits a lifelong resident of the South Fork. A Sag Harbor native, Mr. Mazzeo attended Inter-County Barber School in Babylon after graduation from high school in 1968. “After barber school, I joined the military,” he said. “Of course, they had the draft, so I enlisted in the Navy because that was one branch of the service that I could practice my profession in, rather than the Marines, the Army, or the Air Force — they usually have civilian barbers.”

       Mr. Mazzeo was a ship’s serviceman, responsible for managing and operating all shipboard retail and service activities. “They play a large role in the morale of the ship,” a United States Navy website says of ship’s servicemen.

       In the course of his four-year stint, Mr. Mazzeo spent about a year on a destroyer in the Mediterranean (the vessel is depicted in a photograph on a particularly well-decorated wall in the barbershop). “Barber, tailoring, laundry, I ran the ship’s store onboard,” he remembered. “I sold anything from a Hershey bar to a stereo system.”

       After the Navy, he worked for two years at a barbershop in East Hampton before moving to Amagansett, where he opened his first shop, farther east on Main Street, in 1975. “I was there for five years. I moved to this location in 1980 and have been here for 33 years,” he said.

       Surveying those 33 years’ worth of adornments on the walls of his soon-to-be-vacated space, Mr. Mazzeo observed that his business is “more of a museum than a barbershop,” and has been likened to a Norman Rockwell painting. But, he said, “I think it’s going to be a good move for us.”

       There is sufficient clientele, Mr. Mazzeo said, to keep him and Nick, who joined his father in 1999, busy throughout the year. Many of them are second-home owners who retired and now live on the South Fork year round, he said. The Amagansett location also draws customers who reside everywhere from Montauk to Wainscott and Sag Harbor. “It does slow down in the wintertime,” he said, “but we have a nice base” that keeps both men busy. 

       “I enjoy what I do,” said Mr. Mazzeo, who is 63. “I enjoy working with my son. I don’t think there are too many father-son teams that could work together. We’re a team, and I think people like coming here. Right, Theodore?” he said, to a freshly shorn customer.

       “I love it,” was the reply.

       Pointed criticism of the East Hampton Village Zoning Board of Appeals punctuated what had been a very brief and uneventful meeting on Friday.

       The rebuke, delivered by Stuart Vorpahl, a fisherman and former East Hampton Town trustee, concerned Mollie Zweig’s half-built rock revetment on the beach in front of her West End Road property. The board had granted Ms. Zweig’s application to construct the revetment, and to remove an existing stone groin, restore an eroded dune with 4,000 cubic yards of sand, plant beach grass, and install sand fencing, on Oct. 11. Work began on Nov. 11, Veterans Day.

       The trustees took strong exception to the project, claiming that most if not all of it would be happening on land under their jurisdiction. Their attorney, David Eagan, won a temporary restraining order in State Supreme Court on Nov. 13, halting construction. A hearing on the matter was to have been held there yesterday.

       “Have any of you people actually read the charter that created the Village of East Hampton?” Mr. Vorpahl asked the members of the zoning board.

       “Yes, of course we have,” answered Frank Newbold, the chairman. Ownership of the land was not what had been at issue, he said. “If you read the resolution . . . what it states is that we give our approval and it is subject to any other permissions that the homeowner may need, which, obviously, we now appreciate is the trustees.”

       Linda Riley, the village attorney, broke in. “I’m not disagreeing with anything you just said,” she told Mr. Newbold, “except that the jurisdiction of the village and the ownership of the underlying property is all a topic of the litigation. This board has no authority to determine that one way or the other. It’s in the courts, where it belongs.”

