The Democratic candidates for East Hampton Town supervisor and town board tackled issues as specific as the staffing of the town supervisor’s office and as broad as coastal policy, “managing growth,” and investments in the town’s infrastructure in their platform released last week and in a discussion of it on Friday.

    The document, said Job Potter, who is running for town board along with Kathee Burke-Gonzalez, “is a blueprint . . . for a new town board.”

    “This is an attempt to begin to address many of the issues that will be important in the campaign and will be important in January,” said Larry Cantwell, the supervisor candidate, who is running unopposed pending results of a Republican write-in primary.

    The three have “a pretty good understanding of how government works and how to make it work better, not for us, but for the people,” said Mr. Cantwell, the East Hampton Village administrator for over three decades and an East Hampton Town councilman before that. Mr. Potter served two four-year terms on the town board and was on the town planning board before that. Ms. Burke-Gonzalez just finished nine years on the Springs School Board, the last two as president.

    While there are matters of greater importance that a new town board will have to tackle — many of them outlined in the platform — “the biggest thing people mention on the street so far is the animosity on the town board and how the public is being treated,” Mr. Potter said Friday during a meeting with reporters at D’Canela restaurant in Amagansett.

    “It’s very hard to get things done when you’re operating in an adversarial environment,” Mr. Cantwell said. The town board has been sharply split of late, with the outgoing Republican Supervisor Bill Wilkinson and his closest and often only ally on the board, Councilwoman Theresa Quigley, on one side of the divide and Dominick Stanzione, also a Republican, staking out the middle ground or siding with the Democrats Sylvia Overby and Peter Van Scoyoc.

    The Democratic candidates paint a rosier picture of a board that would “work toward consensus solutions . . . to benefit the community as a whole,” give the public more opportunities to participate in decision making, and reopen lines of communication that have frayed to realize savings, pointing specifically to the possibility of consolidating the town and village emergency communications departments, which they said would save money for both municipalities, not to mention the fire districts that use the emergency 911 system. “This may achieve a savings of $700,000,” according to their platform.

    As far as long-term capital spending is concerned, the Democrats said there are significant needs resulting from lack of maintenance as the town climbed out from under the crushing deficit left by the McGintee administration in 2010. The town needs a five-year capital plan that addresses priority needs without increasing the town’s already high annual debt service payments, the Democrats said, something they believe is possible in part because the town’s overall debt, not including preservation fund debt, is expected to “decline from about $96 million to about $25 million” over the next 10 years.

    “We believe the town’s financial stabilization has left some gaps in important areas, with services and important functions of the town negatively impacted,” they say in their platform. The town’s beaches are a prime example, Mr. Cantwell said. “The beaches are probably one of our most important assets,” for year-round residents, second-home owners, summer visitors, and tourists. “The garbage cans are deplorable,” Mr. Cantwell said. “The public restrooms are neglected.”

    On the subject of the airport, the Democrats do not take a position on the controversial subject of whether the town should continue to accept Federal Aviation Administration funding for airport projects, but they do call for “legally enforceable restrictions” to limit aircraft noise.

    “One of the things we’ve proposed is that the town do a financial analysis and business plan for the airport,” Mr. Cantwell said, so that it can get a “fair projection of fees and revenue sources,” as well as an understanding of operational costs and the cost of capital improvements over the next several years.

    In terms of aircraft noise, Mr. Potter said the town should “vigorously pursue what kind of limitations might be possible.” The platform calls for doing this by first establishing that East Hampton is a “quiet community and that airport access restrictions which we will propose can significantly reduce airport noise.”

    “I’d like to see the town on a parallel track with respect to funding and regulation,” Mr. Cantwell said.

    Democrats also said they would make it a priority to deal with more widespread noise and quality-of-life complaints. “Enforcing our quality-of-life laws is one of the major issues in the community,” Mr. Cantwell said.

    To deal with that, the Democrats propose hiring an additional code enforcement officer to “specialize in residential zoning enforcement,” but it will take more than that, they said. The platform offers a number of specific proposals including increasing the maximum fines for zoning violations, defining the number of cars and size of commercial vehicles allowed on residential property, and amending the town code to require that “the number of allowable bedrooms and bathrooms be listed on the certificate of occupancy.”

    They also propose organizational changes to better deal with enforcement and compliance of quality-of-life laws. They want to reorganize the Building Department and appoint a chief building inspector who holds that Civil Service title, “engage a strong, fully staffed legal department with professional attorneys providing sound independent legal advice,” and create an “an interagency working group” drawn from the Police, Code Enforcement, Fire, and Building Departments as well the town attorney’s office to focus on “residential zoning violations and health, safety, and welfare issues.”

    “Things are starting to get out of control,” Mr. Cantwell said.

    While the town works to manage quality of life on an everyday basis, it also needs to consider the bigger picture, and should look to its comprehensive plan and local waterfront revitalization plan “to guide growth while protecting and preserving what is special about East Hampton,” the platform says.

    “It’s striking to me in recent years that there’s been such a breakdown in terms of relations with the Planning Department and the town board,” Mr. Potter said. “The comprehensive plan has been essentially ignored whenever laws are written,” he said, when it should actually be “a starting point and a reference.”

    Mr. Cantwell decried a trend toward considering spot-zoning proposals for certain parcels, among them the Cyril’s property on Napeague. “You have a comprehensive plan; you looked at the big picture, and you ended up adopting the plan,” he said.

    Another big-picture issue the Democrats have raised again and again is the need to better plan for climate change, sea-level rise, and post-storm recovery.

    “One critical element of the Local Waterfront Revitalization Plan left unfinished is a hazard mitigation and recovery plan,” the platform says, the purpose of which “is to identify hazards and areas of vulnerability along our shoreline so we can take positive actions and build resiliency in advance to limit damage from serious storms and hurricanes in the future.”

