Melvin Smith, 50, an East Hampton man with a long criminal record, was indicted Monday on multiple felonies related to the sale of oxycodone, following a March 9 dawn raid on a Morris Park Lane house. According to East Hampton Town police, Mr. Smith was caught selling the prescription opioid on three separate occasions, starting last August and ending early this month.

The raid was a cooperative operation between the East End Drug Task Force and the East Hampton Town Police Department. Officers from the Sag Harbor and East Hampton Village departments, who joined town police in executing a search warrant, also allegedly turned up a small amount of cocaine and a shotgun, though the grand jury indictment did not mention the weapons charge.

Mr. Smith was initially arraigned in East Hampton Town Justice Court. Justice Steven Tekulsky sent him to county jail, explaining that state law precludes local justices from setting bail for defendants with two or more felony convictions. Mr. Smith has over five, including convictions for rape and sodomy when he was 18. His most recent was in 2012, for failing to register in East Hampton as a sex offender. 

He is being held in the county jail in Riverside. The indictment will be unsealed in the courtroom of New York State Justice Richard Ambro in Riverside next Thursday. If convicted on the current charges, he could be sentenced as a persistent felony offender to 15 to 25 years in state prison.

When Dai Dayton and Sandra Ferguson sit down to lunch, they talk not in years but in decades.

Nearly two decades ago, the Friends of the Long Pond Greenbelt began with a simple knock on the door.

Then as now, Ms. Dayton was a committed conservationist, busy gathering signatures along the Bridgehampton-Sag Harbor Turnpike to prevent Vineyard Field behind what is now the South Fork Natural History Museum, and the nearby woods from becoming a 70-acre luxury condominium development and nine-hole golf course. 

When Ms. Ferguson answered her front door, she recognized a familiar face. Ms. Dayton had graduated from East Hampton High School with Ms. Ferguson’s stepson. Both women had since moved to the Bridgehampton-Sag Harbor Turnpike and now lived within half a mile of each other.

For decades, the Town of South­ampton had eyed the low-lying, flood-prone Long Pond Greenbelt for preservation. Ms. Dayton convinced Ms. Ferguson that it was an opportune time to act, and they quickly worked in tandem to circulate petitions and galvanize public support.

The Friends of the Long Pond Greenbelt, which now includes 325 members, oversees 1,100 acres between Sag Harbor and Sagaponack — 800 acres of which are preserved by either the Nature Conservancy, Southampton Town, or Suffolk County. With fluid boundaries, its founders are hopeful that more parcels will continue to be preserved, thereby expanding the Long Pond Greenbelt’s footprint and ecological impact. 

“Dai is a bit of a dynamo. She has a real drive for preservation and I have to say, I responded to that,” said Ms. Ferguson, over a recent lunch of homemade whole-wheat pizza and a mixed green salad with balsamic vinaigrette. Since January, both women have assiduously followed a diet sponsored by the Wellness Foundation in East Hampton. It forbids dairy, meat, and oil.

“It’s the first time I’ve done it,” said Ms. Ferguson, adding that it helped stop her sugar cravings. Her backyard has a pathway that leads directly into the 41-acre Vineyard Field.

“Because I don’t stick to it, it’s my third time,” added Ms. Dayton, whose property overlooks Black Pond, one of the Long Pond Greenbelt’s 13 coastal plain ponds.

“The initial purchase was quite fast,” said Ms. Dayton.

“It was inspiring and seemed like a big, early victory,” added Ms. Ferguson. The two, who alternate serving as president and vice president, often finish each other’s sentences.

Very quickly, their volunteer roles shifted to one of preservation and stewardship — overseeing an expanse of coastal plain ponds, freshwater swamps, wetlands, and woodlands that stretches from Ligonee Creek in Sag Harbor to Sagg Pond in Sagaponack.

“And we’re not finished,” said Ms. Dayton, who remains hopeful that several parcels will be added to the current acquisition list, helping connect more plant and animal life. She estimates that she spends nearly 20 hours each week devoted to some aspect of the Long Pond Greenbelt, with Ms. Ferguson, now retired, logging another dozen hours. Otherwise, Ms. Dayton keeps busy as an estate manager. Jean, her daughter, serves as the nonprofit’s secretary and Jackson, her son, guides hikes. A lifelong horseback rider, Ms. Dayton is also one of the founders of the Southampton Trails Preservation Society.

