Government

Getting to the groundbreaking for the Montauk Playhouse Community Center’s new aquatic center was reminiscent of the concept of “third places,” said Sarah Iudicone, the Playhouse Foundation’s president. After home and work, “third places play an important part in our identity. They allow us to open ourselves up, learn more about the people around us, and deepen our civic engagement. And because of all of your support, Montauk is going to have a new third place.”

East Hampton Town is "leading by example with upgrading our town-owned municipal facilities to innovative alternative, low-nitrogen sanitary systems,” according to the environmental analyst with the Natural Resources Department. Five upgrades have been completed and many more are in the works.

On a visit to the East End last week, Senator Kirsten Gillibrand announced proposed legislation that would regulate perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl substances — of a class of chemicals known as PFAS — which have been determined to be dangerous at any level of exposure.

The East Hampton Housing Authority’s five properties will soon see the installation of solar panels that are estimated to produce a combined 927 megawatt hours annually. Once the buildings have been solarized, residents will receive at least a 15-percent reduction in their electricity costs.

Suffolk County Supreme Court Justice Joseph Santorelli dismissed Michael Bebon’s lawsuit against East Hampton Village regarding pickleball at Herrick Park last week, but that didn’t stop Mr. Bebon and a phalanx of lawyers from showing up at Monday’s village board meeting to draw another line in the park’s sandbox.

Adam Potter has tabled controversial plans for a 79-unit downtown affordable apartment building with 34,000 square feet of retail space, and said he will instead submit plans to Sag Harbor Village for a building with 39 residential units and a third of the retail space originally proposed.

End Citizens United, which works to elect Democratic candidates and to combat the influence of money in politics, has filed a second complaint against Representative Nick LaLota of New York’s First Congressional District, this one alleging that he violated federal election law by failing to file complete financial disclosure reports.

A representative from the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority’s Build Ready program pitched a study to the East Hampton Town Board on Tuesday that would identify potential sites for solar farms and battery storage systems on town-owned properties.

The New York League of Conservation Voters has endorsed East Hampton Town Councilwoman Kathee Burke-Gonzalez in her bid for supervisor, as well as Westhampton Beach Mayor Maria Moore, who is running for supervisor of Southampton Town. Both are Democrats.

The Suffolk County Legislature voted 10 to 7 along partisan lines to recess and close its hearing on Tuesday without acting to put the Suffolk County Water Quality Protection Act on the Nov. 7 ballot, which would have let voters decide whether or not the county sales tax should be increased by one-eighth of a cent to create a Water Quality Restoration Fund.

The East Hampton Town Board is in discussions with the Long Island Rail Road about the Cranberry Hole Road Bridge over the railroad tracks, which was has been closed since July 1 because of structural problems.

Attorneys for the plaintiffs who have successfully thwarted East Hampton Town’s plan to briefly close East Hampton Airport and reopen it as a private airport have told the New York State Supreme Court that they calculated nearly $295,000 in fees associated with a May motion holding the town in civil contempt, fees the judge in the suit had ordered the town to pay. The town's attorneys say those fees are excessive and that the court should reject them.

The Southampton Town Board, at a special meeting last Thursday, voted unanimously to hold an Aug. 8 public hearing on the imposition of a six-month moratorium on applications for battery energy storage systems, following an outcry from residents near a proposed installation on North Road in Hampton Bays. Several board members expressed support for the proposed moratorium.

Representative Nick LaLota of New York’s First Congressional District has joined the bipartisan Climate Solutions Caucus, a group comprising an equal number of Republicans and Democrats.

A lawsuit brought by four Wainscott residents challenging the onshore construction of the South Fork Wind farm, one of many efforts to stop its construction via the courts, was dismissed by a federal judge this week. 

The Huntting Inn wants to add a swimming pool to its property, to which at least one neighbor has objected. “If the application is granted, I imagine the Maidstone Inn, Hedges Inn, Mill House Inn, and perhaps some B&Bs, will ask for [a pool], and the fresh precedent will be difficult to overcome,” Frank Morgan told the Zoning Board of Appeals on Friday.

Is your property overrun with invasive plants like honeysuckle and poison ivy? You may want to consider goats. That’s in part what Concerned Citizens of Montauk pitched to East Hampton Town for the roughly 40-acre Arthur Benson Preserve on Old Montauk Highway.

Auditors told the East Hampton Town Board on Tuesday that they found nothing amiss in a review of the town's finances. "Everything’s really in good shape,” Supervisor Peter Van Scoyoc said.

Tom Flight, a Democratic Party candidate for the East Hampton Town Board, is on the road to recovery after spending four days at Stony Brook Southampton Hospital following a seizure on July 4. 

A proposed amendment to the East Hampton Town code would allow volunteer firefighters and ambulance workers with two years of qualifying service to apply for a partial tax exemption.

In a pilot composting effort aimed at diverting, recovering, and reusing residential food scraps to create compost and return it to the soil, East Hampton Compost will receive food scraps at farmers markets in Springs and Sag Harbor to start.

The East Hampton Town Planning Board held a “wrap-up discussion” on June 28 about a stripped-down site plan application from Rita Cantina, the Mexican restaurant located in a residential neighborhood in Springs. In order to speed approval, the restaurant has removed several proposed points of contention, among them an outdoor patio with seating area, parking for catering trailers, grills, and lighting.

Temporary roadside informational signs are being placed in East Hampton Town to raise awareness and enforce the New York State Move Over Law, which aims to protect law enforcement officers, emergency workers, tow and service vehicle operators, and other workers stopped along roadways.

A proposed teardown project on Oyster Shores Road in East Hampton, which came before the zoning board of appeals at a public hearing late last month, raised the question of whether more weight should be given to proposed improvements to a parcel and its surroundings, or to the dictates of the town zoning code.

The first substantive discussion of progress made by a work group charged with amending East Hampton Town’s zoning code happened at the town board’s work session on Tuesday, and many of the dozen residents who spoke about it during the meeting’s 90-minute public comment period tied the effort to curb development to the myriad manifestations of environmental degradation and climate change throughout the United States and around the world.

Stung, not by a wasp — which purportedly was a catalyst for Carl Icahn to build an unpermitted gazebo at his Nichols Lane residence — but by the East Hampton Village Zoning Board of Appeals’ March 14 refusal to grant retroactive approval for the structure, Mr. Icahn sued the village in April.

The East Hampton Town Trustees were agreeable to the proposed rebuilding of a bulkhead on Three Mile Harbor when they met on Monday. They were also amenable to a proposed installation, behind that bulkhead, of a permeable reactive barrier — typically a long, narrow trench filled with a material such as iron, limestone, carbon, or mulch to remove contaminants as groundwater passes through it — that would prevent an estimated 500 pounds of nitrogen from entering the water body annually.

Violations for the illegal taking of shellfish from East Hampton Town waters could be elevated to aggravated charges. The town board considered an amendment to the town code toward that end last Thursday.

East Hampton Town’s forests are under assault from multiple species, the town board was told on Tuesday, and while invasive insects are a major component of the ongoing threat to them, “more aggressive deer management” was the recommendation to alleviate forest degradation.

A newly installed 262-kilowatt solar system array is now operational at Hither Hills State Park in Montauk, the New York State Office of Parks, Recreation, and Historic Preservation announced last week. It's projected to generate 360,000 kilowatt hours per year, covering the park’s entire electricity use and saving around $45,000 annually on electricity costs.