Montauk will celebrate Earth Day on Saturday with a cleanup from 10 a.m. to noon starting at the Montauk Movie, where bags and gloves will be dispensed. Hosted by the Concerned Citizens of Montauk and the Group for the East End, the festivities will continue at 11:30 a.m. through 1:30 p.m. at the Montauk Playhouse Community Center with a program on everything you ever wanted to know about birds. There will be crafts for kids and materials for making bling-laden birdie gift bags.

    For adults, a free program on how to prevent deer from wreaking havoc on your garden will be held from 2 to 3:30 p.m. at Fort Pond Native Plants in Montauk, where Matt Stedman will lecture and provide a survival guide.

    Two hikes will take place, weather permitting, led by student interns who have been trained in Concerned Citizens of Montauk programs. The first will meet at the trailhead at Big Reed Pond at noon on Saturday. If you have the stamina, the second will start at the trailhead of the Walking Dunes on Napeague at 2 p.m. Directions and other information can be found at CCOM-Montauk.org/events.

    Also in Montauk, the East End chapter of the Surfrider Foundation will have a cleanup at Ditch Plain Beach on Saturday starting at 9 a.m. Participants will meet in the parking lot near the East Deck Motel.

    “We need lots of help to pick up trash, debris, and other stuff that is littering our beaches,” a release said, going on to point out that doing so offers a fine opportunity to spend time with friends and family. “At the end of an hour or two, you will feel good about cleaning a special part of our coastline.”

    As part of its Earth Day celebration, the South Fork Natural History Museum in Bridgehampton is seeking volunteers to help clear beach debris that may be dangerous to birds and marine life on Saturday morning from 8:30 to 9:30 on Long Beach in Noyac.

    Southampton Town will hold its annual Great East End Cleanup on Saturday and Sunday, with residents asked to select a property such as a public park, beach, roadside, or trail to help clean up.

    In Sagaponack, bags will be available at Sagg Main Beach at 9 a.m. Saturday, or volunteers can bring their own. A pointed stick would be a good idea, too, according to Sagaponack Mayor Donald Louchheim, who will participate with other village board members.

    The John Jermain Memorial Library’s budget vote and trustee election will be held on Tuesday from 10 a.m. to 8 p.m., and is open to all registered voters in the Sag Harbor School District.

    The proposed 2014 budget is just under $2.29 million, an increase of $71,633 over this year’s approved budget, with $60,450 of that increase to be covered by taxpayers. That represents a difference of about $5 per year for the average homeowner, according to the library.

    The total includes $905,000 in debt service related to the restoration and expansion of the library. Other increases cover rises in health and unemployment insurance costs as well as in utilities and other day-to-day operations. The library is also planning expanded programming for families and senior citizens and is paying for new digital resources and climate-controlled storage for rare local materials and artifacts, according to its newsletter.

    Three candidates, whose election is assured, are running for three spots on the library’s board of trustees. They are Linley Whelan, who has served one three-year term and is seeking a second; Nick Gazzolo, who is active in a number of other village organizations and has a background in business and marketing, and Alison Bond, an editor, writer, and literary agent. Mr. Gazzolo and Ms. Bond will be first-time trustees.

    The library has a limit of two consecutive terms for its trustees and the two leaving the board, Carl Peterson and Carol Williams, have met their term limits. “They have just done great things for us in the six years they’ve been here,” said Catherine Creedon, the library’s director.

    Voting on Tuesday will be at the library’s temporary location at 34 West Water Street. Absentee ballots will be available at the school district office at Pierson High School until the morning of the vote.   

    Mary Lou Kaler, an East Hampton horsewoman who 21 years ago adopted a young horse named Bubba — a Clydesdale that grew familiar to town residents, clomping peacefully in numerous parades and offering cart rides around town — reported his death on March 30, six weeks after a Star turn in a photo on the front page of this newspaper.

    Ms. Kaler said that she and a partner, Glenn Heigl, got the yearling horse in 1992 from a breeder in Jamesport. He was already named Bubba. “With a good Bonac name like that, he was destined to live in East Hampton,” she said.    

