Government

A town board discussion about amending the town code governing ethics turned into a furious argument among members on Tuesday, largely over a May 7 event that honored pandemic frontline workers and food pantry staff but drew criticism from the town's board of ethics.

"We all want this to be over," New York State Gov. Kathy Hochul said on Wednesday as she announced a mask mandate for child care centers, residential health programs, and other state-run health facilities as well as a vaccination initiative that will enable emergency medical technicians to administer Covid-19 shots.

The yearslong court battle pitting East Hampton Town and the town trustees against property owners along a 4,000-foot stretch of ocean beach on Napeague popularly known as Truck Beach ended on Tuesday, as the homeowners' associations prevailed in their quest to claim ownership of the beach adjacent to their properties.

As debate over the future of East Hampton Airport heats up with the looming expiration of Federal Aviation Administration grant assurances, allowing the town to control its future, a group aiming to see the airport closed announced its formation on Friday.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Fisheries division has announced new regulations for the lobster and Jonah crab trap and pot fisheries in the Northeast to help save endangered North Atlantic right whales by reducing their risk of entanglement in fishing gear.

The League of Women Voters of the Hamptons, Shelter Island, and the North Fork will host several events between now and the Nov. 2 elections. First up, on Monday at 7 p.m. over Zoom, is "The Electoral College and the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact: What Every Voter Should Know."

Air traffic at Montauk's single-runway airport, in a worst-case scenario, could rise by as much as 34 percent if East Hampton Airport were closed, consultants told the East Hampton Town Board on Tuesday, but a number of factors, including existing limitations there, make a surge of that scale unlikely.

Three months after several residents of a southern portion of Accabonac Road in East Hampton complained of a surge in truck traffic since the Long Island Rail Road trestle was raised there, the town board voted last Thursday to prohibit commercial vehicles weighing more than nine tons between Collins Avenue and Floyd Street.

The race to succeed Representative Lee Zeldin in New York's First Congressional District has become a crowded one, with two new Democratic candidates and the first declared Republican to throw his hat into the ring.

Citing the proliferation in recent years of "extremely large houses" looming over and destroying the privacy of their neighbors, the Amagansett Citizens Advisory Committee asked the East Hampton Town Board at its meeting on Tuesday to strengthen the town code, particularly as to setbacks and the pyramid law, and to impose a moratorium on building permits and on "the many subdivisions that are occurring in all East Hampton hamlets and especially in Amagansett."

East Hampton Town will soon begin a detailed environmental study at East Hampton Airport, 47 acres of which was included on the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation's Registry of Inactive Hazardous Waste Disposal Sites, commonly called Superfund sites, based on detections of perfluorinated chemicals, known as PFAS.

After having employees quit because of the high cost of housing, Michael Ruddy, the owner of Ruddy and Sons Masonry in East Hampton, is seeking permission from the town board to build affordable apartments on land next to his business.

The first of four public workshops on a re-envisioning of East Hampton Airport will be held tonight at 7. It will be a virtual workshop, held via Zoom video conference, rather than in person at the LTV Media Center in Wainscott, as initially planned. Owing to a significant uptick in the rate of positive Covid-19 tests at the testing sites at the East Hampton Town Hall campus and in Montauk, the town board and other boards and committees have reverted to virtual meetings.

Citing the highly transmissible Delta variant of Covid-19, East Hampton Supervisor Peter Van Scoyoc announced Thursday that the town board will return to virtual meetings as of Tuesday. The variant "is significant within the community at this time. It’s spreading rapidly, and people need to really take this seriously,” he said.

The Army Corps of Engineers has awarded the first contract of the Fire Island to Montauk Point reformulation project (FIMP), to Great Lakes Dredge and Dock Company, for nearly $47.5 million, a milestone toward getting the long-delayed project under way.

In a unanimous vote, the Suffolk Legislature has passed a local law to preserve honeybee colonies in the county. The resolution is expected to take effect in a few weeks, according to Bridget Fleming, its co-sponsor with Al Krupski of the North Fork.

A toxic blue-green algal bloom prompted the East Hampton Town Trustees to close Georgica Pond to swimming and shellfishing in mid-August, but signs warning that crabbing is currently prohibited haven't stopped several people from trying.

East Hampton Town's first solar-plus-battery storage system is being installed on the roof of the Parks Department building at the Town Hall campus. The 75-kilowatt solar photovoltaic system will generate clean, renewable power and charge a 137-kilowatt-hour battery that will allow the town to sell excess power to the grid when demand and prices are at their peak.

The Springs Fire District has reiterated its offer to the town to install a 100-foot communications tower at the Fort Pond Boulevard firehouse to improve wireless coverage. And a spokeswoman for the Girl Scouts of Nassau County said the company handling a tower application for Camp Blue Bay is negotiating with the town "to increase the size of the tower to provide space for emergency services equipment."

The federal Bureau of Ocean Energy Management has issued a notice of intent for Sunrise Wind, a 924-megawatt wind farm proposed by the developers Orsted and Eversource to be situated in federal waters adjacent to the South Fork Wind farm, which they are also developing. 

East Hampton Town Supervisor Peter Van Scoyoc has come out in support of state legislation that would pave the way for a dedicated affordable housing fund, according to a statement from Town Hall. 

Lee Zeldin, eastern Long Island's four-term representative in Congress, has begun his New York gubernatorial campaign strong, raising over $4 million in all, with over a third of the total coming from out-of-state donors.

Carrie Doyle, a member of the East Hampton Village Zoning Board of Appeals and a former planning board member, has declared her intention to run on the NewTown Party ticket for one of the two village board seats up for grabs in June 2022.

Beach closures in place since April at the Amagansett National Wildlife Refuge and the Jessup's Neck peninsula at the Elizabeth A. Morton National Wildlife Refuge in Sag Harbor, both to protect threatened shorebirds, were lifted earlier this week in the wake of an unsuccessful effort to allow the bird populations to recover.

The installation of geotextile bags that are meant to be a short-term measure but have remained long after their permits' expiration is likely to lead to the amendment of East Hampton Town's zoning code with respect to emergency activities permitted under the protection of natural resources.

The East Hampton Town Trustees on Monday heard from Bob Tymann of South Fork Sea Farmers, which John Dunne, the director of the East Hampton Town Shellfish Hatchery, described as the nonprofit educational arm of the hatchery and the town's community oyster garden program, who proposed an oyster reef in Accabonac Harbor. An effort to establish such a reef, he said, could lead to natural propagation while establishing habitat. 

East Hampton Fire Department Chief Gerard Turza Jr. appealed to the village board on Friday for approximately $4.5 million, to replace an aging fleet of vehicles and other equipment. 

In the ongoing fight between Sand Land and its opponents over operations at the Noyac mine, a new court decision announced on Monday upholds a previous ruling that voided a permit awarded by the State Department of Environmental Conservation.

The East Hampton Town Trustees' Largest Clam Contest, a popular annual event that showcases the trustees' role in town government and the bounty of the town's waterways, will be held once again this year, starting at noon on Oct. 3.

A proposal that will permit two-bedroom accessory dwellings with kitchens on East Hampton Village properties of 60,000 square feet or more, and several other zoning code amendments were approved by the village board on Friday following public hearings during which members of the village's zoning board of appeals, and the executive director of the Village Preservation Society of East Hampton, asked the board to take more time to analyze the potential ramifications, and give residents a chance to offer input.