    “We have 100 miles of coastline in East Hampton Town,” Mr. Cantwell said. “The biggest physical threat to our town is the potential future threat from sea-level rise. We’ve got to get ready. . . . We can model the level of damage that will occur from different levels of storms.”

    As for the federal money slated to come to East Hampton to rebuild beaches and dunes, “Our clear preference is that this be a soft replenishment project,” Mr. Cantwell said. He also hopes the town is given options so that it can choose a “beach and dune replenishment project that is a meaningful one.”

    “The town needs to have its own coastal expert and should have already had one on board nine months ago to help develop what some of the best options are,” he said.

    At a meeting this spring, representatives from the Federal Emergency Management Agency “talked about us being a shelter-in-place community,” said Ms. Burke-Gonzalez. “We’re not prepared.”

    “We need to do a better job of communicating in general, but especially after a natural disaster,” Mr. Cantwell said. “People get afraid when they don’t know what’s going on and they get reassured when they know what’s going on. That’s one reason we need to have an administrative head in the supervisor’s office,” as well as a secretary. That support staff is necessary in order for the supervisor to be effective and for handling constituent concerns, he said.

    The Democrats’ platform can be found in its entirety at ehdems.com.

    In the coming weeks, Mr. Cantwell, Ms. Burke-Gonzalez, and Mr. Potter will continue a series of listen-ins with constituents in the town’s various hamlets and villages. They have already met with Springs, Montauk, and Amagansett residents and plan additional listen-ins in Sag Harbor, East Hampton, and Wainscott.

   As servers, not only are we selling food, we’re also selling ourselves. We are a product the customer pays for in tips. We must make ourselves look desirable, we must act deferentially, we must flirt. We are easily expendable — there’s always another waiter or waitress to hire — and therefore less likely to complain about behavior that makes us feel uncomfortable. After all, it’s just part of the job.

    At the first restaurant where I worked it was emphasized that we should highlight one part of our physical anatomy — “Tits or ass or legs or arms, but not all at once,” a manager told us — with what we chose to wear. The dress code? Literally that: a dress. Above the knee, preferably.

    I gamely went along with this because I didn’t recognize the sexual politics at play. I was a naive undergrad doing my best to navigate the social morass of hook-up culture, and I barely acknowledged that twisted feeling in my gut when a customer grabbed my butt and squeezed and said, “I’d hit that.” After all, he was a regular and I knew him and so did everyone else in that small town. I stayed silent.

    Adding another layer of murk are the interactions between co-workers in a restaurant environment. Often comments of a sexual nature are made by both male and female employees. Where is the line, then? Is it only when behavior makes one uncomfortable that it’s harassment? If you go along, and go along, and are complicit with what’s being said, when do you become a victim?

    In the movie “Waiting,” Ryan Reynolds plays a seasoned waiter who asks a new hire, “How do you feel about frontal male nudity?” — referring to an ongoing game played by the male employees wherein they attempt to trick each other into looking at their genitals. Another scene has Mr. Reynolds and Anna Faris trading insults about various sexual encounters between them while an audience of their co-workers looks on.

    Of course, the movie is a comedy and presents caricatural aspects of working in a restaurant. But within the exaggerations lies the truth that, in a majority of restaurants, there exists a sexualized relationship among staff that bleeds into the perception of what constitutes sexual harassment. In effect, no one really knows when enough is enough except for the victim who feels violated, but who often won’t, or can’t, acknowledge it as such because of this other environment where sex is openly talked about.

    An article written in 2008 by Lisa C. Huebner of West Chester University attempts to address the unique milieu within which waitresses operate:

    “In a study of restaurant work, Patti Giuffre and Christine Williams (1994) found that sexual harassment happens often in restaurant work because of its highly sexualized nature; sexual banter and touching are common among staff. Institutional practices and policies also encourage ongoing displays of heterosexuality and sexualization of staff, such as physically revealing uniforms or efforts to encourage staff to flirt with customers.”

    I agree with all of that, and I also recognize that this kind of behavior is part of the nature of my job. Brushing off the guy who grabbed me by thinking of him as a regular allowed me to go about my business and not dwell on what happened. Never forget that waitresses are easily replaceable. As Ms. Huebner states it, “The next questions are not if sexual harassment is ‘everyday’ or part of the job but how, when, and under what conditions it becomes that way.”

    I don’t have an answer, though I suspect, as does Ms. Huebner, it depends on “race, age, and sexual orientation,” as well as life experience. What am I willing to tolerate these days? Not much. In college I didn’t speak up, but now if something like that were to happen there would absolutely be vocal outrage . . . most likely because the older I get, the less and less I’m willing to put up with others’ bad behavior.

The New York State Department of Environmental Conservation early Wednesday ordered East End bays and harbors closed to all shellfish harvesting following heavy downpours during Tuesday's thunderstorms.

The order covers enclosed water bodies from Moriches Bay in the Town of Brookhaven east to Lake Montauk and will remain in place until the Conservation Department announces that unsafe conditions have dissipated.

The closed areas as listed by the department are:

1. Town of Brookhaven: All the area of Moriches Bay lying east of a line extending northerly from the northeasternmost point of land at the eastern end of Smiths Point County Park on the west side of Moriches Inlet, including the inlet, to the southeasternmost tip of land at Tuthill Point on the west side of Tuthill Cove.

2. Town of Southampton: All the area of Moriches Bay, Quantuck, Shinnecock Bay, Cold Spring Pond, North Sea Harbor, Noyac Creek, AND all that area of Sag Harbor and its tributaries.

