Donald J. Torr, 69, owner of a rental property on Winterberry Lane in the Springs section of East Hampton Town, was arraigned Wednesday in front of Suffolk County Justice John Iliou on charges that he secretly taped and viewed tenants' intimate behavior at his $7,000 a week rental house.

"He was taking their money and invading their privacy at the same time," John Cortez, an assistant Suffolk County district attorney, said in the hallway outside Justice Iliou's court in Riverside. "This defendant secretly videotaped 13 adults and 9 children, without their permission."

According to East Hampton Town police, they first received a call on August 31, from a tenant, who, they said, had discovered numerous hidden cameras throughout the house.

Assisted by the Suffolk County Police Department, East Hampton Town police built the case against Mr. Torr, which they say include "numerous" families as victims, concluding with an indictment that was issued by a grand jury last month.

Mr. Torr was arrested by United States marshals at his house on Celebration Avenue in Celebration, Fla., on May 21, and was extradited to New York earlier this week.

To date, two of the families who rented the Winterberry Lane house last year have filed civil lawsuits against Mr. Torr.

Mr. Torr is facing 14 counts of unlawful surveillance in the second degree, which is a low-level felony, and nine counts of misdemeanor endangering the welfare of a child.

The unlawful surveillance charge is brought when police believe that a defendant has taped or viewed private acts of an intimate nature.

Mr. Torr's attorney, Bruce Barket of Barket, Marion, Epstein and Kearon, had a very different view of what had occurred at 18 Winterberry Lane. "As we have maintained all along, since this investigation began, he did nothing criminal," Mr. Barket said during an interview outside the courtroom.

In response to a reported admission by Mr. Torr that he had taped the two families with cameras in bedrooms and one hidden in a bathroom, Mr. Barket said, "The admission by him is that there were cameras. And he said that they were not on when people were actively renting the house."

"Cameras are in many homes these days for security reasons, especially rental homes, to make sure the houses are secure when renters aren't there and to prevent vandalism when renters are there," Mr. Barket said.

Justice Iliou set bail for Mr. Tor at $100,000, which Mr. Barket indicated would be posted.

   There was Rose, black apron tied around her waist, blond hair pulled into a bun, pencil pushed behind her ear. I called out to her, “Rose! Hey!” and hugged her with inebriated familiarity.

  I grew up with Rose. After we graduated high school, she stayed and became a waitress and I went away to a small, expensive liberal arts college and began to think less of the place I called home — a town with a blinking orange light at the lone intersection and more cows than people.

   “How’ve you been?” I asked.

   She flinched. A subtle jerk, but it was there. She told me she cut hair at a local salon during the day and that she lived with her boyfriend one town away. I made noncommittal, “Oh, how interesting” noises and arranged my face into an expression that I hoped masked what I was thinking: “Poor Rose. She didn’t escape. What a boring life. How sad and meaningless.”

   “Well it was nice running into you,” she said as she edged away.

   “You too! We should get a drink sometime!” I said brightly. Neither of us had exchanged phone numbers.

   It wasn’t until I became a waitress my senior year in college that I began to understand why Rose flinched.

   When I waited on my classmates, there was always a shimmer of unease, at least between myself and the ones who had trust funds and didn’t need to work, the ones who wore designer clothes, but tipped me in quarters.

    They looked at me the way I had looked at Rose, as a person defined by the burgers she served.

    As a waiter, you become part of the background of the customers’ dining experience. You are there to provide comfort and to handle any problems that arise. Other than that, you cease to matter.

    There’s nothing innately wrong with that; it’s part of the job. But it’s easier to mistreat someone who’s not a person but a “waitress,” a “landscaper,” a “housecleaner.” It’s easier to look down on someone who doesn’t have the things you value, like wealth or higher education or invitations to trendy parties or being on a “50 Most Powerful People in the Hamptons” list.

    This attitude influences the relationships between the residents and those who come here on vacation. It’s not that the “summer” people are unwelcome, but rather that it would be nice if the majority of them didn’t seemingly operate under the assumption that this place exists solely for their pleasure. Of course I’ve had many positive interactions waiting on people not from this area, but it’s the negative ones that linger in my mind.

    One night, after I was yelled at by an irate customer because she disliked the consistency of her salad dressing, a woman at another table tried to comfort me by saying, “It’s okay dear, you won’t always be a waitress.”

    Excuse me, what? Is there a problem with always being a waitress? What kind of judgment are you making about my profession? With one statement you’ve managed to capture the suck of dealing with well-fed jerks complaining about their dinner while at the same time belittling the person refilling your water glass.

    Perhaps if the wealth gap didn’t continue to grow; perhaps if people didn’t build multimillion-dollar mansions on nearly every piece of available land, raising property prices to unaffordable levels for someone like me; perhaps if colleges didn’t up their tuition year after year; perhaps if the banks didn’t have sky-high interest rates. Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps, I wouldn’t always be a waitress.