Last month, the Friends of the Long Pond Greenbelt wrote a letter to the Village of Sag Harbor asking that a property owned by Barry and Carol Magdioff, which is now before the planning board for subdivision, be added to the list of properties to be preserved by Southampton Town’s community preservation fund.

“The Magdioff property, three-quarters of which is wooded,” wrote Ms. Dayton, “bridges two established park areas at the gateway to Sag Harbor: Mashashimuet Park and the Nancy Boyd Willey Park. The parcel also shares a border with the main entrance trail to the Long Pond Greenbelt.”

Last week, the Sag Harbor Village Board voted to send Southampton Town the letter requesting that the property be added to the community preservation fund list. “It’s a slow but steady process,” said Ms. Dayton, who remains optimistic. “It only works if you have a willing seller.”

  About a decade ago, the organization applied for a grasslands restoration grant for Vineyard Field, to help restore native plant life and remove thorny autumn olives that had since taken up residence, killing off native plant life. Now, the field has come back to life, with wildflowers, milkweed, goldenrod, bluebirds, hawks, and purple marlins calling it home. At Monday night’s meeting, the nine-person greenbelt board voted to bring six goats from Goodale Farms in Riverhead to the property. They will spend the summer munching on invasive plant species. Several quail releases are also planned.

Next month, the Friends of the Long Pond Greenbelt will honor the late Richard Hendrickson — who recorded twice-daily weather conditions from his Bridgehampton farm for over 80 years — by installing an automatic weather station at the Long Pond Greenbelt Nature Center.

Larry and Julie Penny, two early supporters and members of the organization, recently made a donation in Mr. Hendrickson’s memory, which will provide a 24-hour feed of local data. According to Tim Morrin, who heads the National Weather Service’s Cooperative Observer Program in Upton, the East End of Long Island is a data-scarce region, and the new weather station will perform a valuable service.

And later today, the organization will unveil its first Story Walk — a one-mile family-oriented hike that starts near the bleachers at Mashashimuet Park. Laminated pages from “Box Turtle at Long Pond” will be mounted on various posts throughout the one-mile circuit, encouraging young hikers to read as they walk the path. The organization plans to swap out stories seasonally.

No matter the weather, Ms. Dayton and Ms. Ferguson can be found leading hikes every weekend, with full-moon hikes offered each month.

Despite continuous outreach, both founders are baffled when newcomers are still unaware of the Long Pond Greenbelt’s existence. “It’s very surprising when you lead a hike and people say they never knew this was here,” said Ms. Dayton. “We’re trying to get the word out. The more people who enjoy it, the more it will be protected and expanded.”

Whatever you do, don’t call it a bowling alley, said Howard Ellman, architect of what he called the “family entertainment center” planned for East Hampton Indoor Tennis on Daniels Hole Road.

Mr. Ellman and the facility’s owner, Scott Rubenstein, spoke earlier this week about the project with the East Hampton Town Planning Board. The board is ready to approve it once they receive comments from the Suffolk County Planning Commission.

In addition to 10 lanes for bowling, there will be an 18-hole miniature golf course designed by Harris Miniature Golf, Mr. Rubenstein said yesterday.

The plans also call for a 200-seat sports bar, three pool tables, three indoor bocce courts, and a game room. “We will also have a golf simulator with 70 different golf courses you can play on,” he said.

The key to the plan, Mr. Rubenstein said, was bringing something to East Hampton that the whole community could use. Diana Weir, a planning board member, complimented Mr. Rubenstein during the board’s March 9 meeting for reaching out to community groups.

“It is a big project,” said Reed Jones, the board’s chairman, expressing surprise that no one from the public had addressed the board during a Feb. 24 hearing on the plan. Mr. Rubenstein said he had been guided by the town’s Planning Department and the planning board, making for a smoother process.

A new septic system will be designed to handle 150 percent of the flow required under formulas in place in both the town and county. In reality, Mr. Rubenstein said, much of the facility will be used seasonally, while the formulas are based on year-round use of the entire grounds.

