In addition to the usual files, computer, and tons of books in Jack Perna’s office at the Montauk School, his desk is littered with trinkets, most given to him from students. One is a ballerina doll that he received from a former student who is now a dancer.

    Mr. Perna holds the title of school superintendent and principal, and as of this weekend he will also be known as the grand marshal of the 51st annual Montauk Friends of Erin St. Patrick’s Day parade, which starts at 11:30 a.m. on Sunday.

    “I don’t think it’s hit me yet,” he said on Tuesday at a school board meeting. “I’m sure when I turn around that corner onto Main Street, I’ll get it.”

    He remembers walking in the very first parade with his sixth-grade classmates from the Little Flower Catholic School, now known as St. Therese of Lisieux Nursery School. His family had moved to the hamlet from the Bronx full time in 1958. He attended the Montauk School for a bit over a year before transferring to the Catholic school, which had just opened.

    His family owned several businesses in Montauk, including the Lakeside Inn, now the Surf Lodge. They also owned a cluster of houses in the Ditch Plain area, where he spent his summers with extended family, which included 40 cousins, several of whom still live in the hamlet.

    After he graduated from East Hampton High School, Mr. Perna attended Suffolk Community College and graduated from Southampton College in 1972. He immediately started teaching the fourth grade at the Montauk School. He became vice principal in 1978.

    Bob Fisher, a former grand marshal, was the principal of the school at that time and offered him a position in the administration while allowing him to continue teaching. Mr. Fisher thought the name Jack was too informal, and so renamed him J. Philip Perna. The name stuck and most of his correspondence is still signed J. Philip Perna.

    He earned a master’s degree and New York State certification as a school district administrator in 1977, and a certificate of advanced study and New York State certification as a school counselor from Hofstra University in 1990. He was offered the superintendent’s position in 1995.

    During his schooling, Mr. Perna worked at Pizza Village, which was owned by his aunt and uncle, and at Gurney’s Inn in winter. In 1980, he and a partner bought Pizza Village and ran in until 2000, when it was sold to the current owner. While the boss there, he often hired Montauk kids to work the counter and the pizza ovens.

    The superintendent is known for his impeccable style of dressing on the job, always in a suit, starched shirt, tie, and overcoat. But on some days he dresses as the Easter Bunny to have breakfast with the kindergarten students at John’s Pancake House or as Zero the Hero on the 100th day of school each year.

    His days start at 4:30 a.m., he said, when he fires up his computer and starts to answer e-mails and read the news. When it snows, it’s about that time that he determines whether school will be open or not.

    Once he gets to the school, at about 7:45 a.m., he does a bit of work while waiting for the buses to arrive, and then he goes outside to greet the students. Each afternoon he helps manage the exodus.

    A regular day includes meeting with parents, scheduling, working on the budget, and observing new teachers. He said he tries to get involved with whatever program they’re working on to put the newbies at ease. He is also required to observe the tenured teachers a few times a year. He has never called in sick and has missed workdays only for family funeral services.

    Twice a day he walks around the entire building, peeking in at classes and making sure everything is running smoothly. “I sometimes can be annoying,” he said.

    When the eighth graders go to Washington, D.C., for the annual field trip, the superintendent often drives there to spend at least one day with them, visiting the sites that are scheduled for that day.

    Mr. Perna has also been known to discreetly help students financially, and has at times driven some to their homes in case of a forgotten permission slip. He used to call former students to congratulate them for making the high school honor roll, but he no longer receives that information, he said, so the calls ended.

    He is a former member of the board of directors of Montauk Youth, the Montauk Chamber of Commerce, the Montauk Citizens Advisory Committee, and Third House Nature Center. Currently, he serves as a trustee at Fort Hill Cemetery in Montauk, and has served as co-chairman of the East Hampton Town Anti-Bias Task Force, the East End Health Plan, and the Suffolk County School Superintendents Association. He has been a member of the House of Delegates for New York State’s Council of School Superintendents.

    As if that isn’t enough, he teaches religious education at St. Therese of Lisieux on Sunday mornings. Asked when he rests, he laughed and said, “Sometimes on Saturdays.”

    There will be no rest for Mr. Perna this weekend, as he is expected to attend a grand marshal lunch tomorrow, a cocktail party on Saturday, the parade on Sunday, and then a bus ride to all the local establishments that have chipped in financially. Not a big drinker of alcohol, Mr. Perna said he has already told the Friends of Erin, “I’m not drinking for any of this.”

    Faced with thousands of people staring and yelling out to him as he leads the parade, he might need a stiff one, though, just to make it to the end. And several bar owners have a tradition of walking out into the parade to warm up the grand marshal with a shot of whiskey, sometimes in a teacup.

    As the East Hampton Village Board considers increased restrictions for dogs on village beaches, several town and village residents suggested solutions of their own, ranging from bigger and more aggressively worded signs and volunteer beach patrols to stiffer fines and even new citizen’s arrest rights.

    The matter dominated discussion at the village board meeting last Thursday.

