Closing In on a Roundabout

Mayor Paul F. Rickenbach Jr. of East Hampton Village is on an indefinite leave of absence for medical reasons. The mayor announced his leave, effective yesterday, at the conclusion of the village board’s work session last Thursday. He is to undergo knee-replacement surgery.

“I am going to turn the reins over to our deputy mayor, Barbara Borsack, who with her colleagues will make sure that everything is done with due diligence,” Mr. Rickenbach said. “Hopefully I’ll be back on the scene sooner than later.”

That announcement followed the brief work session at which the board continued to debate the roundabout to be constructed next year at the intersection of Route 114, Buell Lane, and Toilsome Lane.

Discussions on how to improve the intersection began in 2009. Last month, Assemblyman Fred W. Thiele Jr., State Senator Kenneth P. LaValle, and village officials including the mayor and Ms. Borsack announced a $700,000 State Community Capital Assistance Program grant for its construction. The State Department of Transportation will have to approve the finalized design.

Becky Molinaro, the village administrator, said by email that the intersection’s traffic volume, poor sight distances, and misalignment of the intersecting roads make it a potentially hazardous area. Officials of the village and the D.O.T., she said, concluded that a roundabout would improve the intersection’s function and safety and provide a more aesthetically pleasing solution than would realignment or traffic signals.

Ms. Borsack told her colleagues that she is concerned about the roundabout’s aesthetic character, citing a roundabout on Scuttlehole Road in Bridgehampton. “The center was landscaped and the trucks have just ruined it,” she said. “They keep going over it and digging up the dirt. . . . It seems to me that we might have to do something with a design of brick to make it attractive, as opposed to landscaping.” The board, she said, will have to consider this before giving approval to a finalized design, and she urged her colleagues to visit the Scuttlehole Road roundabout.

Bruce Siska of the board agreed that a brick layout on the roundabout’s center, without the floral planting board members had initially envisioned, was the best solution. The intersection in question, he said, “gets a lot of trailer-truck use through it. They’re going to have to go right over the top of that. They’re not going to be able to get around it.”

Also at the work session, Joan Osborne, the chairwoman of the Village Preservation Society, told the board that she has received several calls from residents complaining about landscapers who park their trucks on side streets and the resulting obstruction of traffic. “It becomes a maze on these streets,” she said, adding that the trucks can make getting out of one’s own driveway difficult. “I don’t know what you can do about it . . . but apparently it’s causing enough problems for people to call us,” she said.

Mayor Rickenbach said that he would discuss the matter with Chief Gerard Larsen of the East Hampton Village Police Department. Thinking out loud, he suggested that landscaping crews be instructed to offload equipment and personnel at a work site and then park their rigs offsite and away from vehicle traffic. The board’s Richard Lawler suggested that residents of streets where this is consistently a problem call the police.

“It’s a universal problem,” said the mayor, “so we would expect due diligence from patrol officers and code enforcement as applicable. Let’s see if we can work together and make it better.”

Ms. Molinaro announced to the board that Suffolk County has awarded the village a Downtown Revitalization Grant for the second consecutive year. The grant received last year helped to offset the cost of installing a lighted crosswalk on Newtown Lane. This year, she said, the application submitted was for structural repairs to the Pantigo Windmill. She thanked Bob Hefner, a historic preservation consultant, and the East Hampton Historical Society, the applicant on behalf of the village.

“We received our full funding request amount of $20,000,” she said.