An emotional discussion about the value of armoring bayfront beaches dominated a meeting of the East Hampton Town Trustees on Tuesday. The debate was prompted by an application from four Louse Point Road, Springs, property owners who seek to stabilize the toe of the bluffs facing Gardiner’s Bay with a rock revetment. Diane Mcnally, however, the trustees’ presiding officer, argued that rocks placed at the toe of the bluff may not be effective and asked that the applicants expore alternatives.

The application says recent storms have claimed some 20 feet of bluff and proposes to cover the revetment with sand and to plant with beach grass. The bluff would be further stabilized by being planted with other native species and by diverting stormwater runoff at its top.

John and Anne Mullen have attended several trustees’ meetings in the past several months, sometimes accompanied by Charles Voorhis of the firm Nelson, Pope and Voorhis. On Tuesday, the Mullens delivered an impassioned plea for approval, citing what they call an urgent need to act before their house is gravely threatened by another extreme weather event.

Mr. Mullen distributed an aerial photograph that showed 4,500 feet of shoreline. He said that the beach in front of his house and those of the adjacent property owners, across a span of 560 feet, is the only section of  shoreline there not protected by revetments or bulkheads. “We think this request is very reasonable,” he said.

The trustees remain basically opposed to hard structures, asserting that they ultimately lead to the loss of beach. Nevertheless, before the meeting was over, they indicated willingness to consider approving the project despite their fear that it would lead to the disappearance of the public beach, which they oversee on behalf of the public.

Mr. Voorhis read a letter from Thomas Lynch, another of the four property owners, who, Mr. Voorhis said, was a 30-year employee of the state’s Department of Environmental Conservation. The letter read: “I want to assure you that our proposed long-term solution would secure the public resource of beach while protecting and stabilizing the bluff.” Over time, bulkheads and revetments have been constructed there despite the town’s Local Waterfront Revitalization Plan, adopted in 1999, which said hard structures should be prohibited and sand placed there from the dredging of Accabonac Harbor. Yet no sand was ever placed there, Mr. Lynch wrote.

“Because of past decisions and precedents, our property is literally caught between a rock and a bulkheaded hard place. The winter storm of 2010 and Superstorm Sandy in 2012, with its six-foot storm surge, proved that any soft solution without toe or slope reinforcement would be pointless . . . . Now it is time for me to act to protect my property.” The letter went on to say that if two more similar storms occurred, his “deck would likely collapse and the house foundation would be jeopardized.” 

Ms. McNally, however, said the aerial photograph demonstrated that the beach had eroded where hard structures had been constructed but was wide where there are none. Ms. McNally displayed her own aerial photograph, saying it depicted another shoreline demonstrating the same phenomenon.

Mr. Mullen disputed her claim. The wider beach, he said, illustrates the retreat of the bluff in front of his property. He added that a family house in Mississippi was lost to Hurricane Katrina in 2005, and said, “If the theory from the trustees is that our property is to be a sacrificial sand pile to continuously feed a beach, we disagree with that. We own that property, we paid a lot of money for it, and we pay a hell of a tax because it’s waterfront property. And to just watch it drift away does not seem either legal or fair.”

Mr. Voorhis said his firm had used the proposed method elsewhere with success. “The stone revetment at the base will withstand those storms,” he said. “We feel this is the right solution for this specific location.”

“To have a permanent solution, you have to have the hard toe” of the bluff, Mr. Mullen said, along with a properly sloped, planted, and maintained top. “We wish there was a real soft solution,” he said, “but we are totally convinced that ‘soft solution’ is an oxymoron.”

Mr. Mullen said that he and his wife acknowledge the importance of public access, but, he said, “The locals tell me the beach comes and goes. In our case, we’re focused on the going.”

An East Hampton group that has been fighting against the installation by PSEG Long Island of a high-power electricity transmission line on new and higher poles filed suit on Wednesday in New York State Supreme Court in Riverhead in an effort to stop the project. 