Mr. Rubenstein is ready to break ground as soon as the project is approved by the Suffolk County Health Department and the town, but will not work on it in the busy summer months. The best-case scenario, he said, is to have the facility up and running in the spring of 2017. Barring that, he would aim for a September 2017 debut.

A contest is being held to name the facility, with the winner to receive a year of free bowling and golf, along with a dinner for four at the new restaurant.

The South Fork has been without a bowling alley since June of 2013, when East Hampton Bowl closed after a 36-year run. The move also left local leagues and the high school bowling team without a home alley. In the case of the high school team, that may not change with construction of the new facility.

Rather than a traditional pin setup, Mr. Rubenstein is considering a string pinsetter. As the name implies, pins are attached to strings and are reset using a different system than the ones found in regulation lanes. Such systems are supposed to come with lower maintenance and power costs and to reduce the need for an onsite technician. The downside is that those alleys are not sanctioned by the United States Bowling Congress. The East Hampton High School bowling team, for example, could practice on those lanes, but would not be able to play sanctioned tournaments on them.

The ocean dune near the Georgica Association’s bathhouse in Wainscott is gone, the East Hampton Town Trustees were told on Monday, and immediate action must be taken to save it.

The northeasters of Jan. 23 and Feb. 9 “really ripped the dune apart” at the 100-acre private enclave west of Georgica Pond, Billy Mack of First Coastal, a Westhampton Beach marine construction and environmental consulting firm, said Tuesday. He had told the trustees the night before that the storms had exposed the bathhouse’s septic system, along with drainage systems in its parking lot.

Mr. Mack sought permission from the trustees to transport 3,000 cubic yards of sand, dredged from Sagaponack Pond, down the beach to rebuild the dune, with the option to add up to 2,000 additional cubic yards. The required machinery would access the beach via Beach Lane in Wainscott. The project, he said, was particularly time-sensitive due to the approaching piping plover nesting season and the Easter holiday.

      “We literally have to start this week,” Mr. Mack said of what he called an interim project. “We will need to bring in more as the beach recovers.” First Coastal restored the dune following Hurricane Sandy, he said, and a 10-year maintenance permit from the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation remains in place.

Jim Grimes, a trustee, said that while ocean water was rushing under the bathhouse after the storms, the structure itself, which Mr. Mack said was raised on pilings several years ago, “is not really in jeopardy at this point.” Mr. Grimes and Rick Drew, his colleague on the board, recently visited the site and “we both came to the conclusion that, maybe on an emergency basis, this needs to be addressed. But on a long-term basis, this bathhouse, the association may need to . . . I’m not going to say retreat, but I think some alternatives need to be explored,” referring to the septic system.

The septic system was shifted as far landward as possible when the bathhouse was raised, Mr. Mack replied. Mr. Grimes then suggested the association might obtain an easement from the adjacent property owner. “It’s a private owner,” Mr. Mack said, “but I am certainly willing to bring it up.”

“I feel we should give [a permit] to them right now,” Mr. Grimes told his fellow trustees, “but this is one of those things where I wouldn’t feel comfortable about issuing subsequent permits. We need to see a long-range plan.”

“If we rule in favor,” said Brian Byrnes, “you should tell the association we want to stop the bleeding, but this is not necessarily what we’re going to be in favor of in the future.”

A long-term plan is under discussion by the association, Mr. Mack said. “This is the first time they’ve been hit this badly. . . . This property is much more vulnerable now.”

Over the objection of Diane McNally, the trustees voted to permit the dune restoration. “It’s a safety hazard, ultimately it could be a health hazard,” Mr. Grimes said. “To leave it that way would be negligent on our part.” But he reiterated that “in the future, I would like to see the association come up with a long-term ability to address the septic system.”

Also at the meeting, the trustees neared agreement with representatives of the Sag Harbor Village Board’s waterways advisory committee on language to be included in a bill that would grant the village authority over waterways beyond the present 1,500-foot boundary.

Moorings and anchored vessels in the area outside the breakwater, which can number as many as 70 in the summer and are now unregulated, have caused havoc, with some boats sinking and washing up on the breakwater or on Havens Beach. Consequently, John Parker of the waterways advisory committee told the trustees in January, debris, fuel, or other contaminants enter the water, while many of the vessels outside the harbormaster’s jurisdiction are improperly discharging sewage.