3. Town of East Hampton: All the area of Three Mile Harbor, Hog Creek, Acabonac Harbor, Napeague Harbor, Montauk Harbor (Montauk Lake), Sag Harbor and its tributaries, including all the area of Sag Harbor lying south of a line extending easterly from the northernmost tip of the large stone breakwater in the outer portion of Sag Harbor to the northernmost tip of Barcelona Point, AND all the area of Northwest Harbor lying southeast of a line extending northeasterly from the westernmost point of land at the entrance to Northwest Creek to the foot of Mile Hill Road.

Updates and changes to the list can be found at dec.ny.gov/outdoor

According to National Weather Service data, 1.43 inches of rain was recorded in a three-hour period Wednesday at Montauk Point. At Gabreski Airport in Westhampton Beach 3.42 inches of rain fell between approximately 10 a.m. and 2 p.m.

Update: As of Friday, East Hampton waters had not reopened for shellfishing. Conservation Department staff took samples in several locations, for which lab results would be forthcoming. The earliest East Hampton waters could reopen is sunrise on Saturday.

    A tussle between the East Hampton Town Trustees and the town’s Natural Resources and Planning Departments over fencing installed on town beaches was a topic of heated discussion at the trustees’ Aug. 27 meeting.

    With the conclusion of the nesting season of the piping plover, which the state lists as endangered, and the least tern, which the state considers threatened, the trustees were surprised to see photographs that had been provided by an East Hampton Village police officer. The photos, taken at Georgica Beach, depicted string fencing on metal posts in the sand.

    Diane McNally, the trustees’ clerk, sent an e-mail to town employees who monitored the plover nesting areas this year, in which she asked whether the fencing had been erected by the town. According to Ms. McNally, reading to her co-trustees, the e-mailed reply stated, “We are currently conducting a survey for protected beach vegetation on all beaches for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.”

    “Not on our beach,” said Joe Bloecker, a trustee, a comment loudly seconded by several of his colleagues.

    Mr. Bloecker’s title, and those of his fellow trustees, was created and granted authority over the town by King James II through the Dongan Patent of 1686. As such, the trustees manage the town’s common lands, including beaches.

    Ms. McNally read aloud her subsequent response, which stated that the trustees “will have many questions regarding the Town of East Hampton employees conducting a survey for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife [Service] on trustee beaches without having first communicated with us. It’s absolutely mind-boggling that you and your colleagues have not yet grasped the fact that the trustees want to know and approve of any initiatives on the beaches.”

    The e-mail went on to ask why the town was utilizing its limited resources to assist the federal agency, insist that the fencing be removed from all beaches immediately, and instruct the town to refer the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to the trustee board for a discussion of vegetation.

    The flora in question are seabeach amaranth and seabeach knotweed, said Juliana Duryea of the town’s Natural Resources Department. The state and federal governments list the former as endangered. “We were approached by U.S. Fish and Wildlife to conduct these surveys,” Ms. Duryea said. The species, she said, are generally found within areas the town protects for the plover and tern, “so it makes sense that while we’re taking down fences, we’re surveying for plant species.”

    That the town did not consult the trustees or refer the federal agency to it is a problem, the trustees said. The larger problem, said Stephanie Forsberg, a trustee, is the threat of extreme weather such as the hurricanes that struck Long Island in 2011 and 2012. It isn’t about string fencing per se, “it’s string strung along many, many, many metal posts,” she said. “If we wait much longer, we’re going to be in a hurricane and these things are going to end up as trash. I think we’re at the point that, even if we have to foot the bill, we’re going to need to hire someone to take them out,” she said.

    Mr. Bloecker suggested that the trustees notify the town’s code enforcement officers. “They don’t have a trustee permit to put that stuff on the beach, period,” he said. “And when U.S. Fish and Wildlife puts their fence down there next year, have them written a violation. If they say it’s their beach, prove it. Otherwise, pay the violation.”

    “Let’s at least ask for a violation,” said Ms. Forsberg, reminding her colleagues that extreme weather could arise with little warning. “We’ve been asking for these to come out,” she said. “And being ignored,” said Sean McCaffrey, a trustee, completing the sentence.

    “And next year, all fencing must be permitted by the trustees, piping plover or otherwise,” said Mr. Bloecker. “A permit from us,” he repeated.

    Steven Papa of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s Long Island field office in Shirley wrote in an e-mail that his agency works with other federal, state, and local agencies to conduct an annual census of seabeach amaranth on the south shore of Long Island beaches. East Hampton’s Natural Resources Department, he wrote, “participates in this survey for lands that they manage. In some cases, seabeach amaranth plants are protected with ‘symbolic fencing’ by land managers to protect plants from destruction due to off-road vehicles, beach nourishment, recreational activities, etc.” Mr. Papa defined symbolic fencing as string fastened to posts and said it is widely used by land managers on Long Island to delineate plover breeding and seabeach amaranth growing areas.

    Ms. McNally said that management of the birds’ nesting areas, developed jointly by the Natural Resources Department and the trustees, was until recent years a successful effort. She complained that other governing bodies, such as the State Department of Environmental Conservation, have sought to prohibit vehicular access to beaches during the plovers’ nesting season, to which the trustees are adamantly opposed.

    State and federal agencies, she said, rely on local authorities and resources to implement their programs. “And then [they] get angry when you don’t do enough?” she asked. “The reason we’re doing this is to keep our beaches open as much as we can. That concept seems to have gotten skewed in the last couple years, and we need to get it back.”

    Adding insult to injury, “Out of the blue, this popped up,” she said. “I’ve never heard of us leaving fences up for vegetation.”

    Marguerite Wolffsohn, director of the town’s Planning Department, would not comment on communications between town employees and the trustees, but did explain that the program to protect plovers and terns was transferred from the Natural Resources Department to the Planning Department a few years ago. With Kim Shaw now serving as the town’s director of natural resources and Ms. Duryea working in Ms. Shaw’s department, the program is in the process of transferring back to that department. The two departments shared the program’s management in 2013, Ms. Wolffsohn said.