       “That’s why I’m here,” said Mr. Vorpahl, who was a trustee for 12 years beginning in 1977. He drew a parallel between the Zweig project and a developer’s effort, in the early ’80s, to build a hotel and bulkhead at Duck Creek, off Three Mile Harbor in Springs. “East Hampton Town Trustees had to sue the East Hampton Town Zoning Board of Appeals,” Mr. Vorpahl said, “because they gave permission to the developer to dig it all up. It cost the East Hampton Town Trustees a lot of money. And when we got to Riverhead court — I was clerk of the trustees at the time — one of the questions that was raised to me directly [was], ‘What is going on in East Hampton, where one branch of East Hampton Town government has to sue the other branch?’ ”

       The Duck Creek project was halted and abandoned.

       “Your charter states this: Your southerly boundary is the southerly edge of the beach grass line,” Mr. Vorpahl continued. “What you should have done, which would save the town government and the taxpayers thousands and thousands of dollars, was to say, ‘Our boundary is the southerly edge of beach grass.’ You have no say beyond that. Yet a lot of taxpayers’ money now is going to be thrown up a rope to straighten out what is obvious.”

       Ms. Zweig’s attorney, Stephen Angel, had argued in a September hearing that Hurricane Sandy and subsequent storms last year had caused avulsion, not erosion, on the beach. Unlike erosion, he said, avulsion does not affect title to property.

       “It was understood in this town from the beginnings that the high water mark is the southerly edge of the beach grass line,” Mr. Vorpahl repeated, at least until the mid-1960s, when, he said, “we started having trouble trying to work on the beach.” Fishermen would “just about get the [seine] net ashore,” he said, when “somebody would come flying over the dunes screaming and hollering at us that we are on their property, because when that real estate agent sold that person that piece of dune land, they sold them the beach, too. They sold the public land.”

       Commercial fishermen having a saying, he told the board. “When a real estate agent wants to really make the sale, they will tell that prospective property owner, ‘You also own a slot of land all the way to Portugal.’ ” 

       “Sadly, not true,” Mr. Newbold said, as he and his colleagues laughed.

       “Unfortunately, it’s still going on,” Mr. Vorpahl said.

       Mr. Newbold thanked him for his comments. “We all look forward to hearing what the court has to say,” he said.

       Mr. Vorpahl delivered one more message as he walked away from the lectern. “Remember: Portugal!”

      Early on the morning of Nov. 19 at the Child Development Center of the Hamptons, 16 kindergarten students wriggled in tiny electric blue chairs, maybe half a foot off the ground, as one of their teachers, Hillary Paul, led the class through a series of daily prompts.

       The class, made up of 13 boys and 3 girls, discussed the days of the week and the months of the year before finally counting the days of the month, from the 1st of November to the 19th.

       “You guys are getting so good at counting,” said Ms. Paul. Meanwhile, her colleague Mercedes Parris also sat in the semicircle, helping to ease a child into the morning by rubbing his shoulders and giving him an extra dose of encouragement.

       In the kindergarten class, the majority are regular education students, with a small percentage classified as special education. None receive one-on-one support. The Child Development Center of the Hamptons, a charter school on Stephen Hand’s Path in East Hampton that utilizes a co-teaching model, places two certified teachers, one typically in possession of a special education certificate, in every class.

       The effect is warm and intimate, with children, no matter their needs, receiving a steady stream of individual attention.

       Though C.D.C.H., the only charter school on the South Fork, got its start in 1997 as an alternative for children with special needs, specifically a mother in search of an appropriate place for her autistic son, it now enrolls a significant number of regular education students — nearly half of the 80 students from kindergarten to grade five. It also operates a tuition-based preschool, which is separate from the charter school. It currently enrolls 38 children.

       “A lot of our parents know us by word of mouth,” said Patricia Loewe, the school’s education leader, a position she’s held since last fall. She formerly worked in Montauk, overseeing that district’s special education program. “For children with special needs, often earlier is better. If we can intervene as soon as possible, there’s a good chance of a student not needing those services down the road.”

       The building, whose design resembles a spacious airplane hangar, also houses additional on-site services, whether for speech, reading, occupational therapy, or psychological counseling.