The bill, introduced by State Assemblyman Fred W. Thiele Jr., who is also the Sag Harbor Village attorney, passed the state senate but has not been voted on in the assembly. Any modifications to it must be made by the end of this month for submission at the beginning of April, Mr. Parker said at Monday’s meeting.

He and John Shaka, chairman of the village’s harbor committee, told the trustees that a committee including two trustees and Richard Whalen, the trustees’ attorney, had agreed in principle on wording that would maintain the trustees’ ownership of, and input on, management of the area following the granting of jurisdiction to the village. The Sag Harbor Village Board approved a draft of the agreement on Feb. 8. “That’s the first step,” Mr. Parker said. “Then we have further time to have input — discussions about the actual rules for managing the area.”

Mr. Whalen told the trustees he had modified some wording, and read two passages aloud, including one stating that “This act shall not impair any rights the Trustees of the Freeholders and Commonalty of the Town of East Hampton may possess, whether of ownership or management, concerning the bottomlands within the area.”

The trustees seemed likely to approve the language at their next meeting, on March 28. “You’re so close,” Francis Bock, the group’s presiding officer, told the committee’s members. “I’m confident you can get it done.”

Also on Monday, the trustees agreed to renew their contract with Christopher Gobler of Stony Brook University, who has been monitoring trustee-managed waterways in recent years. Dr. Gobler is expected to present a report of his 2015 water-quality tests to the trustees and other town officials in coming weeks.

With a new law in place requiring rental properties to be registered with East Hampton Town, a new business, Rental Registry Expediters, has been established to relieve homeowners of that task.

Kyle Herman, an Amagansett resident and Rutgers University political science instructor whose family members work in both construction and real estate, has launched a website, homexregistry.com, where property owners  can start the registration process with a few clicks.

The business will have a professional home inspector verify and notarize the registration forms, assuring that properties meet the letter of the law, sign off on compliance with numerous codes (such as those requiring pool gates, alarms, and smoke and carbon monoxide detectors), and file the paperwork with the town.

The company, according to its website, provides “a turnkey solution to a painstaking and time-consuming pro­cess,” streamlining registration for “home­owners, real estate agents, and rental companies.” Turnaround, it says, is two to three weeks.

The service begins at $200 for properties with a current certificate of occupancy that are already in compliance with building and safety laws. The fee covers paperwork preparation and processing and the inspectors’ verification.

For those “unsure of the information required” for a property or whether it is “rental-ready,” a “premium” package starting at $650 covers a more extended review. An appointment may be made with one of the company’s house inspectors or architects, and if work is needed to get a property up to code, the business, which has partnerships with local home care companies, will arrange to have it done.

“Basically, we’re a liaison to the whole process; we’re in-between,” Mr. Herman said recently. Property owners who do not live here often “can’t be bothered,” he said, with the details of the new law. “It’s been kind of like the Wild West out there,” he said. “Now, it’s going to be a lot more regulated.”

While the registry was implemented earlier this year, the town is giving prospective landlords until May 1 to comply; after that date the requirement will be enforced, and those renting unregistered properties will be subject to fines of from $3,000 to $15,000 per day or, potentially, jail time.

Local real estate brokers were reluctant to discuss the new rental laws this week, saying that it is early days as yet, but at least one brokerage is rumored to be planning to eliminate rentals from its listings after May 1 if they have no registration numbers.

The Building Department, which is overseeing the registry, said 450 rental permits had been issued to date. Beginning in the middle of next month, payment of the registration fee, which is $250 for two years, will be accepted by credit card.

A brochure outlining the new requirements and other applicable laws is being prepared, Councilwoman Kathee Burke-Gonzalez said Tuesday, and will be mailed out to town residents.

The rental registry fee is also apparently becoming a factor for potential tenants. In a recent classified ad, a person seeking an apartment or cottage offered to pay the fee if the landlord

Led by a team of planning consultants, a town-wide project that will bring residents, business owners, and officials together to shape the future of East Hampton’s commercial areas got under way this week.

At a town board meeting on Tuesday morning, the consultants — Harry Dodson and Peter Flinker of Dodson and Flinker; Lisa Liquori of Fine Arts and Sciences, a former director of the town’s Planning Department who led the revision of its comprehensive plan; Russ Archambault of RKG Associates, and Ray DeBias of L.K. McLean Associates — presented an overview of the hamlet and business studies they will oversee. Later that day and yesterday, they presided over initial meetings on the separate hamlets, each of which will be the subject of its own study.

