Government

The time for America’s testing has come, Judge Michael Luttig told a rapt audience at Guild Hall in East Hampton on Monday. “In Lincoln’s terms,” he said, “we are going to determine, in this calendar year, whether this nation, or any nation so conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal, can long endure.” 

Suffolk County Executive Ed Romaine announced last week that the county intends to buy the 822-acre island, largely untouched by development except for the Plum Island Animal Disease Center, and described it as an environmental jewel.

Following several changes to legislation that would allow for rent-restricted employer-sponsored housing, the town board held a second public hearing on the proposal on July 16, but the changes were not enough, apparently, to create public support.

Representative Nick LaLota, who announced last month that he was cutting off East Hampton Town and Village from federal community project funding over their adoption of laws prohibiting cooperation with the federal government in civil immigration enforcement, is not letting up in his threats.

Three marshes in East Hampton Town — at Cedar Point County Park, Napeague, and Beach Hampton — were scheduled to be sprayed with a larvicide this week, weather permitting, according to the Suffolk County Department of Health Services.

A plan to improve water quality at Havens Beach, where elevated levels of nitrogen and bacteria, including fecal coliform, have concerned residents for decades, had its first public hearing before the Sag Harbor Village Board on July 8.

Angry board members. That was the theme last week at meetings of both the East Hampton Town Planning Board and Zoning Board of Appeals.

The East Hampton Village Z.B.A. appeared disinclined to grant variances allowing a freestanding sign to be erected at 28 Newtown Lane, the former Odd Fellows Hall, which now houses the Rolex Boutique.

Amid the continuing and worsening drought, the Suffolk County Water Authority issued the season’s first Stage 1 water alert on Tuesday for all customers in Southold, Shelter Island, Southampton, and East Hampton Towns. Those restrictions include using an odd/even watering schedule, and no lawn watering is permitted between 10 a.m. and 4 p.m.

A week after Richard Normoyle, East Hampton Town’s chief building inspector, told the town board that progress was being made on a large backlog of applications, rumors began spreading among building industry insiders that he is not New York State Code-certified to perform inspections. 

Two locations in Montauk, one at the southwest corner of Lake Montauk and the other at the northwest corner of Fort Pond, will be improved with so-called “living shorelines.”

Aircraft and firearms, two things America has more of than any other country in the world by a wide margin, are causing frustration to boil over in Wainscott.

The closure, effective Tuesday due to recent heavy rainfalls, will remain in place through Saturday’s Great Bonac Fireworks Show and until a determination that water quality is acceptable for the harvest of shellfish is made.

The National Fish and Wildlife Foundation, a nonprofit created by Congress in 1984, has awarded Concerned Citizens of Montauk a $323,000 grant to address coastal resilience in Montauk and on Napeague. It is the largest grant the nonprofit has ever been awarded.

Two weeks after the heavily contested Democratic primary election, absentee and early mail ballots have been counted, and the results have been finalized. Spoiler alert: They’ve barely changed since election night. 

Gov. Kathy Hochul signed legislation on Monday amending the New York State tax law to stipulate that $250,000 of Suffolk County’s hotel and motel taxes be appropriated to help maintain and operate the Montauk Lighthouse. 

Richard Normoyle, the chief building inspector, detailed the organization of the greatly expanded department (it’s nearly doubled in size in the last year, to 19 approved positions) and said it would be fully caught up on the permit backlog by the end of the year, five months ahead of his May estimate.

After the removal of two large trees estimated to be more than 100 years old on a residential Newtown Lane property where a house was recently demolished, Mayor Jerry Larsen said this week that he will discuss with the village board possibly amending the code to require a permit to remove trees. 

At Guild Hall’s first Hamptons Institute program of 2026, founders of the Indivisible movement promoted bottom-up, grassroots, local activism in the face of rising authoritarianism.

Chris Gallant, who won the Democratic primary election last week and will face Representative Nick LaLota in November, calls CD-1 “a very flippable district.”

Three years after the Cranberry Hole Road bridge in Amagansett was deemed structurally deficient and closed to all traffic, the Long Island Rail Road has awarded a contract for its reconstruction, which is expected to start by early 2027.

“I don’t know how to respond,” Jerry Larsen said after hearing about the effort taking shape a little over a week after his Democratic primary loss to Supervisor Kathee Burke-Gonzalez. “I don't want to discourage them, but I’m not actively campaigning."

During a work session on June 25, the village board discussed the possibility of creating more stops and backups to make the village a less desirable cut-through for traffic heading to points east or points west.

Gov. Kathy Hochul and Letitia James, the state’s attorney general, have sued the Trump administration to protect new state laws that are similar to the East End Public Safety and Accountability Law, a version of which was passed by both East Hampton Town and Village this spring.

A decomposed humpback whale found on a rocky stretch of shoreline at Ditch Plain in Montauk on June 26 was removed by the following afternoon, thanks to some hard work by East Hampton Town, a contractor, and about a dozen volunteers with the Atlantic Marine Conservation Society.

Considering the fire at the East Hampton Energy Storage Center, which resulted in the release of over two million gallons of water from an on-site fire suppression system, it’s hard to imagine that a similar fire at a Montauk storage center wouldn’t have environmental consequences with no good way to remediate them.

The East Hampton Village Board voted unanimously to approve its fiscal year 2027 budget, which lowers taxes by 0.29 percent.

In a continued effort to spur the construction of A.D.U.s throughout East Hampton Town, the town board last week unanimously supported taking $1 million from the community housing fund and chopping it into 10 separate $100,000 loans for applicants. Applications became available on the town’s website Monday and are open until Aug. 21.

Every year East Hampton Town’s shellfish hatchery aims to grow around two million oysters, six to eight million clams, and “as many bay scallops as the gods will allow,” its director, John Dunne, said — but at least 300,000.

The Suffolk County Water Authority is asking East Hampton Village residents to conserve water following discovery of contaminated wells, for which the 2023 fire at a lithium-ion energy storage system at a Cove Hollow Road substation is the suspected culprit.