    Early on, Ms. Kaler and Bubba took on ceremonial duties, marching in the annual Santa Parade, as well as in the parade marking East Hampton Town’s tricentquinquagenary (350th) anniversary celebration, with the late Carleton Kelsey, a town historian from Amagansett, riding in a Bubba-drawn carriage.

    From 1995 through 2001, Bubba and Ms. Kaler also paraded the carriage around East Hampton Village for wedding celebrations or at Christmas, offering rides, with eggnog, from the Maidstone Arms. In 2006, Bubba was at the head of Montauk’s St. Patrick’s Day parade, squiring Suzanne Gosman, the grand marshal, in her Irish “tub-cart.” 

    “He was East Hampton’s Clydesdale,” Ms. Kaler said last week, “the people’s horse. Bubba was a great horse — a horse in service to community.”

    Bubba was indeed a horse-about-town. He was kept at first at a farm leased from the Tillinghast family in East Hampton, and pastured in an adjacent field, where he became a familiar sight to many passing by the Cove Hollow area. He was housed for a time in Montauk and also in Springs, then again in East Hampton Village.

    Without a farm or land of her own, Ms. Kaler has had to depend on others to house her horses — Peanut and Tucker remain — in existing barns. She occasionally rides on horseback through the streets, and stops so that children, and others who love horses, can say hello.

    “The kids loved it,” she said. “I feel strongly about showing up for the ­parades,­ for the children, for everybody . . . to stay connected to our rural heritage.”

     “I shared him in every way,” she said. Bubba appeared at fund-raisers and other parties, took people on  trail rides, did therapy work, and once posed with Justin Timberlake for a GQ magazine photo spread.

    “I feel that people benefit from contact with horses,” Ms. Kaler said in an e-mail. “Having worked professionally with horses for 30 years, it saddens me to witness the gap between horses and their riders growing ever larger. People arrive at a barn, have a groomed, saddled horse handed to them, have someone tell them what to do inside a fenced-in area, and a half-hour or an hour later, hand the horse off again.”

    Ms. Kaler said that a cash gift recently made it possible for her to move all of her horses to a “beautiful pasture” close to her house, where she was with Bubba around the clock as he neared the end. “We shared a campfire under Springs’s . . . full moon,” she said, before the horse died at 2 a.m. on the penultimate day of March.  The two had been “inseparable,” she said, for 21 years.

    The Sag Harbor Village Board waived a $206,575 fee Tuesday night for the renewal of the Bulova Watchcase condominium development’s building permit. The village attorney, Fred Thiele, reasoned that the developer, Sag Development Partners, had paid the fee once at a figure deemed “more than sufficient” and that collection of a second fee would constitute an illegal levy.

    New townhouses are now going up next to the old factory building, which is covered with a blue mesh tarp. The village board okayed the developers’ request to install temporary wood stairs, with rail and decking, to sit beside the trailer on Church Street.

    Angela Scott, a resident of Spring Street, spoke at some length on a controversial matter currently being considered by the zoning board of appeals. An application for stairs, part of a Garden Street expansion bordering wetlands, has aroused neighbors’ fears of water displacement. The neighbors, who are already concerned about existing flooding, have gathered expert opinions which have been submitted to the zoning board; now they want the village board to consider them. The board accepted the papers from Ms. Scott, and both Mayor Brian Gilbride and Mr. Thiele said they would look further into the application.

    Also on Tuesday, two restaurant owners voiced concerns about seating limitations. Parking regulations, they said, conflict with occupancy regulations, and the restaurateurs — Matthew Giufrida of Muse in the Harbor and Barbara Manning of The Cuddy, a new restaurant that will occupy the former Phao space — would like the board to reconsider the limitations.

    A request from Sag Harbor’s fire chief, Pete Garypie, to reinstate Scott Ficorilli to the active rolls, was approved. Mr. Ficorilli filed a claim against the village and fire department in July saying he had been improperly removed two months before. Mayor Gilbride recused himself from both processes because of a personal conflict.

    An amended law that would limit parking in village lots to 72 hours was briefly mentioned, but a full discussion was held until next month’s meeting.

    Robby Stein, a board member, explained that some 20 to 30 cars are taking up round-the-clock spots in the lots but are driven only on weekends.