Focused studies of East Hampton’s commercial centers and of its businesses and economy were among the numerous recommendations in the comprehensive plan. Last updated in 2005, the plan lays out goals for the future of the town and ways to achieve them. A number of discrete secondary-planning efforts or studies have since been done or are in various stages of completion, including the creation of a community housing opportunity plan, an affordable housing credit program, and a coastal stratagem.

Eric Schantz, a town planner, said Tuesday night that the hamlet and business studies are intended to further the designs of the comprehensive plan, which include maintaining East Hampton’s rural and semi-rural character, protecting neighborhoods, hamlets, and landscapes from incompatible development, and encouraging local businesses to serve the needs of the year-round population.

The consultants will help officials and community members develop a blueprint to balance the desired preservation of the town’s scenic, agricultural, and historic resources with “the need to grow and accommodate future growth on a reasonable scale, in a way that fits the development with the historic nature of the town,” Mr. Dodson said in his presentation to the town board.

The goal of the business study, said Mr. Archambault, the consultant overseeing that aspect of the effort, is “to determine what the town needs to do to allow businesses to thrive” while also protecting the environment and the character of the community. He plans to create focus groups of business leaders, and to compile data on demographics to determine what drives the local economy — how and where people spend their money.

Meetings were held on Tuesday to elicit community members’ comments about Wainscott, Amagansett, and Montauk. A second Montauk session was held yesterday afternoon, and a session focused on Springs and East Hampton took place last night. Consultants created a list of the key issues named by participants, then invited them, using maps, stickers, and Post-It notes, to point out areas with problems, as well as “special places to be protected, celebrated, and enhanced,” and areas of “opportunity.”

At the session specific to Amagansett and Wainscott, the focus was on two fundamental questions: “Do we want growth?” and “Can growth add as well as detract?”

“Water is our issue here, our economy, tourism,” said Alexander Peters, president of the advocacy group Amagansett-Springs Aquifer Protection. “It’s everything.” He and many others called attention to the excessive nitrogen and phosphorous in the waterways, for which aging septic systems and stormwater and road runoff are blamed. “Without treatment, we’re going nowhere in terms of growth, or we’ll be completely poisoning ourselves,” Mr. Peters said. “Once the word gets out about the reality of what’s here . . . it’s going to really affect our economy.”

He told the consultants that the proposed workforce housing development in Amagansett was another major concern. “This town is about to add to density, in a very dangerous way,” he said, speaking of the 40 units proposed to be built at 531 Montauk Highway.

Some disagreed, saying that the scarcity of affordable housing and seasonal workforce housing was an emergency. “Affordable housing doesn’t have to mean growth,” said Job Potter of Amagansett. “It may mean that some housing units being built end up as affordable units.”

Septic systems were another concern. Residential property owners, and owners of commercial buildings with second-story apartments, must be given incentives to upgrade to systems that remove most of the nitrogen that otherwise reaches the water table, some said. Excess nitrogen promotes harmful algal blooms that have affected marine life and closed waterways.

Continued growth must be carefully implemented, if at all, participants concurred. Traffic and parking, energy sustainability, litter, and preservation of farmland and the South Fork’s historic character were also cited as concerns. Parking, particularly in Amagansett’s commercial district, must be accommodated, some in attendance said, noting that the roads laid out in an era of fewer residents and visitors are now choked with traffic during the summer.

If density is to be kept in check, the town must take a hard look at building codes, said Jim MacMillan, a real estate broker in Amagansett. Builders, he said, “have maximized every single property.” It’s not uncommon, Mr. MacMillan said, “to find a six or eight-bedroom house on a half-acre property. We’re never going to catch up with the amount of lots still waiting to be maxed out. . . . That’s why the roads have been so bad these last years.”

On a map of Wainscott, one resident singled out the Osteria Salina restaurant, pointing out its proximity to Georgica Pond, which has been closed to crabbing for much of the last two summers due to dense blooms of blue-green algae. By the end of the session, the map was dotted with Post-It stickers with notations including “transportation hub,” “road runoff to Georgica Pond,” “need small grocery,” “more pedestrian-friendly,” and “no industrial usage carwash.”