       For children in need of additional interventions, the school offers a special class. It now enrolls seven students, with most of them also having an individual aide, in addition to the regularly assigned special education teacher and teaching assistant. The class offers multiple opportunities for socialization with peers, whether during art, gym, or lunchtime.

       “We don’t have the layers of bureaucracy,” Ms. Loewe said. “It’s a smaller setting, with more opportunities for more nurturing.”

       At present, 14 different eastern Long Island districts send children to C.D.C.H., from Montauk to Brookhaven and several points in between, as long as they meet the 50-mile radius requirement, according to Christopher Long, its chief operations officer. As a charter school, it is managed by Family Residences and Essential Enterprises, a not-for-profit organization based in Old Bethpage.

       But for sending districts, the alternative is not without attendant costs. Ms. Loewe said a certain diplomacy was required, and that it was, at times, a sensitive issue. As a public charter school, the matter is parent choice, and a contract is established between each of the sending districts, which in some cases are also required to supply transportation should a child’s needs dictate it.

       “We’re impacted because we pay tuition. The services are costly,” said Eric Casale, the principal of the Springs School. Each year, the district sends between 15 and 19 students to C.D.C.H. “A lot of the supports we have here in the building and it doesn’t cost us extra if the students need speech or therapy. If they attend C.D.C.H., it costs us more.”

       According to Thomas Primiano, the district’s treasurer, Springs currently enrolls 19 regular education students at C.D.C.H., where, for the 2012-13 school year, tuition rates were $21,775, with the Springs School paying more than $370,000 in all. Last year, New York State gave Springs $922 in tuition assistance for each of the 19 children — a total of $17,518.

       East Hampton, meanwhile, paid $270,919 last year to send 10 regular education students to C.D.C.H. and $110,672 to cover the costs of enrolling 4 special education students, according to Isabel Madison, the district’s assistant superintendent for business. As with Springs, last year East Hampton received from the state an annual reimbursement of $900 for each child.

       “It does have a financial impact on the district,” said Richard Burns, East Hampton’s superintendent. If we have to budget $500,000 for C.D.C.H., it’s a significant amount of money.”

       In recent years, as with many of the surrounding districts, C.D.C.H. has seen an increase in its Latino enrollment. Ms. Loewe estimated that its Latino population approached nearly 50 percent. As a result, the school recently hired two bilingual staff members, including one who sits at the front entrance and is able to communicate directly with Spanish-speaking parents.

       According to the 2011-12 New York State Report Card, the most recent available, the average class size was 12 students. Only 8 percent qualified for free or reduced-price lunches in a student body that was 55 percent white, 34 percent Latino, 5 percent multiracial, 3 percent black, and 3 percent Asian.

       After fifth grade, Ms. Loewe said, most students return to their home districts, and most with little difficulty. In future years, some members of the administration can see the school expanding until at least the middle school grades, helping to ease the eventual transition.

       No matter the cost, Gail Simons, a Montauk resident, sees C.D.C.H. as a badly needed resource. She enrolled her son, a special education student, in 2003. She said that it saved his life, helping to bolster his confidence and self-esteem.

       “The school deals with children as they are,” Ms. Simons said. “There are no labels. They are only treated as individuals. There is no bullying. Everyone is accepted for who they are — and not just accepted, but celebrated and loved.”

       Since graduating, her son now attends the Montauk School. Though he has since adjusted, she described the move as a bit of a culture shock and said that the transition had been a somewhat rough one. Mostly, she is grateful for the socialization her son received at the development center. “He would have ended up in a far worse place,” she said. “It would have been detrimental for him.”

       Along with several other parents, she can also see its utility for typically developing children. “In learning alongside nontypical children, it can be a good learning experience in terms of building empathy and compassion,” Ms. Simons said.