Twenty plaintiffs who live on or near the six-mile  route, which runs between power substations in East Hampton Village and Amagansett, filed a class-action suit against PSEG and the Long Island Power Authority, which turned over electricity delivery to PSEG last year but retains oversight of its operations.

The plaintiffs seek a judgment in the amount of at least $30 million for the potentially affected homeowners, as well as a total of $20 million to cover the cost of "removing all poisonous substances" from the plaintiffs' property," and for emotional distress.

The lawsuit also seeks an injunction requiring the utility companies to remove all the poles that have been installed, and to bury the electric lines, at the companies' cost. 

The lawsuit claims the lines and wooden utility poles have caused serious injury to trees, vegetation, and the scenic quality of the residential streets along the route. It alleges that the project will continue to cause serious injury due to a coating on the poles of pentachlorophenol, a preservative that, according to the suit, is a dangerous poison that leaches into the soil and can be harmful to the water table as well as to humans if its fumes are inhaled. The suit also alleges negative effects on health from electric magnetic fields emanating from the transmission lines. 

The plaintiffs also allege that the power lines may significantly lower the value of over 300 residences, which, with a total market value now of $300 million, could be decreased by up to 10 percent, or $30 million.

A multi-thousand-person bike ride planned for Saturday that East Hampton Town officials had sought to prevent will go on in a reduced form after a settlement was reached between its organizer and the town on Friday.

Bicycle Shows U.S., which charges riders up to $300 per person for the Ride to Montauk event, had asked town officials for a permit that would have allowed as many as 5,000 participants on a variety of routes. That request was revised downward to 3,400 riders, but was rejected by the East Hampton Town Board on Wednesday.

The following day, concerned that the ride would go on even without the town permit, the East Hampton Town Board sent Michael Sendlenski, an assistant town attorney, to State Supreme Court in Riverhead to seek a temporary restraining order.

Ride to Montauk and the town reached a settlement in Riverhead on Friday that will allow the event to take place, but with a maximum of 1,500 riders. Its route will be limited to one approved by East Hampton Town Police Lt. Chris Hatch, who accompanied Mr. Sendlenski to the court.

Bicycle Shows U.S. agreed to pay for any overtime or other police costs incurred as a result of the ride.

According to the Ride to Montauk website, there are five routes, of different distances, all ending in Montauk. As of Friday, three of the five were listed as sold out. Participants on the shorter routes ride buses or trains to the starting points, while their bicycles follow in trucks.

All routes end at Camp Hero State Park in Montauk. Amenities offered there to riders include hot showers, free all-you-can-eat meals, massages, and Blue Point Brewery beer.

An 11-year-old boy was found dead at the bottom of a filled swimming pool in East Hampton Sunday afternoon, East Hampton Town police announced last night.

Police and emergency medical personnel responded at 5:08 p.m. to a report of a drowning victim on Route 114. They tried but failed to revive the child. He was rushed to Southampton Hospital, where he was pronounced dead. The name of boy, who was from Brooklyn, has not been released.

While police are investigating the cause of death there is no evidence of foul play, according to a statement released last night.

A landscaper working on a Montauk property was airlifted to Stony Brook University Hospital Monday in critical but stable condition after the large riding mower he was operating flipped over and landed on top of him. The victim had no pulse when police and emergency medical personnel arrived, but was revived by the first responders.   

A three-man crew from Warren's Nursery was working at the northwest corner of South Ferncroft Place and West Lake Drive in Montauk a little after 11 a.m. Monday with two riding mowers, a small, lighter one, and an older, industrial-size unit with a circular blade about four feet wide.

The triangular-shaped property slopes sharply down toward West Lake Drive.

"We told him not to take the big one, just use the little one," one of the injured man's co-workers, who identified himself as Edgar, said in Spanish, while East Hampton Town police were sealing off the area. The injured man, identified by police as Baldomero Villa Vicenzio, 36, of Riverhead, did not listen, Edgar said. "He insisted. He wanted to finish the job."