For Amagansett, the suggestions included a transportation hub at the Long Island Rail Road station, apartments above stores in the commercial district, preservation of vistas, and a town purchase of the former Villa Prince restaurant on Montauk Highway east of the I.G.A. In recent years, the building has been seen as the potential site of a 7-Eleven convenience store, which has drawn both support and opposition from residents of the hamlet.

At the Montauk Playhouse on Tuesday night, similar concerns about affordable housing, environmental protection, septic waste, and more were raised.

“We are a year-round fishing community. Anything that takes place needs to take into account the year-round economy of Montauk,” said Bonnie Brady, the executive director of the Long Island Commercial Fishing Association. 

Plans for Montauk’s downtown must take sea level rise into account, said Rameshwar Das, an author of the town’s Local Waterfront Revitalization Plan. “Sea level rise is going to affect how tenable the downtown area is going to be over time.”

Routine flooding, degradation of drinking and surface water, a “huge” septic problem, failing or threatened utility infrastructure, parking problems, and a surge in police and ambulance calls were the concerns cited by Jeremy Samuelson, executive director of the Concerned Citizens of Montauk. “We have a host of issues that aren’t getting better,” he said. “Are we envisioning ourselves on an infinite growth track,” he asked, or should the community call a halt and look to maximize and improve on what exists? “The community and the world are changing around us,” he said. “Will we manage that change or be a victim to that change?”

Speaking to the consultants on Tuesday morning, Supervisor Larry Cantwell underscored the diverse nature of the town’s hamlets. “You’re going to need to adjust your approach for these different hamlets,” he said. “This process has to be about finding a consensus of opinion about how we move forward in these hamlets.” People will have varying visions, Mr. Cantwell said, but the town has “had some success in putting people with different opinions into a room.” That approach helped the board forge its policies regarding East Hampton Airport.

The meetings this week will be followed by longer, more formal sessions stretching over two days and nights, which will also center on individual hamlets. On day one of each session there will be a “walking workshop,” when the consultants will travel through the hamlet centers with residents to see sites firsthand. On the second day, Mr. Flinker said Tuesday, alternatives for solving problems will be presented and their impacts considered. An evening “visioning workshop” will allow the public to ponder all the possibilities.

The sessions will help to determine “where you want to be in 20 years,” Mr. Flinker said. “What is it going to look like, and how it’s going to affect the business environment, the living environment . . . we’re not going to solve all the problems, but we want to identify things that the town can do next year, and the year after that”

The session for East Hampton will be held on June 1 and 2; for Springs, on May 18 and 19; for Wainscott, May 20 and 21, and for Amagansett on June 3 and 4. Locations are to be determined.

Separate sessions addressing the Montauk downtown and dock areas, scheduled for Sept. 14 through 17, may be rescheduled after it was pointed out at Tuesday’s meeting that those dates are a Friday and Saturday, during a still-busy time for Montauk business owners.

Information about the hamlet study can be found on the town’s website, ehamptonny.gov. Comments may be sent to [email protected].

The family of Lilia Esperanza Aucapina, whose body was found in the woods near her Sagaponack house in late November after she was missing for six weeks, met with Southampton Town Supervisor Jay Schneiderman, Southampton Police Chief Robert Pearce, and two lawyers from the town attorney’s office Friday morning to review how and why the police came to the conclusion that Ms. Aucapina’s death was a suicide.

According to Foster Maer, chief litigator from JusticeLatino, a Manhattan civil rights group that has questioned the police determination, the session lasted over two hours, with much of the evidence presented to the family being of a graphic nature. While he was not ready to dispute the police determination that Ms. Aucapina took her own life, he pointed out factors that led him and the family to continue to question the report, which was prepared at the request of Mr. Schneiderman.

He said that the meeting revealed the different efforts the Southampton Town Police made in their investigation of the case. “We have a better understanding of what they learned.” Still, he asked why it took police so long to find the woman. “How could they miss the body? Could it have not been there and somebody staged it?” he asked. Ms. Aucapina was found hanging from a low tree branch only after the leaves had already fallen in the thickly wooded area.

Southampton Town police conducted several searches of the area, with help from police departments across the county in the days and weeks after Ms. Aucapina’s 21-year-old son reported her missing on Oct. 10.