    When Jeffrey Collé was a kid, he worked as an apprentice carpenter with his grandfather, a Belgian immigrant, and father maintaining Gold Coast estates. Decades later, the Massapequa-bred builder remembers “300-acre estates with magnificent greenhouses, polo fields, and stables.” With such influences, it’s no surprise that he builds houses that are both vast and echo those places he knew when he was young.

    Now, Mr. Collé has launched Estates by Jeffrey Collé, a South Fork company that is neither an architecture firm nor a straight building firm, but rather a hybrid. By offering to work with buyers to both design and build houses, he is, in essence, cutting out both the spec builder for those who don’t want a cookie-cutter specimen and the architect for those who want their dream house.

     Among his recent projects was a 12,000-square-foot house for sale just marked down from around $40 million to almost $29 million on Georgica Pond. Sited on the footprint of a Stanford White house (only the bones of an artist’s studio remain), it has a 30-foot double-height ceiling in the drawing room, a Versailles-pattern parquet floor made from ancient oak beams he found in several French barns, hand-doweled and assembled in Paris, Louis XV fireplaces, and walls made of quarter-sawn white oak, wire-brushed to raise its grain, then French-chalked and waxed for a creamy warmth.

    While building the house, which took two years, he employed a crew of more than 100 and set up a woodworking shop in the basement so that a dozen workers could mill, fabricate, and install the various wood projects — from antique wide-plank black walnut floors in the kitchen to mahogany doors throughout — on site.

    During a tour of the house, built on such a scale and with so many materials sourced from France that it was reminiscent of a chateau, he pointed out details such as squared pegs in a wall, doorknobs handmade at a Brooklyn foundry, and a scissor joint on a stair rail, all the while repeating his mantra: “You just don’t see work like this anymore.”

    While Mr. Collé is building two houses at the moment, the most prolific builder on the South Fork, Joe Farrell, “has more than 20 new homes under construction, or slated for construction, at a time,” according to a recent article in The New York Times.  

    “In this day and age where profit is the primary motive, Jeff puts in such a commitment that when he turns the keys of a house over to a buyer it’s a hard day for him,” said Philippe van den Bossche, an associate of the builder. 

        Mr. Collé said he had increasingly noticed in the past year that potential clients did not covet lookalike McMansions as much as they once did.

     “They’re going to dinner parties and seeing the same thing and they don’t want it,” he said.

    His hybrid approach to building is a solution for people with more money than time or know-how. “If you want to build a Hamptons house and don’t want to buy someone else’s dream, you basically become a project manager,” said Mr. Van den Bossche. Successful people, he said, think they can transfer their business skills to a building project and soon find out that they’re in over their heads. There are a multitude of variables to consider, all requiring expertise.

    With 35 years of experience building on the East End, Mr. Collé said he can view a piece of land for a prospective customer at no cost and tell them what and where to build. His hope, of course, is that the buyer will retain his services. This may sound easy, but there are zoning restrictions and environmental considerations as well as aesthetics: Where does the sun rise? (That’s where you’ll want your breakfast room.) Or set? (Great spot for a screened-in porch or a dining room.) “They’re looking at a piece of property and they don’t know what to look for.”

    But why not hire an architect? “I go in and evaluate the situation in a 24-hour period,” he said. This is a boon for a buyer who has seen a piece of property but is not sure yet whether to buy. An architect, he said, is brought in after the land has been purchased. “There’s a short window of opportunity.”

    Often when landowners hire an architect, “he’s not from the Hamptons,” said Mr. Van den Bossche, and, even if he or she is, “almost no architects are builders, so they don’t understand . . . what they budget for is usually not reality.” There is also the time-consuming aspect of the “bidding process,” when the architect seeks a builder. “It’s like being a waiter and chef at the same time,” Mr. Van den Bossche said of Mr. Collé. “There’s no going back and forth, so there’s more efficiency.”

    The customer, he believes, also “gets more value on the dollar — 40 to 50 percent more.” This is because of two factors: The process is transparent, and Mr. Collé works for a fee based on the overall value of the project.

    “He’s building a relationship with the owner, so he buys the best material for the dollar rather than trying to get the house built on a budget. When working with an architect and builder, he said, it can take two to three years to complete a project as opposed to the one year he said it takes Mr. Collé.

    “If you like the craftsmanship I provide, you’re still getting a custom house, but you’re taking a shortcut,” Mr. Collé summed up.

    While Mr. Collé insists that architects are hired after a property is purchased, Peter Cook, an architect with an office in Water Mill, said in an interview that “prepurchase land evaluation is something every architect offers.”

    “I can’t tell you how many people I’ve turned away from making a potential purchase based on zoning analysis just this summer,” he said, stressing that within “several hours you can study the property and talk to people in the town and tell [the buyers] the limitations. People don’t know that they’re limited by zoning restrictions, the Health Department, the conservation board, or that the permit process could take years.”

    “There is a reason architects are licensed,” he said. While he admits that “someone who fashions himself as a designer can design anything they want and hire a licensed engineer to stamp it,” and though he thinks that Mr. Collé is “in the enviable position of not having to build other people’s work, if he’s going to dismiss the value of [using an] architect, clearly he’s not going to be chosen to build their projects.” As far as value, Mr. Cook asserts that a house designed “by a noted architect is usually worth more.

    “I had been born female but never felt that way,” said Joel Johnson, an East Hampton High School student who came out as transgender on April 21, 2012, and started publicly identifying as male that June.

    Since then, Joel has been able to literally become “himself,” transitioning from female to male with a legal name change, hormone therapy, and finally “chest-masculation” surgery in Pennsylvania last month.