    William and Mary Kampf and Herbert Keith III and Pamela Anderson, all of East Hampton, have announced the engagement of their daughters, Kelly Kampf and Melanie Anderson.

    Ms. Anderson graduated from East Hampton High School and received her bachelor’s degree in security management from Coastal Carolina University in South Carolina. She is employed as a deputy sheriff with the Fairfax County Sheriff’s Office in Virginia.

    Ms. Kampf also graduated from East Hampton High School and received her bachelor’s degree in sociology from Bloomsburg University in Pennsylvania. She is a private first class police officer with the County of Fairfax.

    A fall wedding in East Hampton is planned.

    Navy Seaman Recruit Cheryl D. Scarlato, a daughter of Diana A. Scarlato of this village, recently completed eight weeks of Navy basic training at Recruit Training Command in Great Lakes, Ill. Ms. Scarlato is a 1999 graduate of Pierson High School and a 2004 graduate of the University of Delaware.

    Her training included physical fitness, classroom study, and practical instruction on naval customs, first aid, firefighting, water safety and survival, and shipboard and aircraft safety.

    Ms. Scarlato also completed Battle Stations, an exercise designed to boost required skills and confidence and to learn sacrifice, dedication, teamwork, and endurance as well as the core values of honor, courage and commitment required to be a sailor.    

    The Montauk Playhouse Community Center will have a generator by summer. The Village of East Hampton is to donate a used one that will be delivered within the month, Bruce Bates, the director of East Hampton Town’s emergency preparedness program, told the Montauk Citizens Advisory Committee on Monday.

    The playhouse is one of three shelters in the hamlet, along with the Montauk School and the Montauk Downs clubhouse. Even though the latter have generators they were not open as evacuation centers during Sandy because the American Red Cross was unable to staff them.

    It was estimated that a new generator would cost upward of $300,000, while the one donated by the village will require only several installation components, Mr. Bates said. The town will be responsible for future maintenance.

    Mr. Bates had been invited to the meeting to go over the town’s emergency services, with residents concerned since Hurricane Sandy proved how vulnerable the hamlet can be. Residents have noted that if the ocean breached Route 27 and flooded the area, access to Amagansett and East Hampton would be cut off.

    Montauk Fire Department Chief Richard Schoen was also at the meeting. He said the department has formed a committee to come up with a system for emergencies and to equip the three evacuation centers. “We missed Sandy by 80 miles,” he said. (The Montauk Firehouse is an evacuation center for department volunteers and their families.)

    Mr. Schoen said the committee had identified areas that would be vulnerable if waters were to seep through the hamlet. Maps are now at the firehouse that show 700 houses in danger zones. “That’s unacceptable,” he said.

    Although the department had lobbied for a generator, it had not collected funds for it, he said. Part of the committee’s plan is to unlock a Red Cross trailer that has been parked for three years in a lot in front of the Playhouse. It apparently contains blankets, cots, towels, and pots and pans, Mr. Schoen said. He noted that the hamlet’s population in summer increases from about 3,500 to 25,000 to 30,000, most of whom would be given early warning and the chance to leave. “If we can get rid of some 20,000 of them that would be good,” he said. He estimated that about 500 people in Montauk might seek shelter in certain situations.

    The committee and the town’s Human Resource Department had sent out a questionnaire to identify those that might be bedridden or have medical needs during emergencies. Those that register would be contacted within 48 hours of a storm’s approaching, Mr. Schoen said. Volunteers have already been visiting aging or medically dependent residents so there will be no confusion in a storm. “We will not be caught flat footed again,” he said.

    “Personally I feel it’s the town’s responsibility. They have the tax power and the manpower. But if we become an island, the town can’t help us,” he said.

    Mr. Bates agreed that advance notice is key. Evacuations are called by Suffolk County’s fire and emergency services. Volunteers are needed to take Red Cross training classes, he said, and he had not seen anyone from Montauk at a recent class held in East Hampton.

    Those interested will have an opportunity to take the class on April 13 at the Montauk firehouse from 9 a.m. to noon, with registration starting at 8:30 a.m. Another certification class will be conducted by the Red Cross at a later date for evacuation center managers. Moreover, by federal law an evacuation center is not allowed to open without medical staff, law enforcement, and a mental health professional on site.