    Or maybe I would. Maybe this is what I like doing because the money is good and the work is satisfying. And maybe, if all of the above didn’t happen, I wouldn’t have some stranger implying that one day I’ll hang up my apron and do something meaningful with my life because people on the richer end of the spectrum wouldn’t be so out of touch with everyone else.

    On the long list of things that I’m ashamed of, how I interacted with Rose that night all those years ago is close to the top.

    She didn’t need my pity; she was better than that. Aside from her poise and my arrogance, the only difference between Rose and me is that I had many thousands of dollars in student loans I would be paying off for the next quarter-century.

    I was an idiot.

    I’m delighted to report that Rose is happily married with a daughter. She still works at the bar and now, when I go home to visit, we have a drink together.

    Sand will be trucked in to Ditch Plain Beach in Montauk to create a soft beach on top of a stretch of hardpan that has been exposed by severe erosion, leading East Hampton Town to hold off on posting lifeguards at the popular site and keep it closed as a bathing beach.

    Following pleas by Montauk residents to actively address the situation, which officials had hoped would improve due to a normal seasonal accretion of sand onto that beach, town board members voted last Thursday to seek bids from contractors to perform the work. Bids may be submitted to the town purchasing agent, who can provide specifications, until 11 a.m. on Wednesday.

    Supervisor Bill Wilkinson said at a board work session on Tuesday that he had hand-carried a permit application for the work to State Department of Environmental Conservation offices, seeking an expedited go-ahead.

    John McGeehan, the town’s assistant chief of lifeguards, who oversees the Montauk beaches, told the board at that meeting that some sand from offshore had been “filling in” the beach, but recent heavy rains had taken a toll. “I’m glad it wasn’t authorized in the last week and a half,” he said of trucking new sand in. “Because on two occasions, that sand would be gone.”

    The fix is an “emergency plan” for the summer season, said Councilman Dominick Stanzione. “We recognize that the action that we take may have no permanence — that the sand we place may not last,” he said. Plans for longer-term fixes, such as the Army Corps of Engineers’ design for an engineered, reconstructed downtown Montauk beach, are also underway, the councilman said.

    Mr. Wilkinson said that, pending D.E.C. approval, the trucked-in sand would be placed in an area east of the traditional bathing beach adjacent to the main Ditch Plain parking lot, closer to Otis Road.

    The beach there, he said, seems to be “holding.” While normally, a lifeguard stand would be placed in that area as well as on the westerly beach, this year, both would be set up on the fortified stretch of sand.

    “The erosion down there, as of this morning, is the worst we’ve seen this spring,” reported Mr. McGeehan, who had visited Ditch before attending the meeting. More hardpan was being exposed at the easterly site, he said. “If this pattern continues that we’re seeing right now, we would literally have to put the [lifeguard] stands on the beach in the morning, and remove them in the evening,” to prevent them from being washed away. Had they been in place on Monday night, he said, they would have been lost. The lifeguard stand at Edison Beach in downtown Montauk, he said, where water flowed through a dead-end road end at the beach, was almost washed away during the same rainstorm.

    Mr. McGeehan said that the protected bathing beach, if set up at the Otis Road area of Ditch, would be “squeezed.”

    “We can’t go too far east,” he said, “because at the jetty is a significant rip. It is the most challenging beach to protect swimmers in the Town of East Hampton,” he said.

    One thing that is less of a concern, the lifeguard said, is the threat of submerged objects in the surf. With other lifeguards, he went into the ocean off Ditch and found sand — though whether that is true all along that stretch cannot be verified.

    However, he said, showing the board a metal fencing stake used to erect sand fencing along the beach, “on a typical day we will have at least 10 to 15 of these brought to us” by people fishing them out of the water. They become buried in sand and then reappear at the shorebreak, he said. Lifeguards have also been removing numbers of them from the sand, Mr. McGeehan said, expressing concern that, along Montauk’s downtown “Motel Row,” 300 to 400 new stakes are going in to support fencing being erected by private and commercial property owners. The town code, which requires permits for sand fencing, allows only the use of untreated wooden stakes.

      I was at a dinner party Friday night with several bigwig real estate brokers in attendance, which is a good thing, as I’ve just started writing the weekly real estate column you now find yourself reading. Last week I featured the most expensive property on the market in the Hamptons, Courtney Sale Ross’s $75 million estate in East Hampton.

     So, this week, I told the gathering, I’m focusing on the least expensive Hamptons houses. There was a lull in the conversation and I noted that not one of the agents, a breed prone to thrusting their cards at unsuspecting prospects, had reached into his pocket. None of these seasoned pros really wanted to help find the least expensive properties in the Hamptons, and who could blame them?

