Government

With plans to remodel her father’s 35-year-old Hampton Auto Collision shop on Springs-Fireplace Road next door to Springs Pizza, Lindsay Reichart and her partner, Gunnar Burke, quickly won over the East Hampton Town Planning Board with their idea for “a year-round location for people to socialize.”

The first people in line to get one of the 1,600 coveted nonresident East Hampton Village beach passes made available to town residents at an in-person sale Tuesday arrived at 5:45 a.m. “It’s like an event, and we look forward to it every year,” one woman said.

The Cranberry Hole Road bridge in Amagansett, closed since July 2023, will remain closed for the foreseeable future, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority confirmed earlier this month.

In a sort of reintroduction to a largely new planning board, the East Hampton Town Planning Department gave a short recap of what has happened since a 2023 hearing on the Wainscott Commercial Center, the largest development proposal in the town, at a 70.4-acre former sand mine.

“I know there are some folks out there that are concerned about the price, and I’m concerned about the cost too,” Kathee Burke-Gonzalez said, but compared the project, slated to cost around $30 million, to the $23 million expansion of the Springs School, completed in 2021, or the $56 million renovation and expansion of East Hampton High School, completed in 2010. “We support our kids. We need to be able to support our seniors.”

Oyster survivorship in Georgica Pond over the last five years is 40 to 50 percent, which Stony Brook’s Gobler Lab deems “really quite amazing.”

They say the wheels of justice turn slowly, but if so, no one told County Supreme Court Justice Paul Hensley. Just days after 84 Wainscott Hollow Road L.L.C. submitted a lawsuit against the East Hampton Town Architectural Review Board seeking an annulment of the board’s Dec. 12 denial of its application, the judge granted the petition “in all respects.”

The Federal Office of Management and Budget’s temporary pause Tuesday on grants, loans, and federal financial assistance programs that are targeted by President Trump’s executive orders was rescinded only 24 hours later, but not before sending local organizations into a panic.

President Trump’s pick to lead the Environmental Protection Agency comes in for praise and skepticism in a Senate confirmation hearing.

After a difficult debate that ended in compromise, the East Hampton Town Board agreed at its work session Tuesday to bring an updated formula that links house size and lot size to a public hearing in early March. The board settled on a maximum house size of 7 percent of lot area plus 1,500 square feet. Right now, the formula is set at 10 percent of lot area plus 1,600 square feet.

Tommy John Schiavoni was sworn in as the new assemblyman for the First District of New York on Friday night in Sag Harbor, with his wife, acting Suffolk County Supreme Court Justice Andrea Harum Schiavoni, administering the oath of office. He became only the fourth person to hold that post since 1969.

At its first meeting of the year, the East Hampton Town Planning Board, under the new chairmanship of Ed Krug, chose not to pursue an Article 78 lawsuit against the town board for passing a resolution to exempt the new senior citizens center from town planning and zoning regulations.

Fans of village beaches, mark your calendars. The village’s in-person sale of nonresident beach parking permits to East Hampton Town residents who live outside village boundaries will take place on Jan. 28 at the Emergency Services Building on Cedar Street. The sale will begin at 9 a.m. and continue through 6 p.m. 

In a split decision, the East Hampton Town Zoning Board of Appeals approved a nearly 9,000-square-foot house to be located at 325 Bluff Road, adjacent to the Atlantic Double Dunes Preserve in Amagansett. “This is a model application, and I applaud this application,” said Roy Dalene, the zoning board’s chairman, who voted for approval.

The Sag Harbor Village Board held a hearing Tuesday night on legislation that would change the fee for holding events on village property and require that people planning events at commercial, residential, or public properties submit requests 60 days in advance of the event as opposed to the 30 days now required.

Compromise proved elusive again for the Paramount Development Group and the East Hampton Town Architectural Review Board on Dec. 12, a month after the A.R.B.’s unanimous denial of Paramount’s application to build a residence at 84 Wainscott Hollow Road in Wainscott. Despite some changes to the plans, the board again denied the application to build a 7,374-square-foot house in place of the one there now.

A law that would have protected horseshoe crabs in New York State from harvest for bait or biomedical purposes starting Jan. 1 was vetoed in December by Gov. Kathy Hochul, leaving many environmentalists dismayed.

John Aldred will take over for Bill Taylor as a deputy clerk of the East Hampton Town Trustees, the group decided on Monday. Jim Grimes will continue as the other deputy clerk.

With some commercial fishing vessels unable to get into Montauk Harbor during low tide, Suffolk County Executive Edward P. Romaine has asked Col. Alex Young of the United States Army Corps of Engineers “to utilize emergency funding to dredge the Montauk Inlet and deepen the channel to at least 17 feet.”

The East Hampton Town Board discussed myriad topics related to Montauk, from boat slips to beach parking to traffic and drainage along Fort Pond.

Everybody wants a raise, including members of the East Hampton Village Board. “I don’t think a seasonal lifeguard should make more than the board of trustees and mayor,” Marcos Baladron, the village administrator, said at the board’s December meeting.

It took more than two minutes on Dec. 17 for Roy Dalene, the recently reappointed chairman of the East Hampton Town Zoning Board of Appeals, to read out the number of variances that the 108-year-old Devon Yacht Club requires for its proposed redevelopment. “It would be an impossible task to fit all the elements of the current club into the setbacks without relief,” its attorney said.

Looking ahead to the problem of summer traffic, David and Stacey Brodsky of Wainscott have a plan that they believe will alleviate the burden created by cars using some of the hamlet’s back roads to bypass Montauk Highway.

The East Hampton Town Board approved grant money from the town's community housing fund for five housing projects that serve people of middle and low incomes.

The long-discussed site plan application for the construction of a sewage treatment plant at the Montauk Shores Condominiums was approved unanimously at the East Hampton Town Planning Board meeting on Dec. 18.

As wind and cold settled over East Hampton last Thursday, Town Supervisor Kathee Burke-Gonzalez delivered a positive 2025 State of the Town Address at the annual organizational meeting, and also appointed chairmen to the town’s advisory boards, naming a new one for the planning board and reappointing the chairmen of the zoning board of appeals and architectural review board.

On Dec. 31, the Brookhaven Town landfill stopped accepting construction and demolition waste, which means that trash generated in East Hampton now needs to be hauled much farther away — off Long Island, in fact. Chiefly because of the new hauling fees, Stephen Lynch, superintendent of the Highway Department and Sanitation Department supervisor, asked the town board to increase the budget for most categories of trash disposal.

The assistant secretary of the United States Department of the Interior on Thursday affirmed the Shinnecock Nation's sovereignty over the Westwoods land parcel, the site of a planned gas station and travel plaza on Sunrise Highway, the Nation announced Friday.

Of dozens of proposed new rules for East Hampton Village beaches, the one that generated the most discussion would prohibit dogs on the Main Beach Pavilion between 10 a.m. and 5 p.m. “It’s dangerous to have animals on the pavilion at the same time as when it’s busy,” the deputy mayor told the village board last month.

A petition urging East Hampton Town to allow licensed cannabis retail dispensaries popped up recently on change.org, arguing that a regulated cannabis market would increase community safety and foster opportunities for economic growth.