    Another problem faced by emergency service workers is that in many cases people don’t want to leave their homes or pets. Mr. Bates said the best information can be obtained on the town’s Web site. He also offered other Web site information sources, including a Suffolk County storm surge mapping tool that allows residents to punch in their addresses and receive specific information, including vulnerability to flooding. The address is suffolkcountyny.gov/departments/firerescueandemergencyservices/stormsurgezonesshelterlocatormap.aspz.

    For kids this weekend, the Easter basket runneth over, with holiday fun and egg hunts aplenty tomorrow, Saturday, and Sunday.

    The Easter Bunny will make a stop at Agawam Park in Southampton tomorrow at 10 a.m. for the Police Benevolent Association’s hunt. In case of rain, kids will assemble at the park on Saturday at the same time.

    Things really get hopping on Saturday. At 10 a.m. there are dueling Easter egg hunts, with the East Hampton Town Democratic Committee hosting one at Herrick Park on Newtown Lane and another at the Maidstone Gun Club in Wainscott.

    The Bridgehampton Presbyterian Church will hold an egg hunt at 11 a.m. sharp, rain or shine. Coffee, juice, and snacks will be served. Donations of candy or toy-filled eggs in advance of the event will be welcomed and can be dropped off at the church office.

    An ambitious egg sleuth could then head over to Amagansett Square, where from noon to 2 p.m. there will be face painting, egg decorating, bunny games, and an egg hunt. The Youth Park, nearby on Abraham’s Path, is another option. An egg hunt goes down at noon. Parents of kids who plan to take part have been asked to drop off a dozen plastic eggs and a bag of individually wrapped, non-peanut candy in advance.

    Or, in Sag Harbor at the same time, the Sag Harbor Garden Center will host a free petting zoo with animals from Cornell Cooperative Extension’s Suffolk County Farm. The village’s annual Easter Bonnet Parade, sponsored by the chamber of commerce, takes off from near the Laundromat on Main Street at 1 p.m. Participants have been encouraged to wear an inventive Easter topper of their own creation. There will be prizes for the best hats, courtesy of the Sag Harbor Variety Store.

    Easter Sunday brings the Sag Harbor Lions Club’s egg hunt at Mashashimuet Park. Festivities begin at 12:30 p.m., and the hunt will be at 1. The club scatters thousands of eggs in the park, all filled with candy and prizes, and there are pony rides until 2 p.m.

    Also starting at 1 p.m. Sunday is the Southampton Trails Preservation Society’s egg hunt for kids 8 and under. It will be held at Poxabogue Park, south of the railroad trestle on Old Farm Road in Sagaponack.

    In recent weeks the buzz around Montauk is that Gurney’s Inn has been sold. Ingrid Lemme, the inn’s marketing director and spokeswoman, denied this in a press release issued on March 25.

    “Gurney’s Inn has not been sold. Currently conversations are taking place between Gurney’s timeshare owners and a potential investor. At this point we are not at liberty to discuss those conversations. It is business as usual at Gurney’s. The hotel, seawater spa, and restaurant are waiting to welcome you,” the release said.

    Nick Montemarano (who preferred to use a shorter version of the family name) purchased the then-20-unit oceanfront hotel on 11 acres for $200,000 in 1956.

    Over time, the inn has expanded to include 15 buildings, 109 rooms (half of which were later turned into timeshare units when the inn fell on hard times financially), a seawater spa, conference rooms, a restaurant, and a bakery.

    When asked to confirm what the release said, Paul Monte, the chief executive of Gurney’s and nephew of Nick Monte, said, “There is no new owner of Gurney’s. It is not on the market.”

    Asked if there would be more news at the end of this week, Mr. Monte said, “I can’t say.”

    Applications are being accepted through the end of this month to get on the waiting list for the affordable apartments at St. Michael’s in Amagansett, which are earmarked for senior citizens.

Those eligible must be age 62 or older, with an annual income below $37,500. Those with additional assets are eligible.

    At present there are no available units in the complex, which opened several months ago.

Applications may be obtained from Tom Ruhle, East Hampton Town’s director of housing and community development, at the department’s offices on Bluff Road in Amagansett. They must submitted to a mailing address listed on the form and be postmarked by April 30.