     Then, one of the non-brokers took me aside and told me about his nephew, Sam Friedfeld, who is 23 and specializes in the low end of the market. It turned out to be not exactly true. Mr. Friedfeld’s expertise in houses under $500,000 is a default position. No one else wants them.

     “Just today,” Mr. Friedfeld told me Sunday, “a customer called my office looking for a property under a million.” The agent on call couldn’t be bothered and gave the client to Mr. Friedfeld. “Even people looking under $2 million can’t get a date with an experienced broker,” said Mr. Friedfeld, who has been in the business only four months. He works out of the Douglas Elliman office in Southampton. “That’s okay with me,” he said, stressing that he is happy to deal with what he calls “neglected customers.”

    So Mr. Friedfeld went to work to dig the bottom of the barrel for the least expensive properties between Southampton Village in the west and Springs in the east. He found 21 listings under $250,000, but they were all condos. (Apparently, none were the condos at the Watchcase Factory in Sag Harbor where a one-bedroom starts at just under $1 million.) There were two houses under $300,000, one for $290,000 (listed by John Brady of Nest Seekers) on Fort Pond Boulevard in Springs, the other for $289,000 (listed by John Gurwicz of Beau Hulse Realty Group) on Fords Lane, off North MageeStreet in Southampton. Both are ranches with three bedrooms, two baths, full basements, oil heat, and are on roughly quarter-acre lots. The main difference appears to be in square footage, with the one in Springs nearly double the size (1,500 square feet) of the Southampton house (894 square feet). There are also a few houses in the low 300s.  

    “None of these homes appear to be in ‘good’ condition,” Mr. Friedfeld wrote in an e-mail, an understatement to be sure. “But they could definitely become ‘Hamptons’ homes with some work.” Mr. Friedfeld is definitely on track to becoming the next big agent.

    The East Hampton house is actually kind of cute, with multiple roof gables (odd on a ranch, but undoubtedly meant to give it a cottage-y, storybook feel, which it sort of has). The rooms are light and the lot is woodsy. I would be rushing to place a bid on it, but just discovered that it’s in contract. The Southampton house is, well, small. But it is on a quiet, dead-end street.

    Location, as they say, is everything in real estate, maybe no more so than in the Hamptons. Naturally, anything south of the highway automatically is priced to reflect the exclusivity of the concept. “You can take the same house and move it a couple of hundred meters above, and it’s twice the price,” said Mr. Friedfeld. Ditto for houses in the villages. Because of the limited supply of houses in East Hampton Village, “there are small ones that would be $300,000 or $400,000 on the rest of the Island, that are a million here.”

    What allows a house in the Hamptons to go for a price reminiscent of Levittown is mostly an undesirable location: on or near a main road, in a flight path, near power lines, or next to something ugly, or as Mr. Friedfeld says, “visually unappealing.”

    Not wanting to rely on only one source, I also called the office of Simon Harrison real estate in Sag Harbor because I suspected that a broker with an eponymous firm might be more willing to talk about cheap housing than one attached to a snooty agency.

    “I think we have the last surf shack,” Mr. Harrison told me. It’s a ranch within walking distance of Long Beach, with a “daylight basement” in which you can store fishing rods, bikes, and, of course, surfboards “without tracking sand through the house.” That entitles it to a price tag of $460,000, which according to the broker is “considered cheap.” What condition is it in? “You can move in in two weeks; it just needs a little paint,” he said. Then, why, I wanted to know, is it priced so low? The answer was electric heat, a fix that Mr. Harrison estimated would cost around $7,000.

    “I think it’s safe to say that the parting line is $500,000,” Mr. Harrison continued. “Any house that you buy under that price needs that much money to bring it up to ‘see level.’ ” By which he means, if you buy a house for $425,000 you’ll need to spend $75,000 to bring it up to par. His best-valued property, however, is a house near the village of Sag Harbor on two acres near a pond. At $799,000 it doesn’t seem like such a bargain. But when he explains that he has a half-acre of land for sale at $585,000 it begins to compute. Even though the house on the two-acre lot is by no means a teardown, according to Mr. Harrison it becomes “irrelevant” when dealing with a lot of this size.

    Lou Sapienza was a bit edgy and hot sitting in the sun last week in Montauk, the polar opposite of the six men whose bodies lay frozen under layers of ice and snow, three in Greenland and three in Antarctica, men whom Mr. Sapienza is driven to extricate and repatriate.

    The longtime Montauker, who now lives in Springs, is a photographer by trade who in 1989 became involved in the search and recovery of the plane that was part of a lost squadron that crash-landed in Greenland during World War II. He heard about the expedition while working as a commercial photographer. 

