Government

Gordian Raacke, the executive director of the East Hampton advocacy organization Renewable Energy Long Island, has been appointed to Suffolk County’s Community Choice Aggregation Task Force.

Perry Gershon of East Hampton, who narrowly lost a challenge to Representative Lee Zeldin last year and hopes to be the Democratic Party’s nominee to challenge him in the 2020 race for New York’s First Congressional District, said that he had raised more than $400,000 in the second quarter.

Meanwhile, a rival for the Democrats’ nomination, Nancy Goroff, announced last Thursday that she had raised more than $200,000 in the 72 hours following the July 9 announcement of her candidacy.

New York State Health Department Commissioner Howard Zucker has accepted the State Drinking Water Quality Council’s recommendations for maximum contaminant levels in drinking water for PFOA, PFOS, and 1,4-dioxane, which have been found in water deemed potable.

Eighty acres of Lake Montauk will see a seasonal shellfishing closure extended by 60 days, and 21 acres in Sag Harbor’s Little Northwest Creek will be permanently closed to shellfishing, the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation announced last week.

Members of the East Hampton Group for Wildlife renewed a push for the town board to ban hunting on one weekend day during hunting season at the board’s meeting last Thursday, with the submission of a petition bearing 601 signatures, nearly all of them residents.

A three-year study of tick infections in Suffolk County's 10 townships showed them to be consistent with ranges of infection rates in New York State, county officials announced Monday.

The Town of Southampton is making significant progress on a range of sustainability initiatives to protect the environment, members of the town’s sustainability advisory committee told the town board last Thursday.

Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo announced on Thursday that Sunrise Wind, a joint venture of the Danish energy company Orsted and the Connecticut company Eversource, and Empire Wind, proposed by the Norwegian company Equinor, have each been awarded contracts to develop offshore wind farms — one of them some 30 miles east of Montauk.

“Airports, in particular, are very important refuges because of their continued grassland maintenance, and their exclusion of people and deer,” said Marguerite Wolffsohn, East Hampton Town’s planning director, and the town’s airport, “is a refuge for native plants.”

The agency has identified several "deficiencies" — primarily regarding the effect on a variety of fish species — in the South Fork Wind Farm transmission cable plan.

The East Hampton Town Republican Committee re-elected the group’s executive board to two-year terms at its 2019 organizational meeting on Friday. 

At the request of the East Hampton Town Trustees, the federal Bureau of Ocean Energy Management has engaged consultants to evaluate existing studies of potential effects of electromagnetic fields on fish species as part of its environmental studies program. That evaluation could lead to a field study, a trustee reported to his colleagues on Monday.