    “Having my parents introduce me as their son and having my siblings greet me with ‘brother’ made a huge difference,” he said last week.

    He is still recovering from what is commonly called “top surgery” and said he is “beyond excited” to start his senior year without having to “chest-bind ever again,” an unpleasant process that he said was “seriously hindering my life” and causing painful bruises and blisters.

    “I’m free at last,” he said, adding that he is not planning further surgeries. “Bottom surgery is somewhat experimental and extremely pricey,” he said.

    He has been open about the process, believing that sharing his story might help people understand and accept him and others in similar situations.

    Joel’s transition had nothing to do with sexuality, he explained. He identified as “straight as female, which made me gay as a trans guy,” he said, and that confuses some people.

    When Joel first told his mother, Bridget LeRoy, that he was transgender, she spent about three hours asking, “Are you sure?” Ms. LeRoy recalled this week. After she told her husband, Eric Johnson, they spent another three hours mourning the loss of a daughter, “but we tend to turn things around quickly,” she said.

    They had accepted their daughter, Joelie, the way she was. “She was not a lesbian,” she was not “a tomboy,” Ms. LeRoy said, and it was clear that she was not happy.

    “I just want my children to be happy,” she said. “Rather than an extraordinarily depressed daughter . . . who would not look in the mirror since the age of 3,” she now has a son who “has done more in the last year as a guy than most 17-years-olds.” Along with the changes Joel made in his own life, he has also made changes and had a big impact in the community, his mother said. “What more could a parent want?” Joel has become an outspoken advocate for gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender youth and has won local and even national recognition for his efforts. “It makes me very proud,” Ms. LeRoy said.

    In the spring of 2012, Ms. LeRoy had a meeting with Adam Fine, the principal of the high school, telling him, “Next year she is going to be a he.” His response, she said, was, “This is going to help us grow as a school.”

    Joel began hormone therapy last fall. Before he could start on testosterone therapy, “My mom and I drove to Brooklyn every week” to see caseworkers and physicians, he explained. The two-and-a-half-hour drive each way after school was “what anyone would do for their child,” said Ms. LeRoy.

    The cost of hormone therapy was minimal — $75 for a six-month supply of shots, with insurance.

    The surgery came after more than a year of gender therapy, visits with a psychiatrist, a psychologist, medical doctors, phone calls, parent support groups, and lawyers, Ms. LeRoy explained this week. There were hours of questioning from experts before the decision was final.

    Ms. LeRoy, a reporter for 30 years (including at The East Hampton Star), “did extensive research,” she said.

    Her stepmother, Kay LeRoy, formerly of Amagansett, “offered to pay the full amount for his top surgery, about $8,000,” Joel’s mother said, adding that if it was not for his grandmother, he would not have been able to pay for it.

    She is glad he had the surgery before his senior year at high school, “so he could fully participate as a student.” Hopeful for scholarships, Joel has his sights set on college, with the top three choices being Washington University in St. Louis, Soka University in California, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

    Despite the emotional pain of not feeling comfortable with his appearance, Joel has been on high honor roll every semester, and has also excelled as a student, activist, artist, writer, and poet. His awards have included the Frederick Douglas and Susan B. Anthony Award for humanitarianism. He was also a national runner up for the Gay Lesbian Straight Education Network’s student advocate of the year, chosen from over 500 nominees. 

    “Students in the hallway bow to him,” his mother said. Last year, when he became the president of the East Hampton Gay Straight Alliance, “It was a pretty intense year” with the suicide of David Hernandez, a gay student from Ecuador whose family indicated bullying as the cause. The Long Island Gay and Lesbian Youth organization came to the club to talk about the possibility of a new center, Joel said. “We were all pretty sure it was a pipe dream.”

    Joel had started going to LIGALY events the day before he came out, which he considers a testament to organization’s “ability to create a safe space.” He then began “ridiculous” trips that were 60 miles each way to a youth center farther west on the Island. It was “worth it every time,” he said.

    At early advisory meetings on the center, he was the only young person, “but I felt that if the center was for us, one of us had to be there.”

    After an invitation from the Rev. Mark Phillips at the Old Whalers Church in Sag Harbor, a temporary location was opened there on Aug. 10. Over 200 people attended the grand opening, including kids from schools across the East End and many school representatives and local government officials. Joel spoke, saying that for every kid there, there were 10 who were afraid to come forward.

    “I wasn’t expecting a center to open until I was away at college,” Joel said last week, but “we have somewhere to call our home away from home . . . for events and meetings and just seeing each other outside of school. . . . It’s more than we ever dreamed, and it’s only the beginning.”

    “I can’t wait to see what LIGALY will do once it gets a permanent space,” he said.

    Joel will turn 18 in three months, and “he is changed,”  his mother said. “His personality has come out. . . . The girl was like a Halloween costume, and now it’s off,” she said. “He hasn’t worn a shirt since the surgery, he is so happy and proud.”

    “I’m just waiting until he is not sore so I can get a full-on hug.”

A grand jury, which met in Riverhead from Wednesday through Friday, is expected to indict Jason Lee, a banker at the Manhattan investment banking firm Goldman Sachs, on a charge of first-degree rape as a result of a hearing at which the alleged victim appeared. Mr. Lee was arrested on a charge of first-degree rape at 2:24 p.m. on Tuesday, his 37th birthday. He was arraigned in East Hampton Town Justice Court, in front of Justice Catherine Cahill, the following day. Bail, set at $20,000, was met and Mr. Lee was released.

East Hampton Town police allege that Mr. Lee raped a 20-year-old woman, a foreign national, early that day. She and her brother were driven to the Riverhead hearing by an East Hampton Town detective.