    “I was listening to CNN, heard ‘Greenland,’ and said, ‘Hold the presses.’ ” Two hundred dollars in phone calls later, he was told to submit examples of his photography and a letter explaining his qualifications. All the competing photos were good, he was told, but it was his letter that did the trick, that and the fact that he knew how to cook, a skill he learned while working at Gosman’s restaurant back in the 1970s.

    The expedition succeeded in locating the lost planes and “gave me an experience that developed a passion,” he said. “We had to dig out from under snow every morning. ‘Shovel or die’ was our motto — literally. After that I wanted to go back.”

    Go back to Greenland he did, in 1990 and in ’92, when he was the photographer of record who took the photos of a P-38 fighter plane Glacier Girl being hoisted to the surface from deep in the ice. The men of the lost squadron, two B-17s and six P-38 fighters, survived.

    Not so fortunate were the three men aboard a small amphibious plane launched from the Coast Guard cutter Northland to rescue survivors of a crashed B-17, also in Greenland during the war. The B-17 had crashed while rescuing flyers whose cargo plane had slammed into a snowy ridge two and a half weeks earlier.

    The Grumman-built J2F-4, known as a “duck,” with two Coasties and a rescued Army airman aboard, crashed en route back to the cutter. For years, the wreckage was visible on the surface of the Greenland glacier, the last sighting in 1964. Slowly the plane and its crew disappeared under snow and ice as the glacier itself migrated away from the original crash site.

    Three years ago, Mr. Sapienza got a call from the Joint Prisoners of War, Missing in Action Accounting Command, known as JPAC, headquartered in Hawaii, asking if he would help find the duck so the three servicemen could be brought home, something the Coast Guard wanted very much to happen. A breakthrough had come when a plane using a sophisticated radar device picked up a reflective target under the ice.

    In September 2010, the photographer formed the North South Polar group, and led a team — he described its members as not unlike the characters in the film “Armageddon” — to Greenland, but the promising lead did not pan out. Mr. Sapienza then pressed the Coast Guard for logbooks, diaries, and half-century-old sighting reports. A watercolor done by a survivor of the B-17 crash, when studied alongside high-altitude photos from 1947, provided what appeared to be a “treasure map” for a second try last year.

    “I wanted 20 days on the ice. The Coast Guard gave me 7, a C-130 [transport plane], and $150,000 out of the $326,000 we needed. And we would only get paid after the mission.”

    After a harrowing adventure that included another frustrating false lead, and the jury-rigging of extension ladders to make skis to pull an 800-pound radar across a crevasse-covered ice field, a probe located parts of the duck as the sun was setting on the final day and a helicopter was en route to retrieve the team.

    The stories of the “duck hunt,” and the wartime events that necessitated it are told in Mitchell Zuckoff’s “Frozen in Time,” a New York Times best seller. Mr. Sapienza is also a founding member of the Fallen American Veterans Foundation, dedicated to repatriating fallen servicemen and women. At the time of the interview for this story, he was waiting for the go-ahead from JPAC and the Coast Guard to return to Greenland and retrieve the duck and its crew. 

    It’s been a long, exciting road. Mr. Sapienza began coming out to Montauk in 1959. “I got into photography via Dan’s Papers. Debbie Tuma asked if I would take pictures for a story about a bike race. I said, ‘Why not?’ ” The two-page spread of his pictures fueled an interest in photography that began in the third grade in New Jersey. “The initial appeal was holding on to memories. As time progressed I liked the mechanicalness of it. I still shoot with Leica cameras with fixed lenses.” Mr. Sapienza’s photos have appeared in Life and Air & Space Magazine.

    “In high school I wanted to be a National Geographic photographer.” He got his wish with a portrait of the leader of the Lost Squadron expedition.

    As Mr. Sapienza waits on tenterhooks to fly to Greenland, he is also waiting to learn the outcome, this week, of United States Representative Tim Bishop’s request that Congress amend a defense appropriations bill to include money for the recovery and repatriation of Ensign Maxwell Lopez and Petty Officers Frederick Williams and Wendell Hendersin. The three servicemen died when the George I, their aircraft, crashed during a mapping mission in December 1946 led by Adm. Richard Byrd near Thurston Island in West Antarctica. Six others were rescued after surviving in the cold for 13 days. The three who died were buried in their parachutes. They are now covered by 150 feet of ice.

    “In 2004, the wreckage was found by a sub-hunter plane with radar. I drew up a plan. In 2006, the Navy told the families the men’s remains would be brought home as soon as it could be done safely.” The Navy is lobbying Senator McCain to oppose the attempt, saying that it’s too unsafe and that the men had been rendered burial honors in 1947. The Navy claims the technology does not exist to melt down to the wreckage, but Mr. Sapienza said, “We’ve punched holes twice to that depth.”

    JPAC wants the men back, and Mr. Sapienza wants to make it happen. “The Navy is saying they were ‘lost at sea,’ but they’re in the ice. We still have obligations.”

