Government

An East Hampton Town Planning Board hearing for a proposed 185-foot cell tower that would be installed by American Tower at Camp Blue Bay in Springs has been scheduled for Oct. 19.

The Cookery, a grocery store, bakery, and prepared-food shop that is operating where Simply Sublime stood for 10 years at 85 Springs-Fireplace Road, has worked out some of the issues with its site plan application and is now ready for a public hearing. An application for National Grid's East Hampton generating station still needs work before a hearing can be scheduled.

“My focus has been on really addressing wages within the town to invest in our human resources, our staff, to bring them up to a more competitive level," East Hampton Town Supervisor Peter Van Scoyoc said of the 2023 budget, which the town board will focus on during work sessions on Oct. 4 and 11. The town, he said, “has fallen a bit behind other municipalities” in employee salaries.

Breezin’ Up, a store at 37 Newtown Lane, is “looking to possibly make some changes of use in the building," according to the East Hampton Village building inspector, and an upgrade to its septic system would allow that. “They’ll be able to have retail wet uses, but not restaurants,” said Mayor Jerry Larsen, noting that similar easements were granted to Starbucks and a building housing multiple businesses at 55 Main Street.

With 47 days to the Nov. 8 midterm elections, Suffolk County Legislator Bridget Fleming and Nick LaLota, the chief of staff to the Republican majority in the Legislature, are presenting contrasting views as they vie to succeed Representative Lee Zeldin, the Republican congressman who has held the seat in New York’s First Congressional District for four consecutive terms.

In an attempt to secure the health of its waterways for future generations, Sag Harbor Village has hired an engineering firm to develop a master sewer plan that will connect more parcels to its wastewater treatment plant. The project’s estimated price tag? A whopping $78 million.

The East Hampton Village Board has created a new aesthetics committee made up of designers, architects, and “tastemakers,” who will advise it on projects and initiatives. On Friday, it got its first task: deciding whether the village could accept an offer from a homeowner whose house overlooks a preserved property adjacent to a Main Beach parking lot.

The East Hampton Town Water Quality Technical Advisory Committee made grant recommendations for high-impact improvement projects in Sag Harbor and Amagansett to the town board. By far the larger of the committee’s recommendations, and the largest to date in the committee’s request-for-applications program, is a grant of just over $1 million to Sag Harbor Village for an expansion of its existing sewage treatment plant.

After last week’s meeting of the East Hampton Town Planning Board, a public hearing on a proposal to raise a 185-foot cellphone tower at the 172-acre Camp Blue Bay in Springs seemed likely by October. Other than lingering questions about a diesel-fueled generator, the board appeared satisfied that the application was ready to hear the public’s comments, for better or worse.

Citing the time and expertise required to process applications, the East Hampton Town Planning Department has proposed updated application and permit fees. Some application processes “are quite involved,” the planning director said, requiring, for example, attention of the attorney’s office, the town board, the planning board, the Building Department, and the fire marshal. If applicants aren’t asked to “shoulder the majority of the burden for the service that they are asking us to perform,” the town’s other taxpayers “are picking up that tab.”

The Peconic Estuary Partnership has received a significant allotment of federal infrastructure money — $909,800 each year for the next five years — and some of that money could go to coastal resilience and climate adaptation projects in Accabonac and Napeague Harbors.

Some 3,200 pitch pines on Napeague were being felled this week, victims of the southern pine beetle infestation that has killed thousands of trees in East Hampton Town since 2017.

Suffolk County has been dealing with a weeklong malware mess that compelled it to hit the kill switch on its computer systems last week.

The Wainscott Citizens Advisory Committee vented at length about the lack of restrictions on air traffic at the East Hampton Airport, which the town had planned to implement in May but had to put on hold after a temporary restraining order was issued. “The worst airport situation ever,” said one member. "It’s time to show our outrage,” said another. “This year was a horror,” was a third.

For years, restaurants have operated at the Springs location in apparent harmony with their surroundings. Rita Cantina has been different. Ann Glennon, the town’s principal building inspector, and nearby residents say its use of the property has risen to unacceptable levels.

At an East Hampton Village Design Review Board meeting last week, village code was found to be in direct opposition to a state law that sets standards for lighting around automatic teller machines, or A.T.M.s, and the Bank of America branch at 14 Newtown Lane was uncomfortably caught in between.

Gov. Kathy Hochul continues to hold a double-digit lead over Representative Lee Zeldin, her challenger, according to a recent Emerson College poll.

East Hampton Town Councilman David Lys, the town board’s liaison to the Montauk Citizens Advisory Committee, brought up a few projects and problems in his presentation to the committee this week, including the anemic response in Montauk to a joint East Hampton Town and Suffolk County program that would provide up to $30,000 to residents to upgrade their septic systems in hopes of improving water quality in the hamlet.

The Southampton Town Patrolman’s Benevolent Association has endorsed Representative Lee Zeldin’s campaign for governor of New York. Mr. Zeldin, the Republican and Conservative Party candidate, is challenging Gov. Kathy Hochul in the Nov. 8 election.

The New York State Supreme Court Justice who issued a temporary restraining order on May 16 blocking East Hampton Town from closing East Hampton Airport and reopening it as a private facility with new restrictions has ordered that three lawsuits challenging the town’s plan be combined.

The East Hampton Town Board appears poised to amend the town code to increase the property tax exemption for senior citizens and disabled persons with limited income, based on their income level.

Tuesday is National Voter Registration Day, and the League of Women Voters of the Hamptons, Shelter Island, and the North Fork will observe the day with voter information tables throughout the East End.

The "last mile" shuttle bus service that takes passengers from the Long Island Rail Road's South Fork Commuter Connection trains to their destinations and back again expanded in East Hampton Town this week. 

“My initial reaction is, it’s too much," the chairman of the East Hampton Town Planning Board said of a plan to redevelop the parcel at 136 Main Street in Amagansett, where the owners want to renovate the historic building that fronts the long, narrow lot and add a new 7,200-square-foot building with six storefronts on the lower level and four affordable-housing units upstairs behind it.

The League of Women Voters of the Hamptons, Shelter Island, and the North Fork will host a virtual forum on the Nov. 8 ballot proposition that will ask voters to approve a .5-percent real estate transfer tax that would support the community housing opportunity fund.

Representative Lee Zeldin, the Republican and Conservative Parties’ nominee for governor of New York, is touting a new poll that has him trailing Gov. Kathy Hochul by just 4.4 percentage points, which sharply diverges from previous polls that had the governor holding double-digit leads.

All 18 members of the Suffolk County Legislature have signed a letter to President Joe Biden imploring him to declare Plum Island a national monument under the authority granted by the Antiquities Act of 1906 “for the purpose of ecological conservation, historical preservation, and the discovery and celebration of our shared cultural heritage.”

The East Hampton Town Board heard from several supportive Wainscott residents last Thursday when it held public hearings on the addition of stop signs at certain intersections, and a prohibition on parking, on the east side of Town Line Road.

By a 4-to-0 vote, the East Hampton Town Board adopted the Coastal Assessment Resilience Plan, known as CARP, into the town’s comprehensive plan last Thursday.

An upgrade of the town’s emergency services communications infrastructure that began in 2017 is mostly complete, but still outstanding is the node in the system that would cover Springs. And at a meeting on Tuesday residents loudly vented about poor to nonexistent personal wireless coverage and a gap in emergency communications coverage in the hamlet.