According to the co-worker, Mr. Villa Vicenzio drove the mower onto the sloping part of the property while the other two went to the east side of a fence that separates the rest of the property at 8 Ferncroft Place from West Lake Drive.

His co-worker reported hearing the sound of the mower as it landed on top of Mr. Villa Vicenzio. According to police, passing motorists ran to assist the men in moving the mower off of the victim.

The Montauk Fire Department ambulance was part of a funeral procession for Tyler Valcich, a department member, that was just getting under way at St. Therese of Lisieux Catholic Church, so an Amagansett ambulance  in Montauk to provide emergency coverage during the funeral was dispatched to the scene.

After being revived, the landscaper was rushed by ambulance to the Hither Hills west overlook on Montauk Highway, where a helicopter transported him to Stony Brook University Hospital.

Detectives were investigating the scene of the accident Monday. The mower was impounded by East Hampton Town Police police to be given a safety inspection. West Lake Drive was reopened at 1:30 p.m.

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An earlier version of this story misidentified Baldomero Villa Vincenzo as Juan Baldomero. East Hampton Town police said in a statement Tuesday that motorists who witnessed the accident lifted the mower off Mr. Villa Vincenzo before emergency personnel arrived.

The Amagansett School board accepted the resignation of Dr. Robert Brisbane, the school's principal, on Friday. Dr. Brisbane, who started at the school in May 2013, has accepted the position of assistant superintendent with the Roosevelt School District.

Eleanor Tritt, the district's superintendent, sent a letter to parents and guardians on Monday in which she explained that Dr. Brisbane's family had been unable to relocate to the South Fork from western Long Island, as they had planned when he accepted the position. And the commute to Amagansett, she said, ultimately proved too challenging.

Roosevelt, Ms. Tritt told The Star, needed Dr. Brisbane immediately, as the position he is filling has been vacant, and asked the Amagansett district to release him before the end of the school year.

"We will immediately commence a search for Robert's replacement," Ms. Tritt wrote to parents, adding that she hopes to secure a new principal before the start of the school year in September. A school administrator will soon be hired to assist in the interim.

The East Hampton Town police announced this week that they have launched both a Facebook page and a Twitter account in order to increase communication with the public. 

This announcement comes on the heels of a successfully implemented use of the department's Code Red program last weekend, when Charlotte Silverbert, an 80-year-old with dementia, wandered out of her house on Karin Drive in East Hampton late Saturday night.

The police began searching for her, calling on Suffolk County K-9 units and a helicopter, as well. As the night wore on, police became concerned that she might walk off in Northwest Woods, and they activated a system in place to notify all residents by phone of an emergency. The calls went out at 11:40 p.m. to residents within a two-mile radius.

The woman was located when a person who had received the recorded message found her inside a parked vehicle, according to Capt. Chris Anderson.

Then a second round of calls went out, notifying residents that the woman had been found. Chief Michael Sarlo said in an email that police received an "outpouring of complaints to both our dispatch center, as well as to the county dispatch center." The callers were unhappy to have been woken so late in the night by a call from the police.

Both the chief and the captain asked for the public's understanding in the matter. "People should think, 'What if that was your mother, your sister, your wife?' " Captain Anderson said Tuesday.

"We ask for the continued support and patience of our citizens as we work to protect this community," Chief Sarlo said.

The police can be found on Facebook under East Hampton Town Police Department, NY. The department's Twitter account is @EHTPD1.

"We are in the early stages of establishing protocols," Chief Sarlo said Tuesday in an email, "and will be utilizing social media more in the coming weeks to share information with the public in reference to road closures, special events, notifications of missing and wanted persons, etc."

The teachers of the Montauk School, who have embraced the Common Core, the national education standard for students from kindergarten through 12th grade, seemed to have swayed a large group of parents and some board members to support it at a school board meeting on May 13.

