The June weather report from Richard G. Hendrickson, the United States Cooperative weather observer in Bridgehampton, arrived this week — a little late but nevertheless still of interest to other South Fork weather watchers.

    With such hot days this month, people may have forgotten that June was on the cool side. Although the temperature reached 94 on June 9 and 10, the high for the rest of the month was a more reasonable 85 on June 12. “There were two cool, cool daytime readings, on the 14th when it rose no higher than 66 degrees and on the 25th when it was only 67 degrees,” Mr. Hendrickson wrote. “Why these cooler temperatures have prevailed to the month’s end I do not know.”

    June nights were mild, and in two cases downright chilly. Mr. Hendrickson recorded 45 degrees on the night of June 4 and 46 degrees the night of June 5. “Mild nighttime temperatures continued throughout the month,” he said. “Over the years in the month of June there is often frost, but not this June.”

    There was measurable rainfall on eight days, with the heaviest, 1.69 inches, on June 23. “June is often the month when there has been little rainfall and early crops have often suffered. Some of those with cash crops have put in irrigation. Often over the long term it pays. And the opposite is true when we have had ample or many extra rains, with muddy soils and some washouts, making for delayed maturity in crops. Such is one of many, many hazards or perils that affect the farmer, whether he be in crop or livestock farming,” wrote Mr. Hendrickson, a retired farmer who has been watching the weather for more than seven decades.

    The heaviest rain in two days came on June 22 and 23, when a total of 2 inches fell. The total rainfall for the month was 5.78 inches, about 2 inches more than the long-term average for June.

    Mr. Hendrickson reported 5 clear days, 7 partly cloudy days, and 18 cloudy days. Winds were mainly from the southwest, as is typical in the summer.

    He recorded thunder and lightning on June 1, 9, and 17.

    He warned people: “Use extreme care when sudden thunderstorms visit our area, on the golf course, in your boat, in the hayfield, or when clamming.” Mr. Hendrickson recalled a lightning bolt that “hit a barbed wire fence and killed chickens nesting in the tall grass under the fence. I have seen the hissing St. Elmo’s ball of fire going from a telephone pole to a lightning rod on the farm home. Scared the living hell out of me, and it would you too.”   

    David Paton, the author of “Second Sight: Views from an Eye Doctor’s Odyssey,” will speak at the East Hampton Library on Saturday in an author’s talk to begin at 1 p.m.

    Dr. Paton, the head of the ophthalmology department at Baylor College of Medicine in Texas, was a driving force in the early 1970s behind the formation of ORBIS, a nonprofit whose flying eye hospital staff teaches modern techniques around the world and offers treatments in Africa, Bangladesh, China, India, Latin America, the Caribbean, and Vietnam. His friendship with Betsy Trippe DeVecchi led her to secure help from her father, Juan Trippe, the founder of Pan American World Airways, who had a house at Georgica Beach and who helped make the idea a reality.

    Dr. Paton is a member of the East Hampton Heathcare Foundation.      

    Seating is limited, so the organizers have asked that those planning to be there reserve with the reference desk staff in advance.

    More about Dr. Paton and the group he founded can be seen on the Orbis Web site: orbis.org.

    The East Hampton Village Planning Board, at a meeting last Thursday, asked its planning consultant to draw up an alternate plan for clustering houses on property at the corner of Newtown and Race Lanes.

    The 5.68-acre property, known as the Martha Greene estate, is north of the Osborne Lane traffic light, and backs up on the railroad tracks. It contains an old two-story residence and two other buildings, which would be razed.

    Vincent Chiavarone Builders and J. Mart Realty had applied to subdivide the land into six house lots, with 25 percent reserved in a conservation easement at the back of the property. The lots would vary in size, averaging about 30,000 square feet each, in a one-acre zone.

    The board had previously asked the applicants to consider smaller houses and to come up with a plan that would preserve 50 percent of the land. On Thursday, however, the board agreed with the applicant that setting aside 50 percent would not be in keeping with the character of the area. Board members also learned, in a letter from the applicants’ attorney, Thomas J. Osborne of Osborne and McGowan, that the applicants did not feel smaller houses were appropriate.

    After Mary Ella Moeller, a Newtown Lane resident, spoke up in favor of smaller houses or five houses instead of six, Gene Cross, the planning consultant, suggested that “it may be more important to limit the width of the house, rather than the size of the house.” That way, “you retain the character of the houses across the street,” he said.

    Linda Riley, the village attorney, pointed out that the village code allows “the board to permit larger houses in exchange for the open space” in clustered housing developments.

    Mr. Cross also suggested the possibility of mandating an amount of open space somewhere between 25 and 50 percent. The board asked him to come up with such a plan before the next meeting on Aug. 11, adding that it should call for narrower, but longer, houses.

    A motion by the Town of East Hampton to throw out a case filed against it by the Ellis family over establishing further access to Lake Montauk was dismissed by New York State Supreme Court Justice W. Gerard Asher on June 28.

