Villages

    Weekend access to public bathrooms at the Sag Harbor Municipal Building was on Nada Barry’s mind when she spoke to the Sag Harbor Village Board on July 9, hoping that new board members might listen to her pleas. By Tuesday, a few possible solutions were on the table, according to Kelly Connaughton, president of the village’s Chamber of Commerce.

    Ms. Barry, a co-owner of the Wharf Shop, joined Ms. Connaughton and Robert Evjen to represent chamber members at a meeting on the subject with the village trustees Ken O’Donnell and Robby Stein.

    It seems as if someone has been taking it upon him or herself to remove no-parking signs from a stretch along the south and north sides of Industrial Road in Montauk. The signs were posted two years ago to prevent patrons of the Surf Lodge from parking their vehicles on the environmentally sensitive strip of land that borders Fort Pond on the south and a smaller pond on the north.

    The biggest summer fund-raisers for the Montauk Playhouse Community Center start tonight with a show at the Playhouse by Break8, a group of roller-skating breakdancers who have performed on “America’s Got Talent.”

    The event is part of a four-part FamilyFest that, in addition to tonight’s performance, will happen on July 25, Aug. 8, and Aug. 22. Tickets for each show cost $15 per person or $50 for the entire series, and each starts at 7 p.m. Tickets are available at the door, at Willow, a gift shop on the south Plaza, or in advance at montaukplayhouse.org.

    The seventh installment of the Accabonac Protection Committee’s Long Live Accabonac film series, “Grasslands,” will be screened on Friday, July 19, at the Springs Presbyterian Church. The free showing will start at 7:30 p.m., followed by a panel discussion and refreshments.

    In the movie, several of Long Island’s grasslands are depicted, as well as many of the various species of plants and wildlife living in them. “Grasslands” mainly emphasizes how the grasslands and all of their plants and wildlife are in danger of extinction today.

    East Hampton Village Mayor Paul F. Rickenbach Jr. announced last week that Moody’s Investors Service has assigned an Aa2 rating with a positive financial outlook to the village’s proposed $3.3 million serial bond offering, and affirmed the Aa2 rating on current outstanding obligations. The rating represents an assessment of high quality and very low credit risk.

    A brief power outage on Tuesday affected Sag Harbor Village’s sewer plant and the Sag Harbor Yacht Club, as reported and discussed at a meeting of the village board that night. A generator kicked on, according to Dee Yardley, the superintendent of public works.

    Mr. Yardley explained that a fuse was tripped in one of the Long Island Power Authority transformers, resulting in only partial power to the plant. The outage was reported at 7 a.m., and power was restored just before 9 a.m.

    The Sag Harbor Community Housing Trust, a sort of think tank set up by Gregory Ferraris shortly after he left his post as the village mayor when plans for the Bulova Watchcase condominium development were still under review, has been reawakened after a five-year slumber and is looking for help, Mr. Ferraris told the village board on Tuesday.

   The Village Preservation Society of East Hampton will host an informational forum on deer control next Thursday at 5 p.m. at the Emergency Services Building on Cedar Street. Dr. Anthony DeNicola, president and co-founder of White Buffalo Inc., will be the forum’s guest speaker. White Buffalo, a nonprofit wildlife management and research organization, is dedicated to conserving native species and ecosystems through damage and population control, according to its Web site. Dr.

    Alfredo Corchado, the prizewinning Dallas Morning News journalist, whose beat is the dangerous border between the United States and Mexico, returned to the Rogers Memorial Library in Southampton recently to suggest, along with Shannon K. O’Neil, a senior fellow for Latin America studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, that Mexico and the United States each stand to gain appreciably if the relations between the two “distant neighbors” are strengthened.

    Invasive species are a growing problem in East Hampton and the rest of Long Island. The remaining untouched land here — woods, marshes, beaches, and grassy fields — are being taken over by non-native plant varieties.

    Invasive species pose not just ecological threats, but economic and health threats as well. One of the worst invasive species affecting the Town of East Hampton is the mile-a-minute weed, also known by its scientific name, Persicaria perfoliata.

    A loan taken out several years ago to pay for repairs and renovations to Ashawagh Hall, a Springs community building, has been paid off thanks to a $60,000 donation from the Alec Baldwin Foundation and Capital One Bank.

    Johnson Nordlinger of Montauk has been working since April as the assistant site manager of the Montauk Lighthouse, a spot that has long been special to her.

    Raised in Montauk, she remembers playing there as a girl with her good friend Caroline Driscoll, whose father, Paul Driscoll, was the officer in charge of the Lighthouse from 1979 to 1983. And as an adult, she said, she drove there almost daily to walk the wooded trails and ocean beach.

On a Saturday smack in the height of a hot, hectic, summer season, traffic will come to a halt to make way for a bicycle brigade of more than 50 wounded soldiers from the United States and United Kingdom along with hundreds of their supporters.

    The Summer Institute of the Jewish Center of the Hamptons, a series of performances, lectures, and other programs, gets under way tomorrow when Adam Mintz, a Modern Orthodox rabbi and faculty member at City and Queens Colleges, speaks at 2:30 p.m. Rabbi Mintz will also lead Torah study on Saturday at 12:30 p.m.