    Citing inquiries and complaints he and board members received, Mayor Paul F. Rickenbach Jr. said that recent discussion has focused on two potential changes to the code to create stiffer rules and eliminate ambiguous wording. One would confine dogs to the fringes of village beaches — an as-yet undetermined distance east of the road end at Two Mile Hollow Beach and west of the road end at Georgica Beach. Another would continue allowing dogs on all village beaches, before and after the prohibited times — presently 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. from the second Sunday in May through Sept. 30 — but require that they be kept on a leash up to a certain distance east or west of the roadway. Richard Lawler, a member of the board, said that distances of 300 and 500 feet were being considered.

    Village and town residents voiced a willingness to make concessions but implored the board to stop short of prohibition at any beaches. “The passionate people here are very willing to work with the board to monitor, be involved, contribute their time, spread the word,” said Sara Davison, the executive director of the Animal Rescue Fund of the Hamptons. Citing the “almost religious experience” of taking one’s dog to the beach, Ms. Davison said, “My experience has been that good laws with a good crew of volunteers are a recipe for success.” The most effective laws, she said, are self-policing. “If it is necessary to use the leash at the entrance to the beaches, I think that’s workable. But it would be a shame to restrict the geography so much,” she said, calling Wiborg’s Beach a particular favorite among dog walkers.

    All of that makes sense, said the mayor, but “when we promulgated this policy, working in partnership with ARF a few years ago, the reality was it fell woefully short as far as getting that agreement of participation.” The board feels compelled to tighten regulations and enforcement, he said, “not for those of you that adhere to the policy and work with the village. It’s the others. They’ve encumbered it for everybody.”

    Michael Dickerson, who said that his family settled in East Hampton in the 17th century, spoke of the “long and glorious history of being able to enjoy our beaches,” but acknowledged that times have changed. He and other dog owners police the beaches vigorously, he said, but told of visceral reactions from dog owners that he has admonished for not cleaning up after their pets. “It’s not my job to correct your behavior,” he said. “But over the last two seasons I’ve had to become more assertive.” 

    Mr. Dickerson, in favor of allowing dogs on village beaches, agreed that it is them that we’re going to lose [the privilege to use the beach]. . . . They either don’t believe there is a power strong enough to take that privilege away, or they’re getting their hackles up.”

    While supportive of a leash law, Mr. Dickerson pointed out the preponderance of fencing to protect piping plover nesting areas tends to be placed around 500 feet from the beaches’ road ends with uncanny regularity, rendering a 500-foot regulation unworkable for dog walkers. He suggested larger and more aggressive signs, as well as the granting of citizen’s arrest powers. “There are major offenders, and you can’t change their behavior without it turning into a fight,” he said.

    “You could have illuminated billboards up there and those individuals are going to pay no attention,” the mayor answered.

    Steven Gaines, an author who lives in Wainscott, has started the Committee for Responsible Dog Ownership, which he said was inspired by the Committee for Access Rights, which opposes privatization of beaches. “I want to form a major organization of dog owners out here, maybe 1,000, 1,500 people. I want to raise money, take ads, I want people to really understand what the problem is. We can do this, because CfAR did this and in an enormously successful way,” he said.

    Mr. Gaines cited the 1978 law in New York City that required dog owners to clean up after their pets and the resulting group consciousness. “It’s been an enormous success in New York City, a giant city where there are, I think, 2 million dogs in the five boroughs,” he said. “It can be a success out here, but it takes education. We’ve got to organize.”

    Regarding the piping plovers, Mr. Gaines said, “The dirtiest thing we have on the beaches are birds. Bird excrement contains 60 different kinds of diseases. Where the piping plovers have nested, I wouldn’t want to walk on that area. So we’ve got a lot of issues if you’re worried about cleaning up the beach.” He asked the board to allow him and other dog owners 6 or 12 months to organize a volunteer force to work every beach on every weekend. “I hope you make the right choice,” he said.

    “We don’t want to wait six months or a year,” the mayor told Mr. Gaines. “We want to try to make a better product and put it in place for the season, where the beneficiaries are the users of the beach — all of us. We’re at that point in time.”

    Kevin Reynolds, an East Hampton resident and former New York City police officer, said that, “I would have no problem giving the chief 10 summonses a day if I went out there in my Bermuda shorts and just observed. If a police officer went down there in the morning in civilian clothes and just sat in his car, he’d come up with a couple of summonses.”

    There must be consequences to bad behavior, said Maureen Bluedorn, addressing the board. “If you raised your fine to $500, $600, second circumstance could be $1,000, it will stop. We’re as frustrated as you are, believe me,” she said.

    Any new regulations implemented by the village board would be contingent upon agreement from the town trustees, said the mayor. With that in mind, Diane McNally, the trustee’s clerk, was invited to attend the meeting. “I don’t have a consensus of the board as yet,” Ms. McNally said, but with regard to the new restrictions under consideration, “I have an informal agreement from many of them that this doesn’t appear to be a significant change to anyone’s access to the beach, or a significant infringement of any group’s use of the beach.”

    “I think we’re going to head in two directions,” Mayor Rickenbach concluded. “To have some more stringent leash control of the animal, and at the same time possibly make more stringent the violation requirements and fine process. We will continue to have conversations with you folks. We’re all trying to achieve the same goal.”

    Storm flags were flying on Feb. 19 when the East Hampton Town Zoning Board of Appeals considered a request from a Montauk man for several variances, as well as a natural resources special permit, for a property containing seven cottages on Fort Pond Bay.