       Back in the building this November morning, during an observation of a fifth-grade class, the co-teaching model was in full force during a math lesson. The class of 18 was roughly split into thirds — with a third performing at grade level, a third approaching grade level, and a third receiving remediated instruction. Besides the two main teachers, five paraprofessionals circulated throughout the room, working one-on-one with nearly half the class, many seated at separate desks.

       It should be noted that when asked to observe the co-teaching model, the school granted two 10-minute observations — one of the kindergarten and another of the fifth grade.

       Jessica Tuthill, who is in her fifth year as president of the school’s parent-teacher organization, has enrolled her son, Hunter, who has autism, since kindergarten. Now that he is 10 and in the fifth grade, she is weighing whether to hold him back another year to delay the transition to another school.

       Mrs. Tuthill, a resident of Sag Harbor, doesn’t know what her family would have done were it not for the school. “They take special-needs kids and integrate them into a regular education model,” she said. “I never felt like he wasn’t accepted. Of all the quirks that he has, they’ve always found a way to work around it.”

       A who’s who of local attorneys, judges, and court personnel gathered Sunday night at Michaels’ restaurant Maidstone in Springs to honor the outgoing East Hampton Justice Catherine A. Cahill, who is retiring after 20 years on the bench.

       Justice Lisa Rana, who has been on the bench herself for 10 years, recalled in informal remarks that when she first joined the court it was Justice Cahill who had a decade of tenure.

       “Over the past 10 years, we have stood shoulder to shoulder,” Justice Rana said. “Through it all, Justice Cahill has been my close personal friend.”

       “Let’s be honest,” Justice Cahill told the group. “All you lawyers are here to make sure that I am handing the gavel over.”

       Addressing incoming Justice Steven Tekulsky, who won the seat by a large margin earlier this month, she predicted he would quickly find Justice Rana an important ally, “a supportive co-justice who will fast become the person you call to say, ‘You can’t make this up.’ ”

       Another whom he will find indispensable, she told Mr. Tekulsky, is the long-time court clerk Jennifer Anderson.             “People always thought that I have been the buster, the tough one. Actually, it’s Jen,” Justice Cahill said. She warned Mr. Tekulsky, smiling broadly, to expect “a kick in the shin” if he makes any judicial missteps while Ms. Anderson is sitting next to him on the bench.

       Ms. Anderson said that Justice Cahill had “been my boss on one hand, but has become a close friend, someone that I admire and look up to.”

       The entire staff of court clerks was on hand. To a woman, they spoke in glowing terms of Justice Cahill and of her importance in creating a positive work environment, especially for women.

       “She has a complex personality,” said Tamara Palmer. “She can go from being the toughest person on the bench to the sweetest person behind the scene.”

       “We’re sorry to see her go,” said Brian DeSessa, an attorney with Edward Burke Jr. and Associates. “She has been great for both sides.”

       Justice Rana presented her departing colleague with a gold charm necklace from which hung a golden gavel, purchased with donations from co-workers and friends. Justice Cahill appeared strongly moved as she accepted the gift.

       Former East Hampton Justice James R. Ketcham also gave some informal remarks. In an interview in April, soon after announcing that she would not seek another term on the bench, Justice Cahill said that Mr. Ketcham had been her mentor. In encouraging her to run for the position, she remembered, he told her, “You have standards. You don’t just give in.”

       He repeated those words on Sunday.

       Justice-elect Tekulsky has been preparing for his new job by sitting in daily on court proceedings beside both justices. He has been fitted for his black robe.

       “It is an honor to be taking the seat that has been held the past 20 years by Justice Cahill,” said the incoming justice. “She has set a standard of excellence and professionalism that she can be very proud of.”

       Justice Cahill said in April that she sees herself spending more time now with her family, and in the garden behind her house in Springs as well as in her New York apartment. She also plans to do some traveling.

       The speaking done on Sunday night, she said happily, “Now I can have a glass of wine.” Somebody gave her one, but she never did get to drink it. There were too many people to thank and embrace.