The Common Core, which also links test scores to teacher evaluations, was implemented last year, some say too quickly. “I felt it was overkill,” said Jack Perna, school superintendent. Across New York State, parents and educators have protested, saying its implementation did not offer teachers the proper tools for teaching the new standards. Some parents allowed their children to opt out of taking the state tests, saying the tests were too hard and included questions even they didn’t know how to answer.

Kathy Piacentine and Donna Etzel, who teach seventh-grade math, led the discussion. Parents were handed leaflets with examples of problems that Ms. Piacentine went over. Some parents looked at the problems and shook their heads or rolled their eyes, but once Ms. Piacentine got going even they seemed satisfied.

As Chantal Adamcewicz, who teaches fourth grade, said, “You don’t want your kids doing the same work as you; you want them to progress.”

The tests require students to visualize the process and use their heads to solve problems, the teachers said. They added that students also learn there is more than one way to solve a problem. They learn to be critical thinkers, they said.

They agreed that students had a bit of difficulty when first challenged to use math to solve everyday problems and to find information using graphs, tables, and charts. But, the teachers told the parents, once students get it, it clicks. “It’s incredible,” they said, with Ms. Piacentine adding, “They have to get over that fear of learning something new.” Ms. Piacentine went over examples of the math problems from first to eighth grade with the group and provided parents with tools to help at home.

    “I’m a better teacher because of Common Core. We’re going to have such great thinkers when they graduate from this school,” said Ms. Adamcewicz, who has three children in the district.

The basement in the residence of Joe Farrell, the ubiquitous South Fork builder, is famously over the top. The 31,000-square-foot Bridgehampton house, which is said to have been rented by the likes of Madonna, Jay-Z, and Beyonce, boasts a 10,000-square-foot basement sporting a media room, gym, spa, racquetball-squash-basketball court, and two-lane bowling alley replete with pizza oven, bar, and seating.

There is also an “air lounge,” which the builder has said is the most expensive room in the house. This area, built for Mr. Farrell’s three children, includes a rock-climbing wall, half-pipe skateboard ramp, karaoke center with D.J. booth, golf simulator (allowing players to “play” courses worldwide), and a stage. For impromptu Shakespearean skits, perhaps?

When he built the house in 2009, people oohed and aahed, but these days blinged-out basements are par for the course. “Don’t use the B word,” said Gene Stilwell, an agent at Town and Country Real Estate who specified the preferred real estate term: “lower level.”

It does seem odd to refer to these subterranean palaces as basements, considering that they are often as kitted out as excessively as their upstairs neighbors.

John Kean, a builder, is about to break ground on a 20,000-square-foot house on Huntting Lane in East Hampton Village that will contain two bowling alleys, movie theater, wine cellar, billiards and Ping-Pong area with bar, and a couple of en suite bedrooms and that open up to outside. And an elevator to lift you out of the depths.

“I think it’s necessary in the high end in the Hamptons,” Mr. Kean said. “People are coming out for their vacation, bringing kids, grandkids, friends, and looking for all the amenities.”

In a land with stringent height and footprint restrictions, basements essentially give their houses a third floor. “Despite all the downsizing talk, bigger is better for Wall Street,” said Leslie Reingold, an agent with Sotheby’s International Realty. This holds true even on small lots, she said. Considering the trend toward moving into the “stimulation” of villages, homeowners still want the perks of larger houses. Thus underground expansion.

“Almost every house I have has a finished basement,” Chris Burnside of Brown Harris Stevens said of the properties he has listed. “It’s a standard now. If you’re building a new house it’s expected to have a movie theater, wine cellar, rec room, media room. If not, people won’t even look at the house.”

And it’s a financial boon for builders who, because the infrastructure is already in place, have found a cost-effective way to provide more living space. “It costs about half as much to build,” Mr. Burnside said.

Indeed, just about every spec house on the market has a finished basement. Priscilla Garston of Douglas Elliman Real Estate has a listing for a relatively small house, 3,500 square feet, in Bridgehampton asking $1.89 million. Its basement has a living room with a fireplace and French doors that lead into a courtyard, “making it feel like a ground floor.” It also has a laundry room and bedroom.