    According to the Planning Department, granting Morgan Neff’s requests could jeopardize the town’s ability to qualify for national flood insurance. In a memo, JoAnne Pahwul, the department’s assistant director, had strongly cautioned the board about the risks of granting the requested variances. She wrote that one of the cottages under consideration, called the Crowley, straddles two flood zones, and is thus required to meet the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s flood zone height and construction standards.

    She stressed that the National Flood Insurance Program is a cooperative one between FEMA and local communities, based on the idea that a community will self-regulate construction in flood zones. If FEMA found that a town were not in compliance, she wrote, residents could, among other things, lose their flood insurance.

    Richard Whalen of LandMarks, an Amagansett land planning service,  called the FEMA variance “a tiny variance on a tiny property,” and said that granting it would in no way jeopardize the town’s relationship with FEMA. Ms. Pahwul has been dealing with a family emergency over the past couple of weeks and has been unavailable for comment on the matter.

    Mr. Whalen told the board during the Feb. 19 hearing that he was aware that requesting a variance from FEMA regulations was unusual. Lisa D’Andrea, a town environmentalist, went a step further, saying she knew of no such request, ever.

    There are two cottages involved in the application. For the larger one, called the Sharkey, Mr. Neff needs a variance of 29 feet to allow a 480-square-foot deck, which has already been built, to remain 121 feet from the beach; 150 feet is the standard. He also needs a natural resources special permit for the deck.

    The other cottage, the Crowley, needs a variance to expand a 122-square-foot structure to 289 square feet. That, too, has been done already, a point not lost on Alex Walter, the board’s chairman, who remarked that the applications “appear to be after the fact.”

    One requested variance for the Crowley would allow it to be within 13.5 feet of the neighboring property, where the standard is 15 feet. One flood-related variance would permit the first floor to be elevated only 4.1 feet off the flood zone (sea level) where 12 feet is required by town code, and the other would allow a basement in a flood zone, where basements are normally prohibited.

    Mr. Whalen said yesterday that the basement in question was a basement in name only, created by the town code’s differentiating between a basement and a crawl space, and that opening one side of the so-called basement to the elements at grade level would solve the problem.    

    Over and above the insurance concerns, however, the number and configuration of the cottages, and the question of whether all of them pre-date the adoption of the zoning code, is under study following the arrival of documents sent a few days before the hearing to the Z.B.A., the town’s head building inspector, Tom Preiato, and this newspaper. The documents were signed by a “John Reynolds” of 23 Fort Pond Road, which is the address of Roughriders, a nearby condominium complex. No such person lives there and there was no telephone number given.

    The documents appear to cast doubt on the number of cottages on the Neff property that pre-exist the code, as well as the impact of a zoning board determination dated July 27, 1983, in which Mr. Neff’s father, Paul G. Neff, appears to have conditionally agreed to clear the three-acre parcel of all structures in return for a frontage variance for the property. It is not clear whether the planning board ever took up the matter, as the zoning board suggested at the time.

    In the 1983 decision, the property is described as containing five cottages, two trailers, and three sheds.

    Mr. Whalen said yesterday that the variance requested in 1983 would have allowed the elder Mr. Neff to build without road frontage. At the time, what is now Fort Pond Road was not a public roadway. It is now, which would eliminate the need for the variance, he said. He added that the property was in a dilapidated state when the Neffs acquired it and would have been a natural target for removal by the town. Since then, he said, it has been vastly improved. The Sharkey cottage, the largest on the property, rents for close to $50,000 for the season.

    In addition to the 1983 determination, the documents sent to the Z.B.A. included a grant of scenic easement (which is missing a key page) and a planning board memo dated Sept. 29, 1997, which notes that the conditions of the 1983 variances were never met. That memo mentions “several small cottages” without giving an exact number. There is also a 1983 map, which, Mr. Whalen pointed out, while hard to read, indicates seven cottages on the parcel. In February of 2012, Mr. Preiato said in a letter that there were, in fact, seven cottages, plus one habitable trailer.

    A certificate of occupancy from 2009 describes six cottages, one trailer with a kitchen, and one shed. The cottages, all or some, were once part of the old Montauk fishing village, much of which was destroyed in the Hurricane of 1938.

    The planning board has 48 more days to render its decision on Mr. Neff’s application.

    Reflections on life in East Hampton during the Great Depression brought a lively blend of nostalgia, laughter, and melancholy to Clinton Academy Friday night.

    The second winter lecture in the East Hampton Historical Society’s 2013 series “Changing Times: Epics and Events That Shaped East Hampton,” the round-table discussion featured four local residents, each of whom offered vivid recollections of occurrences, large and small, that shaped their perspective of the Depression. Donald Halsey, Robert Stone, Norton (Bucket) Daniels, and Mary Curles told the moderator, Hugh King, and a capacity audience about the hardships they and those around them endured, in the process illustrating the characteristic charm and grace of the era.

    “I remember so many guys out of work,” said Mr. Halsey, whose father owned an automobile garage and dealership on Newtown Lane and maintained his staff of 14 throughout the Depression. “Every once in a while, some poor guy would come with some sad story, and my father would give him a job, maybe just for a day. Some guys made 25 cents an hour, 15 cents an hour, just to get work. You can’t feed many people on 10 dollars a week.”