    Harry Ellis sued after the town attempted to clear a parcel just south of his house on East Lake Drive in Montauk and open it to the public. “I didn’t want to file a suit against the town that would cost the taxpayers money, but the gun was put to my head,” he said.

    The justice’s decision states that the town did not offer enough evidence to contradict Mr. Ellis’s claim. It said the case could proceed, as there remains a reasonable doubt as to the ownership of the land in question.

    Last year a group of citizens who believe Lake Montauk does not have enough public access studied old files and maps and identified the parcel as being town-owned. But Mr. Ellis disputes that, saying members of his family have used it as part of a driveway since 1975, when they bought the house, which sits just south of a nature preserve on East Lake Drive. He claims that a 50-foot right of way was issued to Robert Bullock in 1930, when he owned the property.

    Over the winter Mr. Ellis spent much of his time in the county clerk’s office in Riverhead researching waterfront land titles in Montauk. “I consider myself a historian by now,” he said. He presented most of his findings to the justice in the case, which names the Town of East Hampton, Supervisor Bill Wilkinson, Larry Penny, who is the town’s natural resources director, and the Department of Natural Resources as defendants.

    When people started using the nature preserve as a beach and driving four-wheel drive vehicles down to the shore, the town tried to identify other parcels that could be opened to the public, including the heavily overgrown one next to the Ellis family residence.

    Some claimed that Mr. Ellis was preventing them from walking on the beach in front of his house or from using the overgrown land as a path to the beach, which he denies. “Just because I live next door to the property doesn’t mean I’m encumbered by its maintenance,” he said.

    Mr. Ellis hired an attorney, Jim Henry of Sag Harbor, who filed the suit. He did not return calls for comment. Mr. Ellis said he quite honestly doesn’t know who owns the property. “That’s now in the court’s hands.”

    Carl Irace, an East Hampton Town attorney, said he wouldn’t comment on pending litigation, but said, “It was only a preliminary motion that was dismissed.” He said the town has a lot more work to do to get the paperwork together for the next step. “Now we move on to discovery and collecting information,” he said.

    The Great Bonac Fireworks will light up the sky over Three Mile Harbor on Saturday night, getting under way at 9:15 p.m. The extravaganza can be seen from beaches and other locations ringing the harbor, and will of course be viewed by hundreds on boats moored right in the harbor, under the firework lights.

Fireworks by Grucci will present the show, which has been a midsummer tradition, on or about Bastille Day, since it was inaugurated by George Plimpton in the early 1970s, continuing for decades as a fund-raiser for the former Boys and Girls Harbor camp.

Two years ago, the Clamshell Foundation, a local nonprofit, took up the fuse, so to speak. The group is hoping not only to cover the approximately $50,000 cost of the show, but to raise enough to make donations to other community groups.

Donations can be sent to the foundation at P.O. Box 2725, East Hampton 11937, or made online at www.clamshellfoundation.org.

­    The Home, Sweet Home Museum is showing lithographs and watercolors by Gustav H. Buek, who owned the James Lane house from 1907 to 1927. Etchings by Frederick Childe Hassam and Charles H. Miller are on view as well, through Sept. 30.

    The hours are Monday through Saturday, 10 a.m. to 4 p.m., and Sunday from 2 to 4 p.m.

   The East Hampton Board of Education heard Tuesday from a promoter of a two-day August rock festival hoping to use school district property for parking.

    Chris Jones, an organizer of the two-day MTK music festival, which will be held at the East Hampton Airport on Aug. 13 and 14, asked board about using the high school’s parking lot for overflow traffic, providing security and shuttles to and from the event on his own dime. He also offered to write a donation check to the school district for $10,000 regardless of whether the Long Lane, East Hampton, lot was used or not, and an additional $5,000 if the lot was full.

   There were some questions and misunderstanding about this, which led finally to George Aman, a member of the board, making a motion to enter into a two-day contract for $15,000. Mr. Jones agreed.

   “Are you all coming?” he asked the board.

   “Can we park for free?” answered Dr. Aman, with a smile.

    Looking up East Hampton Village property records, especially those that pertained to permits, design review, zoning, planning, and building inspection, may have been a lengthy, costly paper chore — until recently. But now, “with a few keystrokes,” Larry Cantwell, the village administrator, said, the data on a particular property can show up in one neat, tidy place: the village’s computer system.

    “Space becoming constricted” was one reason Mr. Cantwell cited for the three-year project, which converted over 200,000 pages of documents from paper to electronic records, thanks to Linda Beyer and Pam Bennett, village employees.

    “It will save enormous hours of staff time,” Mr. Cantwell said, adding that it would make it easier to get property information to those who request it, which includes, but is not limited to, “property owners, title companies, contractors, lawyers, buyers, and real estate agents.”