Ms. Aucapina’s estranged husband, Carlos Aucapina, was treated as a person of interest by police after the woman’s disappearance and was arrested twice, by Southampton Town Police as well as East Hampton Town Police, for violating an order of protection Ms. Aucapina had obtained against him in the days before her disappearance. He ended up spending several days in county jail before the $10,000 bail set in Southampton could be posted.

Colin Astarita, his attorney, said recently that the Southampton case was due to be dismissed. However, the East Hampton case, stemming from an incident in the parking lot of the Meeting House Lane Medical Practice on Montauk Highway in Wainscott on the morning of her disappearance, is still open.

Mr. Maer wondered why the Suffolk County Homicide Squad had not become involved in the investigation. “If the homicide detectives had been there, they would have conducted a search that would have found the body,” he said.

The family and his office are going to “carefully review” the documents and photographs they were presented with Friday morning over the next couple of weeks, and then meet again with the Town Supervisor.

He said that the family was prepared to accept a conclusion after it reviews the report. “They are very straightforward. It is hard to believe a close family member might have done something like that.”

Mr. Maer said that Mr. Schneiderman had agreed with him that communication between the police and the family could have been better. There is a gap between the Latino community and the police that needs to be bridged, he said.

Mr. Schneiderman was not immediately available for comment.

College is something students are almost ubiquitously expected to do once they finish high school. So says Claire Kunzeman, who has no intention of going to college.

But that doesn’t mean she isn’t going places.

In fact, she already goes pretty far — namely, to New York City’s Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre. That’s where Claire, a 17-year-old senior at Pierson High School in Sag Harbor, has been taking sketch comedy and improvisation classes at least twice per week for the last year and a half. She is one of the youngest students to have enrolled in the comedy school, having begun studying there at 16, whereas it normally takes students who are at least 18.

“I had to get a permission slip to make sure I wasn’t a runaway child, but they were all so cool with me being there,” Claire said recently.

The theater’s training program was established in 1997 by Amy Poehler, Matt Besser, Ian Roberts, and Matt Walsh, a heavy-hitting, long-form sketch comedy quartet hailing from Chicago. They call themselves the Upright Citizens Brigade. Since then, the Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre has fed the comedy industry a fresh supply of funny people, with directors, casting agents, and producers tapping its talent on a fairly regular basis. Ed Helms (“The Hangover,” “The Office”), Kate McKinnon (“Saturday Night Live”), Rob Corddry (“The Daily Show,” “Hot Tub Time Machine”), and Aziz Ansari (“Parks and Recreation”) all trained or performed with the theater early in their careers.

Claire wants in. She loves shows like “Saturday Night Live” and “Broad City,” and writes down ideas for original sketch scenes all the time. To be accepted into the theater’s training program, she had to submit a few original scenes for evaluation. Claire has completed the first and second levels of improvisation and the first level of sketch writing, and will begin the second level of sketch writing in a few weeks. She said her style has been described as “simple, stupid-funny, and relatable.” She is undecided, however, whether she wants to be a behind-the-scenes comedy writer or a performer on the stage or screen.

“I haven’t figured that out yet,” she said. “I like performing. I always thought I would be a writer but I don’t know now. And I have time to figure it out.”

Jackie Jennings, who teaches at Upright Citizens, said Claire has excellent comedic instincts and has grown a lot since she started. She said it is unusual for the theater to accept a student at such a young age.

“Claire is a great student,” Ms. Jennings said. “I was pretty blown away that she was only 16 when she started taking classes. It’s crazy to be very funny and as talented as people who are trained actors twice her age. Also, to have the initiative to be taking classes is very impressive.”

Claire plans to move to New York City after high school. She hopes to use her experiences baby-sitting, teaching swimming lessons and lifeguarding, and working as a Hayground summer camp counselor to get a job as a nanny, which would allow her to continue studying at the theater. Still, telling people she does not plan to go to college was difficult at first.

“It made me crumble. I was so embarrassed,” Claire said. “I never could see myself in college, but I thought everybody goes because that’s what you do after high school. When it became very clear that I couldn’t see myself in college, it scared me a lot. But when I told people what I was doing, they said, ‘I could see you doing that. That makes sense.’ It did for me, too.”