    Given his father’s established business, Mr. Halsey considered himself fortunate, in light of the scarcity around him. “I really had it pretty good, when I hear so many other stories,” he said. In the early 1930s, he said, the American Legion held meetings on the second floor of his father’s garage, which had a kitchen. “They would make coffee and serve doughnuts to people who were out of work,” he said. “I remember seeing at least a dozen guys there some mornings. For all I know, that’s all they had to eat for the day.”

    “Like Donald said, we weren’t as bad off as a lot of people,” said Mr. Stone. “We raised our own chickens and ducks, had a big vegetable garden, and we all canned food for the winter. In the fall, after the farmers got done digging their potatoes, everybody would be out there picking up the leftover potatoes. We’d have enough to last all winter.”

    “The children who lived in the village dressed a lot better than we did,” recalled Ms. Curles, who said she grew up in Amagansett’s “Little Italy,” between Bunker Hill Road and Cranberry Hole Road. “We didn’t have money to buy better clothes like the people upstreet.”

    She remembered the embarrassment of lunchtime in school, being the only student packing homemade bread. “All the other children had store bread. I would try to hide,” she said. “The men had no money for cigarettes. They would walk along the roadside and pick up cigarette butts and then roll their own.”

    Fortunately for East Hampton’s residents, nature’s bounty provided sustenance through the leanest times. “We always had plenty of clams, oysters, fish at Three Mile Harbor. A lot of people ate more fish than they would have liked,” Mr. Stone said, remembering one night when his father returned from work. “My mother put a plate in front of him. He said, ‘Fish again? I’ve been eating so much clams and fish, my stomach is starting to rise and fall with the tide,’ ” he recalled, to laughter.

    “We lived off the fat of the land,” said Ms. Curles. “My father would raise pigs and chickens, and had a great big garden of tomatoes, peppers, beans, and so on, which we also canned for winter use.”

    As a youth, said Mr. Stone, “you’d take any job you could find. We used to pick strawberries, get 3 cents a quart. Sometimes you’d work around the farm, hauling corn, get 75 cents, maybe a dollar a day.”

    On cold nights in the winter, said Ms. Curles, “we would all go to the ocean for frost fish. The water would be so cold that the fish” — whiting — “would be stunned, they just washed ashore and we picked them up.” At Atlantic Avenue Beach, her father would gather fish heads discarded by fishermen after they’d haul in nets filled with cod. “He would end up with a platter of nice white fish meat,” she said.

    There were many cold winter nights. “I never witnessed such a cold, cold winter in my life as that 1933-34 winter,” Mr. Daniels said. “It was so cold, Gardiner’s Bay was frozen.” He recalled seeing Springs residents walking to, and back from, Gardiner’s Island. “It was reported that in Montauk it was 26 degrees below zero,” he said.

    In the autumn, he said, property owners in Northwest allowed anyone to fell trees. “That’s how we got wood for our stoves for wintertime. I used a two-man saw and also an ax, so I got well conditioned, physically.”

    Not everyone was affected by the Depression, however, and East Hampton residents found work in services for the town’s summer visitors. Many chauffeurs came with their employers from New York City, said Mr. Halsey, but many local men became “summer chauffeurs” as well. “Sometimes the garage was open all night,” he said. “Chauffeurs would wash the cars at night and be ready to go in the morning.”

    Mr. Daniels’s father worked as a caretaker and a bayman. At 14, he said, “I had to do something to earn my clothing for school, so I went caddying at the Maidstone Club.” Caddies were paid $1.25 per round if members decided they were worth the 25-cent tip, he said, and some were generous and paid more. “Others would ask if you were a ‘B’ caddy so they would only give you a dollar.” His parents never paid for his clothing again, he said.

    Why is his nickname Bucket, Mr. King asked. “ ‘Bucket’ came from caddying,” Mr. Daniels answered. “I was talking to somebody, and he called me ‘Bucket.’ I don’t understand to this day why.”

    Mr. Stone’s mother, and some of her friends, opened summer houses for their owners in the spring and closed them in the fall, he said.

    Ms. Curles, whose father shoveled coal for the Long Island Rail Road for “a couple of dollars a day,” used to pick blueberries near the Devon colony, she said, “and then go up to the houses and sell them.”

    Mr. Daniels remembered a thriving Montauk in the waning days of Prohibition. Bill McCoy — “the Real McCoy” — was legendary for smuggling liquor via “Rum Row,” off Long Island, he recalled. “He only sold good stuff,” said Mr. Daniels. “It was strange, because the rest of the country was hurting very badly.”

    Amid tales of peddling berries and shellfish, foraging for coal, and bartering to pay debts, attendees of the lecture were briefly transported to a kinder, simpler time. During the Depression, Ms. Curles said, “there wasn’t much work but there was a lot of family life. We were all in the same boat, everyone shared what they had and helped each other.”

    “All in all,” said Mr. Stone, “we did pretty good. I don’t remember anyone going hungry out here.”