The felony complaint, signed by detectives overseeing the investigation, charges that Mr. Lee held her down with his forearm and proceeded to rape her during a party at an East Hampton house, which he had rented. The arrest was made several hours later.

“There’s not a scratch, there’s not a mark, there is not a bruise on my client,” Mr. Lee’s attorney, Edward Burke Jr. of Sag Harbor, said on Saturday. “There is not a blemish on his background, on his record.”

The woman, whose name has been withheld, is a student who had been working on the East End for the summer. She has either returned home, or is about to do so, according to a source close to the investigation.

Jason Lee, 37, has been arrested in connection with an alleged rape in East Hampton.

The night before his birthday, Mr. Lee, an Ivy Leaguer who had started at Goldman Sachs in 1998 and risen to the position of manager of convertible and equity derivatives for other large financial institutions, called a friend, Rene Duncan of the Bronx, inviting him to East Hampton to celebrate the occasion. Mr. Duncan drove a 2004 GMC Yukon to the house that Mr. Lee and his wife, Alicia, had rented on Clover Leaf Lane, the source said. Ms. Lee was reported to be in the city at the time.

According to an incident report released by police Friday, the two men went that night to the Georgica restaurant and lounge in Wainscott, not far from Clover Leaf Lane house; it was at the Georgica nightspot that they met a group of foreign students, including the alleged victim, who were celebrating the end of their summer employment. Two other men, who were strangers to Mr. Lee and Mr. Duncan, joined the party, and the group moved to the Clover Leaf Lane house when the restaurant closed, traveling in the Yukon, which is registered to Mr. Duncan’s wife. She had remained in the Bronx, with their 5-month old baby, according to a source.

The source said the seven continued drinking and partying in the backyard swimming pool, either partially clothed or in the nude. Police allege that at some point Mr. Lee and the young woman entered the house, where the rape occurred.

Meanwhile, one of the two men who had joined the party got permission to drive the other home in the Yukon. When the man and the Yukon did not return, Mr. Duncan dialed 911, reporting that his vehicle might have been stolen.

East Hampton Town police, concerned that there had been a number of thefts of valuable automobiles in the Wainscott area, arrived on the scene quickly, the source said. The car was found in Montauk that afternoon. It was returned to Mr. Duncan, who declined to press charges. Mr. Duncan has not been accused of any wrongdoing related to the alleged rape.

With police now at the scene, the source said, the brother of the alleged victim drew a female officer aside and led her into the house, where the 20-year-old, who was crying, was interviewed. According to the source, Mr. Lee then went to the driveway, got into his late-model Range Rover — which has dark, tinted windows — and tried to hide; it was there that he was found by police. Detectives were called, and the distraught woman eventually agreed to press charges.

Normally, it can take weeks or even months before an indictment can be procured from a grand jury, but, because the alleged victim was scheduled to leave the country in the immediate future, Suffolk District Attorney Thomas Spota fast-tracked the process.

Mr. Burke, a leading local attorney who practices criminal law, was retained by Mr. Lee, after his advisors made many phone calls, researching the options, the source said.

If convicted as charged, Mr. Lee will serve between five and 25 years in state prison.

“He adamantly denies these allegations,” Mr. Burke told the court during the banker’s arraignment in Town Justice Court.

   The last day of summer camp was Awards Day. The people in charge had decided that all the campers, even the especially bratty ones who repeated everything you said for hours at a time, were deserving of special recognition. With nearly 200 campers, we had to get creative, which is why some kid went home to her bemused parents and showed them her award for Best Rendition of “Fergalicious” Sung While Dancing on a Picnic Table.

    In that same spirit, here are my completely meaningless awards for the 2013 season.

    Best Use of Passive-Aggressive Bullying Tactics: Given to the self-described doctor (we later Googled her and discovered she was a psychologist specializing in overcoming emotional bullying) who attempted to coerce me into giving her a free dessert because, in her words, “I spent $47 at your establishment. No one told me the prix fixe had to include an entree. I think the right thing to do is to give me a dessert since I essentially paid the equivalent of what an entree would cost. I’ve ordered only appetizers before, and I haven’t had to pay for dessert! This is just not right. I definitely didn’t pay for dessert before and I shouldn’t have to pay for one now! You just tell [the owner] about this. I’m sure D will agree with me. You will tell the owner, won’t you?”

    Best Five-Cent Tip Left by Well-Meaning Children: Given to the two boys wearing Polo Ralph Lauren shirts — the combined cost of which is more than I generally make during a lunch shift — who ordered steak and salmon and left $80 on a $79.95 check, despite one of them coming up to me and saying, “My friend is cheap so I left a little extra.”

    Best Overheard at the Bar: Given to a woman with a Louis Vuitton purse telling another woman with a Louis Vuitton purse, “East Hampton has become like Madison or Fifth Avenue. Sag Harbor still has local flavor.” First-Runner Up: “I could pass out face down and still go to work the next day.” Honorable Mention: “I sucked face with a Venezuelan. I think.”

    Best Interruption: Given to the gentleman who walked over to me from his table while I was in the middle of explaining the ingredients in the seafood mac-and-cheese to a young couple, and proceeded to shove his plate of steak under my nose and say, “This isn’t cooked right.”

    Best Random Request: Given to the woman who asked, “Do you have black napkins?” First Runner-Up: “Do you have fake cheese?” Honorable Mention: “Can I have 10 fries?”

    Best Misuse of Company Property: Given to the couple who bring their grocery bags into the restaurant and ask us to watch them while they go to a movie, saying they’ll get them when they come in for dinner after the movie’s over and would we mind putting the fish in our refrigerator until then?

    Best Thing We Found in the Bathroom: Given to the woman (presumably) who left her underwear on the floor next to the toilet. First Runner-Up: A condom wrapper. Honorable Mention: A blond hair extension.