    Seena International, a Hauppauge apparel company, has filed an application with the United States Patent and Trademark Office to register the name “Ditch Plains” for its exclusive use on clothing.

    The East Hampton Town Board agreed during a work session on June 4 to send a letter expressing its objection to Washington after a lawyer for a New York City law firm brought the company’s effort to trademark the popular Montauk beach and neighborhood to its attention.

    Ditch Plain Beach in Montauk has been sacred to surfers and beachgoers alike for decades. Residents and visitors are drawn there to ride its generally forgiving waves, tan in the sun, and cool off in the Atlantic. The beach’s popularity has created a market for T-shirts, hats, and other apparel that are sold locally with the words Ditch Plains, some of them showing surfers and curling waves.

    Kevin Fritz, a frequent visitor to Ditch Plain and the New York attorney who alerted the East Hampton Town Board, explained the stakes last week: “If Seena is able to register ‘Ditch Plains’ as a trademark, Montauk’s merchants will not be able to sell ‘Ditch Plains’ apparel without the risk of being sued for trademark infringement.”

    “Seena’s attempt to prevent Montauk’s businesses from using the term ‘Ditch Plains’ is as reprehensible as dropping in on a surfer’s wave,” he said.

    Seena has produced clothing under the brand name Ditch Plains Surf Co., selling it to retailers such as J.C. Penny and R.A.G., since 2005, according to an April filing with the federal patent office. No one from the company responded to several requests for comment.

    In 2010, Seena was sued by Abercrombie and Fitch for allegedly making copies of its logo designs. Those designs were modified with the words “Ditch Plains” in place of Abercrombie and Fitch’s text.

    The dispute over Seena’s trademark bid also lies in the significance of the beach to the broader community and to merchants who sell apparel emblazoned with the words “Ditch Plains.”

    Several people interviewed for this article said that to trademark the name is like trying to own the whole idea of Montauk.

    “It’s already so commercialized,” said Lili Adams, who owns the Ditch Witch food trailer at the beach’s East Deck Motel parking lot. “I mean you can buy a Ditch Plain T-shirt in Wyoming. But I think if people knew about this trademarking there would be a lot of pushback.”

    There are at least five stores in downtown Montauk that sell such goods, though locally, it has not proved to be a big income generator. Peter Ferraro of Plaza Surf N Sports said that not much of his merchandise had the words “Ditch Plains” because, he said, “it’s not as big as people think.”

    “I don’t think they’ll get away with it. No one can buy the name Ditch Plains,” he said.

    Though she doesn’t also carry Ditch Plains apparel, Kathy Volpicello, a Montauk resident for 34 years and owner of Wave Wear, agrees with Mr. Ferraro. “It’s ridiculous, Ditch Plains is a place; you can’t trademark a place.” Several Montauk storeowners said they were upset, but not surprised about Seena’s effort.

    At an East Hampton Town Board work session on June 4, John Jilnicki, the town attorney, told the board about the trademark attempt. The board said it would write a letter supporting efforts to oppose the company’s request.

    Abercrombie and Fitch’s multiple trademarks related to the City of Hollister, Calif., which the Ohio-based company reserves for clothing, cosmetics, swimwear, sheets, towels, and other products have themselves been at the center of similar disputes.

    And on Shelter Island some years ago, a clothing maker trademarked the outline of the island itself. He declined to defend a concerted challenge mounted pro bono by a number of Shelter Island lawyers and others to overturn the patent office’s decision.

    Three areas along the ocean on Napeague are being considered for new East Hampton Town bathing beaches with lifeguards and bathrooms.

    A report presented to the town board last week by the town’s nature preserve committee identified and analyzed several properties which could accommodate parking and provide a new shorefront area for beachgoers, filling a need board members have been discussing, particularly in light of increasingly overcrowded beaches during the peak summer season.

    An ad hoc committee will be formed to further assess the recommendations, at the suggestion of Councilman Dominick Stanzione, who worked with the nature preserve committee and the town’s Natural Resources and Planning Departments to develop the list of possible beach sites.

    The committee’s top proposal is to use a 6.7-acre parcel of town-owned land at 2048 Montauk Highway, just west of the Windward Shores Ocean Resort, a rectangular lot stretching from the highway to the shore.

    A 37-acre parcel that abuts Dolphin Drive to its west, called the South Flora Nature Preserve, which had been previously eyed by the town board for a new bathing beach, is also discussed in the committee report.

    The property is ecologically significant, and the nature preserve committee recommended further study to determine if it could be developed into a bathing beach without negative consequences.

    If not, the group said, it could perhaps serve as a beach access point, with parking, while remaining unguarded.