    Opening day for the Beach House, a luxury hotel in downtown Montauk, may be delayed by several days, if not longer, after the East Hampton Town Zoning Board of Appeals ruled by a vote of 4 to 1 Tuesday night that its bar and gift shop will have to undergo a site plan review in front of the town’s planning board.

    Don Cirillo cast the lone dissenting vote, saying that whether a site plan was required should be the town’s senior building inspector’s call.

    At the same time, the zoning board voted 5 to 0 that the bar and gift shop were accepted secondary uses for a hotel, and, as such, would be permitted to operate once site plan approval is obtained from the planning board.

    According to the hotel’s online reservation system, the Beach House is scheduled to open the first week in May. It is accepting reservations for that week, with a room for two starting at $299 a night. But the hotel, which debuted last year and ran with a temporary certificate of occupancy, would need a permanent certificate of occupancy to reopen, something it may not get from Tom Preiato, the town’s senior building inspector, without first undergoing the required site plan review.

    The Beach House is now undergoing a site plan review for a new barbecue pit and trellis, for which a hearing date was to be scheduled at last night’s East Hampton Town Planning Board meeting, which took place after press time. Reed Jones, the planning board’s chairman, said yesterday that March 20 was going to be the date for that hearing.

    Alex Walter, the zoning board’s chairman, said on Tuesday that, during the hearing on the matter, held Feb. 5, the resort’s attorney, Andy Hammer of Biondo and Hammer, seemed to veto the idea of combining a site plan review for the bar and gift shop with the one for the barbecue pit that is now before the planning board. The Beach House’s owners, Chris Jones and Larry Siedlick, will apparently have to start anew.

    Mr. Hammer had just learned of the decision when he was reached yesterday. Without having read its actual wording, Mr. Hammer declined to comment, other than to say, “We’ll have to look it over, meet with the building inspector, and take it from there.”

    Last year, mindful of the financial importance of opening in time for the summer season, the Beach House went through the same site plan process, under similar time constraints, for a new basement and a storage room, obtaining approval from the planning board in time for summer. It appears that the owners will have to catch a similar wave this year if they are to meet their May opening date.

    Mr. Jones of the planning board said yesterday that he thought it was very possible for a new site plan review to be done by May, if presented to the board in a timely fashion, though he added, “This particular applicant always generates a lot of interest.”

    Standing in front of the barn at the historic Lester farm site on North Main Street in East Hampton, Prudence Carabine’s eyes gleamed as she talked about one day seeing visitors entering the barn to see what equipment and tools a farming family might have kept there at the turn of the 20th century.

    Meeting on Monday at the property, purchased and preserved by East Hampton Town, a committee of volunteers working to establish an East Hampton Farm Museum discussed the next steps in a process that has already spanned several years.

    In the spring, they hope, a garden of peas, spinach, and lettuce will go in, and the produce used to show visitors traditional means of putting up food, with canning and preserving done in an authentically restored working kitchen.

    Inside the house, the group discussed where various items, salvaged from the barn at the old Tillinghast Dairy on Woods Lane in East Hampton before the buildings there were sold and torn down, could be placed. A cast-iron wood cookstove will be hooked up in one corner; along another wall will go the icebox and a deep double porcelain sink. A Hoosier cabinet will fit into another spot.

    The Revolutionary War-era house was built for Capt. Jonathan Barnes of Amagansett, who lived on Old Montauk Highway in that hamlet. In 1870, it was sold to Selah Lester, who had it moved to its present location, on close to three acres at the corner of Cedar Street and North Main.

    The property had been owned by the Dominy family, cabinetmakers and clockmakers who had a wind-powered sawmill there. Now, the house and barn remain on the large open lot, where the museum committee members picture the public strolling, viewing history exhibits, and generally soaking in a sense of the lives lived by members of an East Hampton farm family in the early 1900s.

    Ms. Carabine said earlier this week that the committee chose to focus on depicting that era because it was a “stepping-off point” into the new century “but still had enough flavor of the Civil War — the 1800s.”

    “There was a forward push, faster,” at that time, she said, “to cars, electricity, and all of that. After people came back from the Civil War” and began to prosper, “their whole lives focused on their farm. What they couldn’t raise, they bartered.”

    The East Hampton Historical Society’s Mulford Farm represents the 1700s, she said, and, if a hoped-for deal to acquire and preserve the old Sherrill Dairy site, just across and up North Main Street, pans out, that would provide a window into the 1800s, when that dairying operation started.

    “There is nothing like this on the South Fork,” said Ms. Carabine, who, with a long family lineage here, has taped interviews with a number of old-timers for the cable station LTV, and has been a driving force behind the farm museum idea after it was first proposed by Carla Ash, another committee member, at an East Hampton Citizens Advisory Committee meeting.

    “My grandfather just spoke to me in that moment,” Ms. Carabine said Monday.

    Ms. Ash, a curator, will recreate an authentic “front room” on the lower level of the Barnes/Lester house, as well as a period bedroom upstairs. A second upstairs room will be outfitted to serve as a library and conference room, and a downstairs room will become a media-rich exhibit area where, for instance, visitors could view some of Ms. Carabine’s oral-history videos.

    The exhibits will be paid for with money from fund-raising efforts and, possibly, grants. Structural restoration, some of which has already been completed, can be covered by the town using money from the community preservation fund earmarked for historic preservation.