    Sharon Mintz, the rabbi’s wife, is the curator of Jewish Art at the Jewish Seminary in Manhattan and a senior consultant on Judaica for Sotheby’s.

    She will speak about her work during Sunday’s “Bagels and . . . ,” beginning at 10:30 a.m.

    Frank Newbold, a member of the East Hampton Village Zoning Board of Appeals since 2004, was appointed its chairman with a one-year term when the village board held its annual organizational meeting on Monday. Mr. Newbold, who had been the board’s vice chairman, replaces Andrew Goldstein, who will no longer be on the panel. The open seat will be filled by Craig Humphrey, who was an alternate member, for a three-year term. Ray Harden was appointed to a five-year term as an alternate. Lysbeth Marigold, a member of the board, was appointed to a one-year term as vice chairwoman.

       A new predator is in town.

    What looked to be a coyote was spotted last week, early on the morning of June 24, by a farmer in Water Mill. The farmer noticed the animal in one of his potato fields and took a photo on his cellphone. The picture was passed on to the State Department of Environmental Conservation in Stony Brook, where the animal was confirmed to be the first known coyote in Suffolk County.

    Noise related to aircraft going to and from East Hampton Airport is an environmental intrusion and should be addressed as such, the chairman of the Village Preservation Society of East Hampton’s airport noise committee told the East Hampton Village board at its regular meeting last Friday.

    It seems that every weekend since the weather turned warmer in May there have been bike races, motorcycle events, and triathlons clogging the roads in Montauk. Residents have complained that sometimes they can’t even get out of their driveways.

    The Sag Harbor Village Planning Board approved and expedited an application on Tuesday evening to allow Madison and Main, a new restaurant, tables for dining outside on Main Street. A restaurant across the street, however, Page at 63 Main, was not as fortunate. Its application for a permit to allow outdoor dining behind it was tabled until the next meeting, and the prospects aren’t good.

    If you have walked around downtown Montauk in recent days and seen men on ladders working on and around its 19th century-style street lamps, no, the men are not lamplighters removing the wires and fueling the lamps with whale oil for the sake of authenticity.

    East Hampton Bowl, where local residents and visitors to the South Fork have bowled competitively and recreationally for the last 54 years, will close next week.

    “We are definitely going to close the doors,” Craig Patterson, who has owned the establishment for 36 years, confirmed to The Star. Reopening under new management is a possibility Mr. Patterson called “very remote,” as is its reopening as another business.

    With a difference of only one vote, Jeff Sander and Jim Laspesa were elected to serve two-year terms on the North Haven Village Board. The candidates received 173 and 172 votes.

    Mr. Sander was elected to his fourth term. Mr. Laspesa is the chairman and a longtime member of the village’s planning board. Mary Whelan, an attorney, was defeated, receiving 74 votes.

    The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Climate Prediction Center is expecting an extremely active hurricane season this summer and fall.

    The center has indicated that between the months of June and November it is likely that 13 to 20 storms will hit the East Coast. Seven to 11 of those could become hurricanes, and 3 to 6 could become major hurricanes, classified as Category 3, 4, or 5, with winds of 111 miles per hour or higher. There is a 70-percent chance of above-normal hurricane activity.

    Michele Herger, Ms. New York America 2013, will compete in the Ms. America pageant on Sunday night in Costa Mesa, Calif. The competition, for women between 26 and 60, will see contestants judged on the evening gown and sportswear they wear, as well as an interview and on-stage question.

    At the conclusion of an otherwise uneventful meeting on Friday, Andrew Goldstein, chairman of the East Hampton Village Zoning Board of Appeals, announced that the meeting would be his last.

    The Town of East Hampton should authorize a hamlet study for Amagansett, the attendees at Monday night’s Amagansett Citizens Advisory Committee’s meeting agreed after discussing a number of issues that they believe are receiving insufficient attention and adversely affecting residents’ quality of life.

    Nine members voted in favor of requesting a hamlet study, with none opposed or abstaining.

Eight candidates weigh in on police and waterfront

    How to make the Village of East Hampton safer for bicyclists and pedestrians was the primary topic at a village board work session last Thursday, when Paul Fiondella and Howard Lebwith, who had made a presentation  at the board’s April 4 work session, returned to make the case for bike-friendly streets.

    The Hamptons Institute, a symposium on some of the most pressing issues of our time, will be back in East Hampton on Saturday, featuring three panel discussions during the course of the day on education, the economy, and the environment. The free event, organized by the Roosevelt Institute and held at Guild Hall, will provide intellectual perspectives and debate by experts in the given fields.

    “I am disappointed that he shot down federal money that could have saved or helped maintain the 11th position,” Kevin Duchemin, a Sag Harbor Village board member, said on Tuesday of Mayor Brian Gilbride’s announcement last week that the village would not apply for a grant that the police chief, Tom Fabiano, had suggested as a means to help hold onto an officer whose job was eliminated last month.