    Previous discussion by the town board of developing a bathing beach at the South Flora site drew much public discussion regarding its fragile ecology and potential traffic problems posed by cars entering and exiting a parking lot there, as well as opposition by members of a neighborhood group of residents who live nearby.

    The third location discussed in the committee report includes several publicly owned parcels in the Beach Plum Park subdivision, which is just east of Windward Shores.

    Due to several issues, that site was not recommended as a guarded beach. The committee suggested however, that the town-owned lots, among them a 14.6-acre parcel with a finger stretching from the highway to the ocean that includes a sand road used for beach-driving access, be designated as nature preserves and used for informal beach access.

    Ed Reid, an East Hampton Town lifeguard captain and a member of the ocean rescue squad, told the town board at a meeting on Tuesday that East Hampton’s beach facilities are for “a 1980s population, and we’re in a 2013 world.” Those charged with protecting bathers and saving swimmers in distress, he said, are concerned that, when faced with crowded designated and guarded bathing beaches, people will go to unprotected beaches to get away from the crowds. “And that’s truly a concern to us, especially if the season is going to be like last year, with high surf,” Mr. Reid said. 

    “I think it’s time we take our head out of the sands and really look at this,” said Councilwoman Theresa Quigley, who has been pressing to establish a new bathing beach for over a year. She asked that the lifeguards and ocean rescue staff be included in discussions of potential new beaches.

    “I don’t think we need further justification for the town to engage in any further development of a protected beach,” Supervisor Bill Wilkinson said. “It’s just a question of where it is going to be.”

    The committee report suggests that the Planning Department research the feasibility of using the former Church of God property.  An acre of parking there, says the report, could provide spaces for more than 100 cars. According to the report, though, on the 6.7-acre property, “it is unlikely that the beach is deep enough from the toe of the dunes to the water to allow for both a lifeguard bathing beach and beach driving.”

    Permission from the town trustees to install a lifeguard stand or to restrict beach driving would be needed to create a bathing beach at any of the designated sites. The nature preserve committee’s chairman, Zachary Cohen, consulted the trustees about the committee’s discussions. He told the town board last week that an ongoing lawsuit against the trustees and the town by oceanfront homeowners opposed to beach driving near their residences could be an obstacle.

    In an April 10 letter to Mr. Cohen and the nature preserve committee, the trustees said that they “will not consider altering or amending existing regulations for beaches until the lawsuit challenging the trustee ownership has been settled.”

    “I’m on a campaign to get this beach open, and I think the trustees are standing as an impediment,” said Councilwoman Quigley last week. “The trustees are unwilling to negotiate. . . .” she said.

    “My interpretation,” Mr. Cohen said, is “the door may be open in the future — ‘we’d like to work with you.’ ”

    Even in the Hamptons, a price tag of $75 million for a property still raises eyebrows, and, of course, hopes. Granted, the land, which belongs to Courtney Sale Ross, the widow of Steven Jay Ross, the Time Warner honcho, and founder with him of the Ross School in East Hampton, spreads out over 5.5 acres in that elite enclave off West End Road in East Hampton Village that might as well be called Billionaire’s Row. Yet it is not even on the ocean.

     “It’s important to make a distinction between a trophy property and the rest of the market,” said John Gicking, senior vice president at Sotheby’s International Realty in East Hampton, the agency with the listing. Trophy properties, by which he means those affordable only to the global elite, “operate on their own supply and demand continuum.” In other words, there may be more ultra-high-net individuals than there are “important” estates.

Mr. Gicking went on to identify the addresses — from Eaton Square and Lake Geneva to Park and Fifth Avenues — required in the portfolios of what Chrystia Freeman, author of “Plutocrats: The Rise of the New Global Super-Rich and the Fall of Everyone Else” called the “international class.”

     Add to that list the Hamptons — beachfront only, please. Or, in the case of Ross’s property, pond-front. Not just any pond, however. We are talking about Georgica Pond, which is shared by such boldface names as Ron Perelman, Kelly Klein, and Ms. Ross’s next-door neighbor Steven Spielberg. The Ross compound boasts 460 feet of pond frontage with a dock and a 7,500-square-foot main house with a heated pool and terrace, according to the listing. Ed Petrie is the listing agent. There is also a separate three-bedroom guesthouse with barn and two vacant building lots. The main house has seven bedrooms and six baths.

     But what about that pond front? Gary DePersia of Corcoran said that the current market is “on fire with a lot of deals happening.” Yet, he points out that a 3.5-acre property across the pond “has the best view on the pond and hasn’t gone yet” despite its price having been lowered to under $20 million.

     Speaking of views, Mr. DePersia cited the sale of the 10.4-acre Southampton estate Old Trees to John Paulson, a hedge-funder, in 2008 for $41.3 million. Not only does he believe that that house is grander than the Ross house, but the property also sold with two pools, a tennis court, and views of both Lake Agawam and the ocean (though it doesn’t front on the beach either.)