    Scott Wilson, the town’s director of land acquisitions and management, who has been working closely with the committee, said that after the structural work on the house and barn has been done, the town would sign a license agreement with a new nonprofit agency being set up to run the farm museum.

    The East Hampton Historical Society is currently serving as an umbrella organization; Richard Barons, its director, is a member of the committee. Donations may be accepted by the society for the museum effort.

    “We need to have the enthusiastic efforts of volunteers — and the support of the town board,” said Ms. Carabine.

    The East End Cooperative Organic Farm in East Hampton, Alex Balsam, a farmer, attorney, and member of the farm museum committee, reported Tuesday, will help with the garden. Discussion turned to use of authentic organic methods, such as using fish heads, seaweed, and chicken manure to enrich the soil, and how to succeed at growing anything without a modern-day deer fence. There were fewer deer back then, Ms. Carabine said. Group members passed around a book on fencing published in 1887 that provided some ideas.

    Plans will proceed under the guidance of a lengthy report written by Robert Hefner, a historical consultant who detailed the history of the property and its days and times.

    The Tillinghast barn, which had remained in that family for 250 years, according to Ms. Carabine, provided a treasure trove: six truckloads of items, from 150-year-old tools, horse gear and wagons, furniture, and farming and dairying equipment to “odd things,” like a standing geared device designed for husking corn.

    Inside the Lester farm kitchen, on a narrow strip inside a closet and on a patch of siding underneath the hand-hewn roof beams, a little gem was found: remnants of sweet, posy-covered wallpaper that probably perked up the early 1900s kitchen. Not only will the scraps be preserved, but the farm museum committee hopes to find a benefactor who would underwrite the reproduction of more of it, so that more of the kitchen can be covered with the cheery patina.

    Sag Harbor’s only public bathing spot, Havens Beach, is on the road to recovery after 20 years of discussion and planning.

    “It looks like it will be taken care of before the beach season,” Mayor Brian Gilbride said on Tuesday. Incidents of eye and ear infections as well as skin rashes have been attributed to a dip in the water there, especially within a drainage ditch where children enjoy playing.

    A project to catch and treat wastewater, which is blamed for contamination, is expected to begin shortly. Stormwater now courses through some 20 acres of the village before running into the ditch and ending up in Shelter Island Sound, and tests of the water at Havens have been positive for bacteria, including fecal coliform. The beach has been closed periodically after heavy rains.

    The present 24,000-square-foot drainage ditch and system will be reconfigured to include bio-filtration with a “smart” sponge. Native plant species will be incorporated to filter waste.

    Mr. Gilbride said he received the okay from the State Department of Environmental Conservation last week to advertise for bids on the project. The Army Corps of Engineers has already approved the plan.

    The mayor wants to “get them going right away,” he said. The village board will review bids on Wednesday, hoping to award the contract at its next public meeting, on March 12. Some work has already begun, including the installation of catch basins on Hempstead Street.

    The excavation of 1,500 cubic yards of material will be the next step, to be refilled with an equal amount of plain sand, which will act as a filtering agent. “When you take the muck out, it will definitely have an odor,” warned the mayor, but he thinks the excavation will be finished in the weeks of chilly weather that remain, when many houses are closed. “Some concrete structures by the bay” will also be involved, said Mr. Gilbride.

    The project had a recent four-to-five-month setback when the state required sample tests of material from the drainage ditch to be analyzed. After analysis, the D.E.C. determined that the material could be deposited at the dump, just like road sweepings.

    The village has allocated $295,000 for the project, with a grant from the Suffolk County Water Quality Protection and Restoration Program for up to $147,500 more. “Let’s get it going,” Mr. Gilbride said on Tuesday.

    “Whale Off!” a cry that echoed here until the early 1900s, called shore whalers to the ocean beach from which they would row out dories to harvest passing whales much as Native Americans had done in days of yore.

    The whole community benefited in some way, sharing some of the proceeds of the sale of whale oil and baleen. These days, however, what townspeople get to share is the cost of dealing with a whale that has drifted ashore — dead or alive.

    When a whale washed up on Napeague in January, the East Hampton Town Board slapped the town trustees with a $7,500 bill for having it cut up and taken away, a cost that had hitherto been accepted by the board as a townwide expense. To come to grips with this, and strandings in the future, the trustees have embarked on a policy and a fund to pay for whatever gets done. Deborah Klughers, a trustee who has a master’s degree in marine conservation policy, has been doing the research.

    Ms. Klughers said the authority to deal with strandings, except in Montauk, became the trustees’ alone when Town Supervisor Bill Wilkinson decided unilaterally to hand them the bill. But the issues are complex and, she said, authority should be shared. 

    Since 1972, whales have been protected by the federal Marine Mammals Protection Act. The law prevents the taking of whale parts. In addition, if a whale is alive when it comes ashore, the decision to try to save or end its life must be made in cooperation with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the agency coincidentally known as NOAA. If a whale is euthanized using chemicals, it cannot be buried or towed offshore and must be incinerated.

    The Riverhead Foundation, the nonprofit organization affiliated with the Long Island Aquarium and Exhibition Center, operates an Island-wide stranding network. Ms. Klughers said the foundation’s research, much of it gleaned from necropsies when whales are on the beach, had to be viewed in the context of public health and safety, especially when a dead whale washes up on a 90-degree day in the middle of the tourist season. 