Tim Ferriss credits his schoolteachers for helping him to love reading and writing, recalling in particular his first-grade teacher at the Springs School. Kathleen Vinski, who explained to him “why the alphabet was important.”

Mr. Ferriss, now the best-selling author of “The 4-Hour Work Week” and other titles, jumped on board a March 10 philanthropic campaign for the crowd-funding website DonorsChoose. org, funding, all by himself, no fewer than 145 school projects across Long Island that teachers had posted over the past four months. In an interview this week, Mr. Ferriss said he felt it was his “karmic duty” to support educational causes, and supporting teachers was key.

“When you put them all together it helped to steer the ship of my life in a positive direction, where it could have easily gone in a different direction,” he said. “I want to try to facilitate that happening for more kids. It’s very easy to go down the wrong path. I had the right teachers at the right time.”

The “flash funding” campaign, dubbed #BestSchoolDay, was started last spring by the TV personality Stephen Colbert, a board member of DonorsChoose.org, who funded all the projects in his home state of South Carolina. This time around, more than 50 celebrities, athletes, and entrepreneurs, including Ashton Kutcher, Elon Musk, Serena Williams, and Bill and Melinda Gates, took part. Mr. Ferriss funded not only all of Long Island’s projects, but all of them in New Hampshire and in Sacramento, Calif., the three places he considers “home.”

Their combined efforts totaled more than $14 million in donations to fund about 12,000 educational projects. Since then, according to Katie Bisbee, DonorsChoose.org’s chief marketing officer, others have stepped up to fund 8,000 more, totaling about $2 million. The projects themselves vary widely in scope, from classroom supplies to field trips to science lab equipment.

Mr. Ferriss encouraged people to follow his lead. “If you want to fix several dozen or several hundred problems at once, including cycles of poverty, investing in teachers and education is where you get the most disproportionate return on investment,” he said. “The heroes are the teachers themselves. What they do with students is truly life and world changing.”

Renewable Energy Long Island, a nonprofit organization that advocates a transition from fossil fuels, will host a forum on wind energy on Saturday from 10 a.m. to noon at the East Hampton Middle School.

The forum is intended to introduce the town’s residents to offshore wind energy, cover topics concerning environmental protection, and answer questions.

Gordian Raacke, Renewable Energy Long Island’s executive director, will be a featured speaker at the forum along with John Sousa-Botos of the town’s Natural Resources Department and Clint Plummer, the vice president of development for Deepwater Wind, a Rhode Island company that has proposed a wind farm approximately 30 miles off Montauk. Mr. Plummer will present the latest information on his company’s proposal, Mr. Raacke said on Monday.

Deepwater Wind’s proposal includes 15 offshore wind turbines and battery energy storage facilities in Montauk and Wainscott. The project, if approved, could generate 90 megawatts of electricity upon completion. The company is at present constructing the country’s first offshore wind farm, a 30-megawatt, five-turbine installation that is expected to supply most of Block Island’s electricity needs.

The project was among the proposals received last year by PSEG Long Island, which manages the Island’s electrical grid on behalf of the Long Island Power Authority. The utility’s request sought an additional 63 megawatts of electricity to be installed between 2017 and 2019 to meet demand on the South Fork that has far outpaced the rest of Long Island, with particularly high usage in the summer and on weekends and holidays.

In December 2014, LIPA rejected a previous proposal by Deepwater Wind, but Mr. Raacke said that he is cautiously optimistic about the company’s latest pitch. “They were debriefed, called in afterward,” he said, “where LIPA folks told them why they did not select the project. Based on that, they redesigned it to meet whatever objections they must have had.”

The proposal was designed to meet the South Fork’s peak energy demand, he said, and not that of the entire Island as in the previous proposal. He called the proposal’s battery-storage element “a clear indication that it was designed to alleviate the problems PSEG is worried about on the South Fork in terms of peak demand.”

PSEG and LIPA are reviewing the proposals, with LIPA scheduled to announce a decision in May. Mr. Raacke said he would attend LIPA’s board of trustees meeting in Uniondale on Monday, “to let the board know what we want.” While Deepwater Wind’s proposal for the South Fork would not be completed before 2022, “It’s not a shot in the dark anymore,” Mr. Raacke said.