    “It’s the infrequent turnover of such coveted properties, many of which stay in families for generations” that gives the sellers an edge, according to Mr. Gicking. “When you’re reading about huge numbers you’re dealing with a very small subset of the market”: buyers to whom greenbacks are tantamount to Monopoly money.

    Since the Ross property was listed at the end of March, it has been shown to overseas buyers, members of the financial world, and builders interested in taking advantage of the property’s two vacant lots, according to Mr. Gicking.

    “A compound in and of itself is an interesting opportunity for a buyer,” said Mr. Gicking. Not to mention that it inhabits one of the more prestigious addresses in East Hampton. At $75 million for just over five acres, the sale would set a record.

    But is the price right? “Everybody is testing to see how high to raise the bar,” said Ed Bulgin, a builder who constructed Ron Baron’s Further Lane house. Mr. Baron, you may recall, purchased Adelaide de Menil’s 40-acre property in 2007 for $103 million, the first nine-digit sale on the South Fork, and to date the largest real estate transaction to have taken place in these parts.

    The last major closing to have occurred in the area was a 10,000-square-foot house on 6.5 ocean-view acres at 52 Further Lane in East Hampton sold by Sotheby’s for $62.5 million in March (most likely the house that The New York Times reported was purchased by SAC Capital Advisor’s Steven Cohen). It went in a matter of days.

    How long the Ross property will take to sell, only time will tell. “Is there a precedent for this?” Mr. DePersia asked. “No. Will it happen? Anything is possible.”

    On Tuesday night, at a particularly lively and celebratory meeting of the East Hampton School Board, its seven members unanimously voted to appoint Elizabeth A. Doyle as the new principal of the John M. Marshall Elementary School and Elizabeth Reveiz-Magnowski as the new director of the district’s English as a second language program.

    The hiring of both women follows an extensive search process. It also follows the recent frustration after Gina Kraus, the current John Marshall principal, was denied tenure this spring. Come September, Ms. Kraus will return to the classroom.

    Earlier this year, following the denial of Ms. Kraus’ tenure, many urged the board to promote someone from within the district to principal, rather than selecting an outsider. But despite that, the district ultimately decided on two appointees from outside the district for the 2013-14 school year.

    Ms. Doyle will be paid an annual salary of $136,000, while Ms. Reveiz-Magnowski will make an annual salary of $130,000. Both will be appointed to three-year probationary terms that will begin on July 1 and are set to expire on June 30, 2016.

    Ms. Doyle is currently in her third year as principal of the Explore Empower Charter School in the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn, a kindergarten through fifth-grade school where 90 percent of students qualify for free and reduced-price lunches. Formerly, Ms. Doyle was the kindergarten through 12th-grade coordinator of English in the White Plains School District in Westchester. Dating back to 2003, she has also worked as an instructional supervisor, director of operations, and as a fourth-grade teacher.

    She graduated from Bethpage High School and received a bachelor’s degree from Hofstra University. After college, she worked for Citigroup, eventually becoming a vice president. She later left the corporate world and began a career in education after becoming a New York City Teaching Fellow, an alternative certification program that attracts mid-career professionals to teach in under-resourced city schools.

    “I know well the critical role that schools and communities play in young people’s lives,” Ms. Doyle said in a statement. “It is the duty of the school community to provide love and hope, coupled with dogged determination to empower children with strong character, knowledge, and skills.”

    During Tuesday night’s meeting, the board also approved the tenure of eight employees, while bidding farewell to four longtime staffers.

    After three years at East Hampton High School, both Adam Fine and Maria Mondini, the principal and assistant principal, received tenure.

    During public comments later in the evening, Claude Beudert, a teacher at East Hampton Middle School, was glowing in his assessment of their accomplishments.

     “They came here under such a spotlight,” said Mr. Beudert. “The atmosphere they’ve brought to this school is appreciated by me and the community.”

    Additionally, six educators also received tenure: David Cataletto, an elementary teacher, Andrea Hernandez, a Spanish teacher, Janine Lalia, a family and consumer science teacher, Lisa Lawler, a special education teacher, Christopher Reich, a technology teacher, and Michelle Kennedy, the high school librarian.

    Among those retiring are Eugene (Buddy) Kelley, the English as a second language director, who is leaving after 19 years, Carol Story, a teacher’s aide at John Marshall, who is leaving after 16 years, Dolores McGintee, a longtime middle school math teacher, and Diane Boos, who works in the high school’s foreign language department. 

    Ms. Reveiz-Magnowski was hired to replacing Mr. Kelley.

    A seasoned bilingual administrator and native Spanish speaker, Ms. Reveiz-Magnowski now works as the director of languages other than English, E.S.L., and bilingual services for the Amityville School District.