    Best Compliment: Given to the man who said to the bartender about the Bombay martini, up, with a twist, she made him, “It’s not bad.” (What is with martinis? Don’t people realize it’s just straight booze in a glass? Why don’t they say, “I’d like Bombay in a martini glass. Can you shake it over ice first, because I prefer to get drunk on gin that’s cold”?)

    Best Prediction About the Future of the World, Perhaps Even the Universe: Given to the woman who asked me for a French 75, and when I said I didn’t know what that was, I would ask the bartender, she explained, “It’s a gin drink. Gin and champagne. I guess it hasn’t made it out here yet. It must be a New York City thing. Just wait, in a few months it will be all over the place.”

    Best Hope For Humanity: Given to the 12-year-old girl who told her friend, “The good thing about Red Bull is you can drink it and it speeds up your metabolism.”

    I hope you all had a lovely summer. Please drink responsibly this holiday weekend, and if you need a recommendation for a charming Irish cab driver, I know just the person.

    “We were gill-netting there,” Nat Miller, a bayman and an East Hampton Town trustee, said of the morning of Aug. 21 off Atlantic Avenue Beach in Amagansett when he, along with Paul Lester, Danny Lester, and Jimmy Bennett, were fishing for bass.  We “were always told by some of the old-timers — specifically Jens Lester — that that way, east of Atlantic, there was always a hang,” Mr. Miller said.

    As the net drifted in that direction, something big got caught in it. “It came in very easy,” Mr. Miller said, “and as we pulled it in, saw what we thought was a log with branches hanging off of it. It never tore the net, never broke a mesh.”  

    “Bonackers don’t swim,” Mr. Miller said of himself and his colleagues. “We’re on the water, not in it.” Just the same, they thought about getting a line around it and towing it ashore. “We wanted to get it out of the way. It wouldn’t have been safe for bathers.”

    Meanwhile, at around 8:45 a.m., as lifeguards arrived at Atlantic Avenue Beach to set up for the day, they noticed what they thought was “a piece of wood,” John Ryan Jr., the town’s chief lifeguard, said. “There hadn’t been any surf in the last two weeks, so it was quite noticeable.” The “wood” was approximately 100 yards offshore to the east of the third lifeguard stand, he said. “It was high tide. Very unusual to see a piece of wood lodged in the surf.” A lifeguard went in for a closer look. “He radioed over that it was an anchor. I and my assistant, Jeff Thompson, were up at the dory barn, so we came down to take a look.”

    “It was just the shank, which was wood, that was exposed,” Mr. Ryan said. He gave Kelly Kalbacher, one of the lifeguards, a pair of goggles. “Kelly got to it underwater and was able to straighten it up to prove that it was an old rusty anchor.” He tied a rope to it, and the baymen used their truck to haul it out of the surf.

    “That thing has been sitting out in that ocean for who knows how long. It had to be over 150 years old,” Mr. Ryan said. “It was over 600 pounds. How did it get washed up on the beach?”  

    Mr. Ryan identified the anchor as of Rodgers design. According to the Encyclopaedia Britannica, 10th edition (1902), the Committee of 1852 on Anchors described the design. “The stock is of iron in large as well as small anchors, and is made with a mortice, to fit over the shank instead of passing through it.” The description went on to note “the shank is rectangular at its junction with the arms, and square close to the collar for the stock; the crown is made longer than the usual, and has a large countersunk hole in its centre to save weight.”

     Informed speculation about the anchor’s origin is that it came from the Daniel Webster, which went aground in Amagansett on March 25, 1856. “Not much is known about the brig Daniel Webster,” Jeannette Edwards Rattray, the late publisher of The Star, wrote in her 1955 book, “Ship Ashore!” It “was bringing from the Canary Islands a cargo of salt, rice, nuts, and fruit,” Mrs. Rattray wrote.

    “The Daniel Webster is a hell of a good story, because one of the men who comes off ship falls in love and marries,” Richard Barons, the director of the East Hampton Historical Society said. Mr. Barons was speaking of John Lawrence, a member of the Daniel Webster crew, who married Nancy Edwards, a 17-year-old Amagansett girl, and settled here. The anchor was found, Mr. Barons said, “in the general area where it went down.”

    The baymen brought the anchor to the Lester family’s front yard on Abraham’s Path in Amagansett. “That’s what we caught fishing that day,” Mr. Miller said.

    A kick-off meeting to outline the development of an East Hampton Town comprehensive wastewater management plan, which will include plans for surface and groundwater quality protection and monitoring, as well as recommendations for optimum septic waste treatment, and the future of the town’s scavenger waste plant, was held Monday at Town Hall.

    The effort, said Dominick Stanzione, follows along in East Hampton’s “long history of environmental progressivity” and will be a “very important, groundbreaking study.” The town councilman has stressed the need for a long-range, science-based plan, and is one of three board members who voted to approve the nearly $198,000 contract with the consultants who will prepare it.

    Pio Lombardo of Lombardo Associates, a Massachusetts firm that has developed its own septic system, along with Kevin Phillips and Stephanie Davis of FPM Group of Ronkonkoma, who specialize in hydrogeology, will work with others from the Woods Hole Group, also in Massachusetts, to address the three main elements of the plan.

     They will investigate and present to the town the “science and engineering issues” involved in decisions about wastewater management and water protection, Mr. Lombardo said at the meeting on Monday, and will provide options, recommendations, and cost estimates for future decision-making by town officials.

    The plan has been at the center of a political tug of war among board members, with Town Supervisor Bill Wilkinson and Councilwoman Theresa Quigley remaining adamantly opposed to it. They have insisted instead that the board should have approved a lease, then sale, almost two years ago of the scavenger waste plant to ClearFlo Technologies, a private company with which the sale had been discussed.