    The depth of the foundation’s participation also had to be weighed against the efficacy and cost of disposing of the animal, she said, noting that the foundation recently lost a good deal of its federal funding

    Ms. Klughers said the plan would would seek to make it clear that, except for situations related to federal authority, what happened to beached whales would be local government’s call requiring cooperation between the trustees and the town board in the same way that the distinct bodies now cooperate on shellfish regulations. The stranding fund might come, she said, by a voluntary contribution on town property tax forms.

     “In our situation, two bodies should co-manage, should decide together.”  She said her goal was to make a well-researched argument for doing just that.

    “If it’s on private property, it’s your problem under federal law. You’re going to pay for it. Is it unfair? Maybe, but it’s unfair when the public doesn’t have access to private beach.” Would the town and/or trustees come to the rescue? The question should be debated, Ms. Klughers said. She noted that the trustees own, on behalf of the public, most of the beaches in town, except for those in Montauk.

    Designating local government as in charge, the plan would help relieve the Riverhead Foundation of financial responsibility as well as criticism in how it handles stranded whales. Ms. Klughers said a town stranding fund could be used to help the foundation, or another scientific entity, but “we don’t have to let scientists cut it up. The foundation is under a microscope,” she said. She referred to criticisms flung at the organization over the long-delayed and bungled euthanizing of a humpback whale that washed up at Main Beach in East Hampton in 2010. “Some people think the foundation can reincarnate a whale.”

    Ms. Klughers said she hoped to write a comprehensive plan that would start with a history of human and whale interaction in these parts. It will explain the federal protection act, she said, and the risks or advantages and costs of different ways of disposing of dead whales, including having them towed back to sea.

    The plan will list people and organizations that must be contacted when a whale comes ashore, including contractors with heavy equipment and representatives of the area’s indigenous people.

    As for the stranding fund, Ms. Klughers said it could go toward helping the Riverhead Foundation, the cost of helping stricken animals, or the cost of disposing of dead ones. She said she had already been in contact with the Shinnecocks to inform the tribe of the trustees’ desire to see their traditions endure.

    A landowner planning to subdivide 20 acres on Cedar Street in East Hampton has renewed a push to have his land removed from the prime farmland category in the town code, which imposes restrictions on how it may be developed.

    John Talmage told the East Hampton Town Board on Tuesday that the soil classifications in the town code are no longer consistent with those of the United States Department of Agriculture and should be revised. The U.S.D.A., he said, no longer designates “Plymouth loamy sand, with a silty subsoil,” the type on his land, as prime soil.

    The town code was based on the classification of agricultural soils in a 1975 U.S.D.A. report, which has undergone updates since then. Laurie Wiltshire, a land planner representing Mr. Talmage, said on Tuesday that the code is now based on an “obsolete book,” which the agency itself has “acknowledged is faulty, and they no longer use.”

    Farming on his land had been abandoned, Mr. Talmage told the town board on Tuesday, because “it’s too sandy.” He said it has few nutrients, responds poorly to fertilizer, and has low moisture content.

    In order to preserve farmland, the town requires property owners seeking to develop agricultural land to set aside 70 percent of the acreage as an agricultural reserve. If held to this regulation, the Talmage family, who want to create four house lots, would have to leave 14 acres alone and cluster the lots on the remaining six.

    Calling the soils on the Talmage property “mediocre,” Ms. Wiltshire said that if freed of those requirements, the family could create “decent-sized house lots, instead of having to cluster.” There could, presumably, also be a greater economic return.         

    However, Marguerite Wolffsohn, the town planning director, reached by phone Tuesday, said that regardless of whether the Talmage land was removed from prime-soils designation, it would be subject to restrictions such as clustering house lots to preserve open space because it is in an agricultural zoning district.

     “My problem with your request is the impact to all the other properties,” Town Councilwoman Theresa Quigley said at the meeting. She had reviewed the matter two or three years ago, when first approached by Mr. Talmage, she said, and had decided that she could not support a code change.    

    “It turns out there is a slew of properties that are tied to this designation,” she said. Whether prime farmland is properly or incorrectly defined, she said, the town has, since 1975, based planning decisions on the code.

     “There have been 30 years of planning, 30 years of people purchasing property, of investing,” based on the current definitions and regulations, she said. Using an analogy, she said that even if town officials declared something not colored blue to be blue, “the fact that we’re wrong in calling this blue doesn’t mean our planning was wrong.” Councilman Peter Van Scoyoc agreed with Ms. Quigley’s concerns about the potential wide-ranging impact of a code change.     Supervisor Bill Wilkinson said he, too, was concerned about “collateral damage” to other owners who may have decided about whether to buy property based on the restrictions of the current subdivision code and its definition of prime soils.

    According to Ms. Wiltshire, however, the number of properties with the same soil as the Talmage land is minimal, so a correction would not have wide-ranging effects. She said that a list the Planning Department had provided Ms. Quigley of properties containing prime soils as now defined by the town code includes not only lands in the U.S.D.A.’s top two farmland categories, which would remain labeled as prime even if the code were changed, but woodland or cemetery lots that are not farmed.