Three years ago, East Hampton Village received a $10,000 grant to get the changeover started. This included buying software. All in all, the village has used $50,000 in state records management money, and about an equal amount in village funds.

    The records go back to 1952, when the first building permits were issued after zoning was adopted. With a tax map number, it is now possible to get a full mélange of data, either from Village Hall employees or from a computer in the lobby set up for public use. Information can even be e-mailed.

    Another reason for the change, Mr. Cantwell said, was “recognizing how important records of property are. Property values are high,” he said.

    Urban areas have used electronic devices for years, and smaller communities throughout the state are just starting to catch up. East Hampton received help, on a different front, from the New York State Archives. This came first in training and education on records management, which has changed drastically in the past 15 years because of computerization.

    “Hopefully,” Mr. Cantwell said in a letter to the village board, “we will save a few trees into the future and reduce the need for storage space.”

    All the records “are now in digital format,” the letter states. “And we have eliminated huge volumes of paper records.”

    The village is “caught up” on its property paperwork, and now it’s just a question of routine. “Every time we’re dealing with an application now, we scan it,” Mr. Cantwell said.

    “Here endeth the lesson,” said Joan Denny, acting chairwoman of the East Hampton Village Zoning Board of Appeals, using the traditional liturgical wrap-up after the board read aloud its draft approval of the East Hampton Library’s proposed expansion.

    The Friday morning meeting lasted all of seven minutes,  and the determination was unanimously approved, since the State Supreme Court had ordered the board this spring to provide the library with the two variances and a special permit it needs. The plans still need final approval from the village’s design review board before construction can begin.

    In that Supreme Court decision, the court allowed the village to impose some “reasonable conditions” in its approval. As adopted, the plans have changed very little since they were last discussed during public hearings in 2010, before the board denied the library’s application.

    The board approved a parking plan that includes an additional 16 parking spaces on the library property, for a total of 42. It also limited the seating in a lecture room to 60, with the understanding that the library would need to come before the board again should there be any further changes in seating capacity.

    The library has another meeting room, the Bendheim room, with a capacity of 25. It was not part of the expansion proposal.

    The library’s director, Dennis Fab­iszak, said yesterday that the site plan was being looked at a final time, and that he expects the plans to be in front of the design review board soon

    The team representing Nick Capstick-Dale at the East Hampton Village Zoning Board of Appeals meeting on Friday may have been expecting a decision on his plans for his Egypt Lane property, but instead, Andrew Goldstein, the board’s chairman, expressed concerns about the manner of construction to be used at the property.

    Mr. Capstick-Dale is tearing down most of a nonconforming house, save for a garage area, and is also replacing three cesspools that are very close to groundwater with an improved septic system farther from the wetlands.

    It was expected from the previous zoning board meeting that the necessary freshwater wetlands permit would be issued without much ado; however, noise nuisances are now the greater worry.

    Although the proposed construction will bring the house into closer compliance with existing wetlands codes, Mr. Goldstein remarked on Mr. Capstick-Dale’s intention to put the house on pilings. “The noise engendered by that kind of construction is far greater than regular construction,” he said.

    But Joseph Fischetti, an engineer from Southold, said the pilings were a necessity. “The house is the lowest on the block,” he said. “The clay layer extends three feet below the water table. You can’t build on clay,” he said. “We have to either de-water — which we can’t do because of the wetlands — or we can put pilings down into the good soil.” The pilings are approximately 8 to 10 inches in diameter, contain no creosote, and are treated “with what’s approved by the state,” said Mr. Fischetti.

    Johanna Caleca, Mr. Capstick-Dale’s attorney, said that her client and his family had rented a house across the street from his property this summer, “so he won’t be wanting to do anything that might disturb him.”

    But Joseph Aversano and Robert Caruso, neighbors, were anxious about the sounds of construction disturbing their tenant, a summer visitor who has rented their property from July through September.

    Although Ms. Caleca said that “an accommodation” had been made to the neighbors should the tenants change the structure of the lease due to the noise, to Mr. Aversano and Mr. Caruso, the accommodation — only about a week’s worth of their three-month rental income — wasn’t enough.

    “We’re happy to continue a good relationship with this neighbor,” said Mr. Aversano, “but we didn’t realize we were talking about a July construction.” He said that even the village itself tries to perform any necessary construction in the off-season.

    “It doesn’t seem fair,” added Mr. Caruso.

    “Mr. Aversano should be very happy that we are bringing the septic system up to code,” said Mr. Fischetti.

    Mr. Goldstein pointed out that driving the pilings would be probably a five-day job. The neighbors balked at the rest of the construction process being done during the summer.

    “There are certain things they’re going to do that we can’t protect you from,” said Mr. Goldstein. “But we could require that the demolition and the pilings be done before July 1.”

    The Building Department agreed that it would be willing to expedite the necessary permits so the work could be done quickly.

    It was decided that the zoning board would issue a formal determination approving the plans as soon as possible.