    Mr. Wilkinson attended Monday’s information session; Ms. Quigley did not. But the course of action set by Mr. Stanzione, along with Councilwoman Sylvia Overby and Councilman Peter Van Scoyoc, appeared to be making continued waves.

    Several speakers at the meeting asked pointed questions of Mr. Lombardo about whether the ultimate result of the planning process would be a requirement that individual homeowners spend their own money to upgrade septic systems, and if the consultants’ recommendations might include the use of Nitrex, the high-technology nitrogen-removal system developed by Lombardo Associates.

     “Is this whole thing a mandate, or just suggestions?” asked Pat Flynn of Montauk. “I am an American. Is this involving my liberty? Is someone going to walk on my property and look at my cesspool, because that I’m saying no to. I’m defending my land and my American rights.”

    “Nobody’s going to violate your rights,” Mr. Lombardo said. A lot-by-lot examination of septic systems is not planned, he said, and would have to be authorized by the town board.

    Should the town’s ultimate plan call for upgrades to sub-par residential septic systems, the town board would determine how those might be financed.

    “We have a collective problem of protecting our groundwater,” said Peter Wadsworth, a member of the town’s budget and finance advisory committee, “and the town as a whole is going to bear that cost. We all benefit from solving that problem.” He said there are numerous ways, including bond issues, to cover the costs of agreed-upon septic solutions that would avoid an onerous burden on individual taxpayers.

    Carole Campolo, a Springs resident, raised several issues about the hiring of Mr. Lombardo, as she has at other recent board meetings.

    In an e-mail sent around last week, Ms. Campolo urged residents to attend Monday’s kickoff meeting on the septic management plan, which she said is “being pushed by the ‘Agenda 21’ crowd.”

    She was apparently referring to a United Nations action plan stressing sustainability, smart growth, and environmental protection, which has become a target for political conservatives who liken it to social engineering.

    In his magazine, Blaze, the conservative political commentator Glenn Beck has called it a “global scheme that has the potential to wipe out freedoms of all American citizens.” He used the Agenda 21 name as the title of his dystopian novel, in which suburban and rural homeowners are stripped of their property rights by the government.

    In her e-mail, Ms. Campolo said that, in her opinion, the contract for creation of a wastewater management plan is “designed to . . . ultimately require each and every household to install the Nitrex system” at a cost of $20,000 to $30,000 per household.

    She called the bidding process that resulted in awarding the contract for creating the wastewater management plan to Mr. Lombardo, FPM, and the Woods Hole Group, “flawed at best,” and warned, in a reference to a solar energy company that went bankrupt after receiving federal stimulus funds, that “this contract could become East Hampton’s Solyndra.”

    She warned recipients who are not residents of East Hampton that, “if this contract gets a foothold in East Hampton, it will definitely spread to other hamlets and towns.”

    The Nitrex system is one of four septic systems accepted for use by the County Health Department. In independent evaluations, including by the Environmental Protection Agency, it has been determined to reduce the pollutant nitrogen in wastewater to the lowest levels, compared to other technologies.

    Mr. Lombardo pointed out in his presentation on Monday that nitrogen pollution is not a potential problem in a good portion of the town — the area south of a groundwater divide running lengthwise roughly through the center of East Hampton. There is a potential for nitrogen pollution north of the groundwater divide, but, he said, at present the lack of a growth of “excessive harmful algae” would indicate that nitrogen is not the issue. Based upon preliminary investigations, he said, he does not expect to be making recommendations for the widespread installation of any nitrogen removal system.

    However, if any Nitrex systems are to be installed as a result of the overall wastewater management plan, Mr. Lombardo will not benefit financially from the sales. In addition, he said, he would expect town officials to subject recommendations for specific treatment systems to a review by other experts in the field.

    On Monday afternoon, Mr. Lombardo provided a copy of a “conflict of interest statement” he signed, which he said is standard for all his contracts. It states that “should there be a need for wastewater and groundwater nitrogen removal systems in East Hampton,” with Nitrex’s capabilities, Lombardo Associates would receive no royalties.

    “Virtually all” technological consultants “have proprietary technology,” and such agreements are in no way out of the norm, Mr. Lombardo said.

    In this case, in response to questions by members of the town board, the consultant also provided a letter reiterating the agreement that the company would only receive consulting fees from its contract with the town, eliminating a financial incentive to recommend the use of the Nitrex system. 

    Kim Shaw, the town’s natural resources director, said that the choice of consultants was made through a blind rating process, using a matrix of criteria, by a committee including representatives from the town’s Engineering, Planning, Finance, Aquaculture, and Natural Resources Departments, as well as the town attorney’s office.

    After independent scores by each committee member were averaged, the group that was ultimately hired received the highest rating, based on the established criteria. 

    The plan calls for the establishment of a citizens’ project advisory committee, another bone of contention raised by Ms. Campolo, who said in her e-mail that she would like to be appointed, but that Mr. Lombardo is opposed. There should be a “representative group of citizens,” she wrote.

    The advisory committee is to be appointed by the town board. In an e-mail to The Star on Tuesday, Mr. Lombardo wrote that the consultants have “no objections or opinions on any candidates.”

    The wastewater management plan is expected to be finished in January. Consultants will focus on needs analysis and defining alternatives for various areas of town over the next two months, beginning with Montauk in September. Public meetings will be held monthly for discussion and review, with remote participation through e-mail and telephone included, and will be streamed live on the town’s public access provider, LTV. Reports on various elements of the project will be issued periodically.

    A Web site, at EHWaterRestore.com, will include information and documents, and afford the public an opportunity to submit questions and comments.

    “Any future action will be decided by the town board in January,” when the consultants’ work has been completed, Mr. Lombardo said on Monday. “All we’re going to do is present the factual information.”