Government

There are two seats open on the Suffolk County Family Court bench, with four candidates, including Andrea Harum Schiavoni, a sitting Southampton Town justice and North Haven resident, and Michael P. Sendlenski, a former East Hampton Town attorney.

The East Hampton Town Republican Committee is hosting a Countdown to Election Day fund-raiser tonight from 6 to 9 at the Bel Mare restaurant at 28 Maidstone Park Road in Springs.

The four candidates vying for two seats on the East Hampton Town Board faced off for the last time on Oct. 16 at the East Hampton Library, the two incumbents defending their tenure and setting goals for the next term, the two challengers criticizing the same while offering their own vision for town government.

County Executive Steve Bellone, a Democrat, is facing a re-election challenge this year from John Kennedy, the Republican county comptroller.

The cost for electricity from the proposed 130-megawatt South Fork Wind Farm will average 14.1 cents per kilowatt-hour, the Long Island Power Authority’s chief executive officer said on Monday.

The Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission has drafted possible regulations in response to a 2018 assessment that striped bass are overfished.

The East Hampton Town Anti-Bias Task Force will host an information forum on New York State’s new law allowing undocumented immigrants to obtain a driver’s license on Wednesday from 6 to 7:30 p.m. at the East Hampton Library.

Find your polling place. And information about early voting in East Hampton and Southampton Towns.

There are nine trustees, each elected every two years to a two-year term. Seven of the nine incumbents are seeking re-election this year. Including those seven, there are 16 candidates on the ballot.

“What you see is what you get,” is how Bonnie Brady, a longtime Montauk resident and EH Fusion Party candidate for East Hampton Town Board, described herself in an interview with Star staff this week. “I’d like to think of myself as a fair, honest person, someone who would work their butt off” for constituents.

Though his name does not appear anywhere on the EH Fusion Party ballot line, David Gruber, a former Democratic Committee chairman running for East Hampton Town supervisor, is by far the splinter group’s largest supporter.

The candidates for East Hampton Town supervisor and seats on the town board squared off at the East Hampton Library on Oct. 16 in their final debate before the Nov. 5 election, this one sponsored by the League of Women Voters of the Hamptons.

Emily’s List, a political action committee that works to elect pro-choice female Democratic candidates to office, has endorsed Nancy Goroff, a candidate for the Democratic Party’s nomination to challenge Representative Lee Zeldin in New York’s First Congressional District next year.

David Talmage, a candidate for East Hampton Town trustee, has invited the public to meet him and his fellow candidates of the EH Fusion Party on Sunday from 2 to 6 p.m. at the Talmage homestead, 869 Springs-Fireplace Road in Springs. “Clams, chowder, chili, chatter, and cheer” will be served, according to a campaign flier.

In a scene some painted as just another example of government running roughshod over the desires of the citizenry, the East Hampton Town Board, with one abstention and over the furious objection of some residents, voted last Thursday to authorize the restoration of signs welcoming motorists, cyclists, and pedestrians to Springs.

Waters under jurisdiction of the East Hampton Town Trustees will open for scalloping on Nov. 10, the governing body agreed on Friday.

Voters in Southampton Town have a three-way race for supervisor ahead, with Greg Robins, a Republican, and Alex Gregor, the town highway superintendent, who is running on the Independence and Libertarian lines, vying for Jay Schneiderman's job.

The cyanobacteria, or blue-green algae, that have bloomed in Wainscott Pond in recent years produce dangerous toxins known as microcystins, the East Hampton Town Trustees were told on Friday, presenting a hazard to private wells or even those breathing the surrounding air.

If she is elected to the East Hampton Town Board, Elizabeth Bambrick said last week, it will be “because people want me to change things.”

The two Pantigo Place East Hampton Little League baseball fields that will be displaced by construction of the Southampton Hospital Association’s planned emergency care facility could be relocated to the grounds of the former Child Development Center of the Hamptons on Stephen Hand’s Path.

Politics makes strange bedfellows, and in East Hampton, this year there may be no stranger political couple than East Hampton Town Justice Lisa R. Rana, a lifelong Republican, and David Gruber, a Democrat who is running for town supervisor but not on the Democratic line.

Suffolk County’s still-pure water sources are irreplaceable resources that must be preserved and protected, State Assemblyman Steve Englebright told a gathering in Amagansett on Oct. 4.

The Springs School and the Springs General Store, as well as the West Lake Inn complex in Montauk and a modular floating structure intended to remove nitrogen and phosphorous in Montauk’s Fort Pond, should receive grant funding from the portion of the community preservation fund allocated to water quality improvement, the East Hampton Town Board was told on Tuesday.

The first debate between candidates for East Hampton Town supervisor and town board — at the East Hampton Library on Saturday — was a mostly civil discussion, the three incumbent Democrats fending off criticism from their challengers while making a case for their own re-election.

Members of the East Hampton Town Board and the town’s Natural Resources Department celebrated operation of the first megawatt-scale solar power plant on the South Fork last Thursday.

Calling Long Island “the test case for the greatest environmental challenges in the state,” Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo, along with a host of New York State and Suffolk County officials, visited South­ampton last Thursday to announce a pilot project aimed at extracting harmful algal blooms from water bodies.

Commercial fishermen have long voiced the concern that an offshore wind farm might disrupt their work by altering fish migration patterns, injuring or killing marine life, or posing a hazard to them and their equipment.

Tuesday’s meeting to begin negotiations on a settlement between the developers of the proposed South Fork Wind Farm and the New York State Public Service Commission was canceled after East Hampton Town and state officials objected to its location and to what an attorney representing the town said was unreasonably short notice.

Those wishing to participate in Tuesday's settlement negotiations between the developers of the proposed South Fork Wind Farm and the New York State Public Service Commission will be able to do so without traveling to the meeting site in Albany, thanks to an administrative law judge's ruling on Wednesday. 

At the conclusion of last month’s meeting of the East Hampton Village Zoning Board of Appeals, the owners of 33 Lily Pond Lane told the board they would abandon their plan to tear down the house there and build a new one on the property, which is in a coastal erosion hazard area. But now they've changed their minds.