On Further Lane in East Hampton Village, Dan Scotti, a high-end builder, is marketing a house for just under $13 million that he has staged exquisitely with furnishings he has picked up in his travels. The basement is no exception. In the wine cellar, he designed shelving made of perforated industrial steel and had it fabricated onsite. Instead of a typical wine-racking grid, he used larger cubbies where bottles are stacked on top of one another. “It just feels less suburban to me.” For added “texture and drama,” he installed stone floors, and sheathed the walls in glazed brick. “I could have used Sheetrock,” he said, but that wouldn’t fit with his meticulous attention to detail. For the window he used a glass storefront, the better to ogle the wine collection.

For the media room, Mr. Scotti designed a hand-knotted rug and sectional sofa, which is upholstered in a silk-cashmere blend. As an added touch, a vintage Lucite ice bucket holds M&M’s that were custom-ordered from Dylan’s candy shop in East Hampton to match the blue in the rug. The billiard room is dominated by a 1940s “anniversary edition” Brunswick pool table that he had restored and re-covered in navy blue felt. Both the media room sofa and billiards table come with the house.

From the vintage cast-iron drainboard sink in the laundry room to the glass wall that filters natural light from the gym into the billiards room, he has curated each detail as if it were in a living room.

Besides providing additional living space for homeowners, basements still provide staff quarters. “It’s that whole nanny thing,” Ms. Reingold said. But mostly she thinks that people have jumped on the finished-basement bandwagon for reasons of “showmanship. If you have that kind of money you’ve got to have the same stuff that a partner in your firm has.” And it’s this kind of keeping up with the Joneses that leads to another phenomenon: the underused basement. “We’ve learned down the line that 9 out of 10 people don’t use them.”

If true, then why go to such trouble? “Because they get press,” said Mr. Burnside. “With so many $20 million houses, you’ve got to do something that’s different. It’s a selling tool.”

Jason Lee, the former Goldman Sachs managing director who was arrested last summer in East Hampton on charges that he raped a 20-year-old Irish student, was ordered Friday by New York Supreme Court Justice Barbara R. Kahn to refrain from any further contact with the woman, including through third parties.

An order of protection for a victim in cases like assault or rape is normally a standard procedure at the time of the initial arraignment. However, District Attorney Thomas Spota’s office did not request the order of protection when Mr. Lee was first arraigned on Aug. 21 based on the belief that Mr. Lee would surrender his passport and that the alleged victim was returning the next day to Ireland, Kerri Kelly, an assistant district attorney who handles sexual abuse cases, said Friday.

Mr. Lee was not actually forced to surrender his passport until Sept. 20, 30 days after his initial arraignment in East Hampton, when he was re-arraigned on the felony charge in front of Justice Kahn in the Cromarty Criminal Courts building in Riverside.

Kimberly Shalvey, the lead prosecutor on the case, requested an order of protection on May 9, saying in court that day that an agent of Mr. Lee’s had contacted the woman at her home in Ireland, frightening her. “She feels that everything she does is being watched,” Ms. Shalvey said at the time.

“We have an obligation to our client to investigate,” Andrew Lankler, one of Mr. Lee’s attorneys, said outside the courtroom Friday of his agent’s visit to the woman.

Though Justice Kahn had said on May 9 that there was nothing wrong with a defense attorney contacting a claimant, she issued the order Friday protecting the alleged victim from any contact by Mr. Lee or anyone working for him after reading an affidavit from the alleged victim regarding the incident. “The people have met their burden,” she said. The order prohibits contact at her school or house or via email, Facebook, or other social media.

Mr. Lee signed the order in the courtroom Friday. He is due back in court on July 18.

Michael DuVally, a spokesman for Goldman Sachs, said Friday that Mr. Lee is no longer an employee of the firm.