    Mr. Talmage said at the board meeting Tuesday that his family has seen an “erosion of at least 80 percent of my land value, because of what I would call improper zoning.” The property was once zoned for one-acre house lots, but was upzoned to two-acre minimum lots and then upzoned again for a minimum of five-acre lots, saying that the primary reason for the upzoning was that it was considered prime agricultural soils.

    “The whole thing just smacks of injustice to me,” Ms. Wiltshire said after the board meeting on Tuesday. The Talmage family, she said at the meeting, has been in East Hampton for generations. And, she said, “they have had their rights taken away over and over and over again based on misinformation.”

    Mr. Talmage urged the board to rectify the discrepancy. “You say it’s too much work. I say do the work. Are you going to take the high road, or are you going to take the low road?”

    Ms. Quigley suggested that the Talmages seek a variance from the Zoning Board of Appeals allowing them to proceed with a standard subdivision. But, said John Jilnicki, the town attorney, variances from the open space subdivision chapter of the town code are not allowed.

    The councilwoman agreed to seek more information from the Planning Department about the townwide impact of a code change. But the board, she said, should pursue other “possible legislative corrections . . . without changing everything in East Hampton.”

    Courtney Sale Ross, who founded the Ross School in East Hampton more than 20 years ago, is officially plotting a new course.

    Going forward, she will spend increasing amounts of time moored not to East Hampton but enjoying the freedom of the open seas — as she plans to travel the world on a private yacht.

    In late January, Mrs. Ross, as she prefers to be called, convened a meeting with faculty and staff to inform them of her plans. For many faculty members, it had been several months since she had been seen on either the Lower School or Upper School’s campus.

    During her protracted absence last fall, rumors began circulating concerning a possible illness. To the relief of many, Mrs. Ross appeared in good health in January.

    While she did not specifically address any rumors concerning her whereabouts, she did share a picture of her yacht and in so doing, hinted at what was likely to unfold during the next chapter of her life.

    In recent years, though faculty members do not see much of Mrs. Ross when it comes to the day-to-day functioning of the school, she has remained an ever-present influence. Further, as not only the school’s founder but also its primary benefactor, Mrs. Ross’s forthcoming absence is but the latest ripple in an environment described by some parents as chaotic and unstable.

    At the staff meeting on Jan. 31, which convened in the Upper School’s lecture hall, she expressed confidence in the school’s leadership, intimating that she didn’t need to be there as often as she might have in years past. Also, while she planned to travel by boat, she assured faculty and staff members that she would remain plugged in and connected to what was happening at each of the school’s two campuses.

    Requests to speak directly to Mrs. Ross and to Gregg Maloberti, the interim head of the school, were both denied.

    Patti Silver, who chairs Ross’s board of overseers, serves on its board of trustees, and is also a parent, provided a statement through the school’s New York City-based marketing and communications firm.

    In the statement, she affirmed that a late January faculty and staff meeting had indeed taken place, with Mrs. Ross informing the group “that she plans to spend a great deal of time during the next few years traveling and revisiting her passion for exploring diverse cultures and environments, which were the genesis of the Ross School.”

    Ms. Silver said that she also discussed issues related to the “school’s fiscal and academic stability as evidenced by the school’s new leadership team, the expansion of the board of overseers, and the phenomenal start to the academic year at all grade levels.”

    She concluded the statement by noting: “Even though Mrs. Ross will be on campus less in person, as chairman of the board of trustees, she will maintain a digital presence through media and technology and continue to lead the school’s mission to be at the forefront of innovation and excellence.”

    At 64, Mrs. Ross appears to be making more than a few changes as far as her geography is concerned.

    A longtime resident of East Hampton, Mrs. Ross recently put her Georgia Pond estate on the market for $75 million. It is a change in location confined to not only the East End.

    Last spring, after being listed for several years, her Park Avenue duplex apartment on the Upper East Side finally sold for $52.5 million. It set a record for the most expensive co-op sale in Manhattan’s history. Three years ago, Mrs. Ross purchased a $7.3 million loft in Tribeca, preferring instead to live in a smaller apartment downtown.

    The Ross School officially got its start in 1991, when she and her late husband, the former Time Warner chairman Stephen J. Ross, started it as a sort of home-school experiment for their only daughter, Nicole, and two of her friends. It has since grown to serve approximately 500 students from pre-nursery through 12th grade — including a growing number of international boarding students.

    While faculty and staff have been informed of Mrs. Ross’s travel plans, parents had yet to receive any official notice.

    The handful of parents interviewed didn’t seem all that concerned by her shifting coordinates, saying that checks could still be written and that money could still be wired from aboard a yacht.

    Some even expressed a sense of relief, pointing out that her leadership often carried with it a certain degree of impulsiveness — whether evident in making Mandarin mandatory for all Ross students last year, delaying the distribution of computers after deciding that carpets suddenly needed to be replaced, or in the high rate of attrition among many of the school’s teachers and administrators.

    Despite expressing gratitude for Mrs. Ross’ largesse, nearly all parents expressed a desire for the school to achieve more sound and stable financial footing. Going forward, many hoped for an endowment that would help protect both the school’s growth and allow for expansion in the years to come.