Government

Jay Schneiderman has completed his first proposed Southampton Town budget since becoming supervisor, a $94.7 million operating budget for 2017 that falls below the allowed 1-percent cap. The budget calls for a 1.6-percent reduction in the property tax rate, the largest tax rate reduction in recent history, despite a 3.9-percent increase in spending over the current year.

“We went back 10 years, there wasn’t anything like it,” Mr. Schneiderman said as he presented the spending plan to the town board last Thursday.

In a move that Southampton Town Supervisor Jay Schneiderman called among the first of its kind, the town is preserving the Southampton Golf Range on County Road 39 in Tuckahoe through the community preservation fund. The town purchased a recreational easement on the 13-acre property for $6.5 million in a deal that closed on Friday.

The easement allows for the continuation of the existing uses: a golf range, a miniature golf course, a peddle-cart track, and a seasonal ice-skating rink.

The Town of Southampton and Long Island Power Authority have reached an agreement that ends a multiyear dispute.

Conceptual plans for a new East Hampton Town Hall — a series of linked, wood-shingled, barn-like structures that would be built on the footprint of the old Town Hall building, which would be razed — got a preliminary nod from the East Hampton Town Board at a meeting on Tuesday, at least to proceed to the next planning stage.

East Hampton Town officials will listen to comments from the public on a proposed moratorium on the development of commercial sites in Wainscott at a hearing at Town Hall on Oct. 6, beginning at 6:30 p.m.

The East Hampton Town Planning Board faced a stormy, three-hour session at Town Hall on Sept. 14 when a site plan for a proposed car wash in Wainscott came before it.

 James Golden wants to put up a 4,435-square-foot steel and glass building with 15 vacuum stations. The facility, which requires a permit from the board, would have a detailing area, room for 18 cars to line up, and nine parking spaces. The property now contains a former discotheque, which has fallen into disrepair and is considered unsafe.

The venture capitalist Fred Wilson and his wife, Joanne Wilson, are planning a family compound on Seabreeze Lane in Amagansett and to do so want to tear down a house they received permission to build there in 2010. A permit from the East Hampton Town Zoning Board of Appeals was, and would be, required because of the proximity of dunes and wetlands.

The East Hampton Democrats opened headquarters for the campaign for Hillary Clinton, nominee for president, and Anna Throne-Holst, nominee to represent New York’s First Congressional District, on Saturday at 53 the Circle in East Hampton.

The “never-ending saga of Driftwood Shores,” as the clerk of the East Hampton Town Trustees put it, was once again a topic at that body’s meeting on Monday.

Southampton Town held off on approving an amendment for ground-mounted solar panels and Suffolk County re-established its tick control advisory committee.

A public hearing to examine water contamination and assess the effectiveness and implementation of laws and policies intended to protect water quality and public health will be held by the New York State Assembly’s and Senate’s committees on health and environmental conservation on Monday.

Members of an autonomous citizens’ committee on airport noise, including a number of those who served on a town board-appointed similar group that the town later disbanded, visited East Hampton Airport on Friday evening to observe and videotape its operations at the start of the busy Labor Day weekend.

Based on the recommendation of an East Hampton Town committee on affordable housing, the town board is considering legalizing the creation of apartments in detached structures on residential properties, such as garages.

The center of Amagansett, and how it will look in the future, is in the spotlight as East Hampton Town moves forward with a plan to expand the hamlet’s municipal parking lot.

The public comment period on the Army Corps of Engineers’ Fire Island to Montauk Point shoreline proposals, a $1.1 billion project that has been more than half a century in the planning, extends through Sept. 29, with a hearing scheduled at the Montauk Firehouse on its penultimate day, Sept. 28.

Efforts are under way to convince the Southampton Town Board to use the community preservation fund to end the possibility of development on the 13.3-acre parcel off Montauk Highway known as the Bridgehampton Gateway despite the fact the principal owner has made it clear she does not want to sell it.

Citizens group seeks police body cameras and a C.P.F. buy on Spinner Lane in East Hampton.

What began as isolated patches of Cochlodinium, or rust tide, in Sag Harbor and Three Mile Harbor in East Hampton earlier this month has spread across the Peconic Estuary.

Town officials moved Thursday night to seek an injunction against an East Hampton property owner who has apparently been operating an illegal nightclub in the basement of a house at 7 Muir Boulevard.

In an effort to find ways to reduce the town’s energy load, an initiative set forth in the town’s comprehensive and sustainability plans, the board is considering changes that would relax property clearing restrictions to allow more area for solar energy systems as an accessory use.

Search for a new Southampton Town Police Chief is down to two candidates and accused highway employee quits.

Just about six years after East Hampton Town faced down a fiscal crisis caused by mismanagement that left the town with a $27 million deficit, Moody’s Investors Service has upgraded the town’s credit rating to the Aa1 level — a positive stamp of approval only one level below Moody’s top Aaa rating.

Concerned about the national rise of hate-motivated rhetoric, East Hampton Town’s anti-bias task force, in a statement sent to the media, has reminded residents of its mission and invited visitors or prospective members to attend its monthly meetings.

Southampton Town officials are taking action to clean up a blighted south-of-the-highway property in Bridgehampton that neighbors claim has been abandoned for eight years and left to attract mosquitos, rats, raccoons, and squatters.

Donald Trump’s visit to East Hampton last weekend left a few unhappy people in its wake, angry that they could not get to a village beach near the house where he was speaking.

They will be raising the rafters for a barn on Long Lane soon, if the East Hampton Town Planning Board gives its stamp of approval for a site plan regarding the former Damiecki farm at the corner of Stephen Hand’s Path.

About a dozen Montauk residents showed up for a hearing before the East Hampton Town Zoning Board of Appeals Tuesday night when a proposed new house at 6 Prentice Place in the Ditch Plain neighborhood of the hamlet was on the agenda.

East Hampton Town

Lighted Crosswalks Coming

The Federal Aviation Administration on Friday renewed its mandate that helicopters flying between points west and the East End, many of which use East Hampton Airport, follow a route along the North Shore until turning south toward their destinations. The rule, which was to have expired on Aug. 6, has been extended through August 2020.

Big game hunters who live in East Hampton and have town and state hunting licenses will now be able to get a guest license for a nonresident hunter, following a vote of the town board last Thursday.