    While at Amityville, she implemented Common Core standards within each department, created thematic-based projects to highlight different cultures, instituted a Spanish spelling bee, and oversaw an iPad integration.

    With a résumé stretching back 15 years, all of it in the field of bilingual administration, Ms. Reveiz-Magnowski has also worked with the Eastern Suffolk Board of Cooperative Educational Services, the Central Islip Public Schools, and the Long Island Regional School Support Center. Besides Spanish, she also has a basic knowledge of Italian and Ukranian.

    More than 100 assembled for Tuesday night’s meeting, which took place in the high school’s auditorium. Midway through the meeting, the Bonnettes, the middle school girls choir, and high school students in the Vocal Camerata each performed two numbers. Afterward, audience members enjoyed cake and refreshments.

    In other business, board members voted to approve an upcoming trip to Senegal for 15 high school students that will help build a school in conjunction with buildOn, an international nonprofit. The board also voted to approve that obsolete technology equipment be donated to Computers for Kids, a Utah-based nonprofit. The board’s annual reorganizational meeting is scheduled for July 2 at 6 p.m.

    Planning and design for rebuilding downtown Montauk’s beaches, which were severely eroded after last fall’s Hurricane Sandy, will continue at 100-percent federal expense by the Army Corps of Engineers. In a press release on Tuesday from Representative Tim Bishop, it was announced that $700 million to rebuild Long Island’s south shore beaches from Fire Island to Montauk had been approved by the federal Office of Management and Budget. Mr. Bishop has been working with the Army Corps, he said in the release, with the target date next year for construction on the Montauk beach.

    The allocation also includes $18 million for the design and construction of an 840-foot stone revetment surrounding the Montauk Lighthouse, although the Army Corps has not released a timetable for the next phases of that project, a subject of hearings and discussion over several years.

    “I will continue to advocate in the strongest terms for a plan that will protect vulnerable beachfront properties and the beaches that make Montauk a world-class vacation destination,” he said in the release.

    “Superstorm Sandy was a once-in-a-generation storm that dealt a heavy blow to downtown Montauk and other areas along the south shore, but it has provided a unique opportunity to secure a stronger and more resilient coastline for the long term at 100-percent federal expense,” Mr. Bishop said in the release, adding that “rebuilding beaches to protect vulnerable coastal property and tourism resources devastated by Superstorm Sandy is a top priority.”

    Just how much of the $700 million approved for Long Island’s south shore will go to construction in Montauk is yet to be determined, as is the scope of other projects to be undertaken within the 83-mile shorefront in the Army Corps “Fire Island to Montauk Reformulation Study.” A draft environmental impact statement for the entire area would have to be issued before any projects get under way. 

     East Hampton Town Supervisor Bill Wilkinson read the press release aloud at a meeting of the town board on Tuesday. “I think this is the first time that Montauk has gotten the attention from the federal government that it deserves,” he said. “It may be a little late, but it’s progress.” Mr. Wilkinson was also quoted in the press release, as were other officials.

    “This is great news for the hamlet of Montauk and the Town of East Hampton,” the supervisor commented in the release. “The global attraction of these beaches are an economic asset to all of New York and I, the people of Montauk, and the residents of East Hampton want to personally thank Congressman Bishop for his extraordinary efforts in securing the expertise and funding to complete this renourishment.”

    While the question of funding for downtown Montauk was pending, Mr. Wilkinson had tried, unsuccessfully, to secure approval from the entire town board for any plan the Army Corps might propose there, including, potentially, the installation of rocks or hard structures. Without blanket, pre-emptive approval, he had said he feared the Army Corps might leave Montauk out of the project. A board majority, however, excluding Town Councilwoman Theresa Quigley, agreed that review of a beach-rebuilding plan, perhaps by an independent coastal engineer, was warranted before expressing support for an Army Corps plan. According to Mr. Bishop’s office, the Army Corps will develop its plans in conjunction with local and regional authorities.

     “Areas such as Montauk are important to our economy and our beaches are not only a tourist attraction but they provide important protective barriers to residential and commercial areas during storms,” said Suffolk County Legislator Jay Schneiderman, a former East Hampton Town supervisor, in the press release. He also applauded the congressman’s efforts.

    “These projects will help protect and maintain our beaches and our economy,” said Town Councilman Peter Van Scoyoc in the release. Councilwoman Sylvia Overby said, “Sand replenishment will help protect our shoreline and mitigate storm erosion. Tim Bishop is to be thanked for his tireless efforts on behalf of individuals and businesses that depend on a healthy and sustained coastline.”

     New York State Senator Kenneth J. LaValle and Assemblyman Fred W. Thiele Jr. also expressed thanks for Representative Bishop’s work in the press release, and underscored the importance to the economy of maintaining beaches.