As part of its efforts to reduce energy consumption during peak electricity demand, the Town of East Hampton has installed energy-saving LED (light-emitting diode) fixtures and “smart” thermostats at town buildings. They have been installed at no cost to the town, under the South Fork Peak Savers incentive program launched last fall. 

To date, more than 400 light fixtures and bulbs have been replaced at the town offices at 300 Pantigo Place and the E.M.S. technical services building. Replacing fluorescent and incandescent lighting with LED products saves 50 to 90 percent of lighting costs and energy consumption. The upgrades are expected to save around 40,000 kilowatt-hours per year. 

East Hampton residential and business owners are eligible for similar free rebate offers, including smart thermostats for central air-conditioning systems, energy audits, lighting upgrades for commercial customers, and rebates of up to $950 for energy-efficient swimming pool pumps. 

According to Applied Energy Group, the energy industry consultancy that runs the South Fork Peak Savers incentive, more than 1,500 residential and commercial smart thermostats are enrolled in the program, with customer savings approaching $1 million per year. The energy savings are equivalent to taking 800 cars off the road for one year, precluding the release of 4,000 tons of carbon dioxide. 

“I’m pleased that we upgraded the first two of our facilities with state-of-the-art energy-efficiency lighting and thermostats, which will reduce energy consumption while saving money on utility bills,” Supervisor Peter Van Scoyoc said in a statement issued Monday. “I encourage every homeowner and every business owner to take advantage of the free and heavily rebated energy-saving programs available via the Energize East Hampton initiative.” 

“Whether you are replacing hundreds of light fixtures in a town facility or a single thermostat in your home or office, it just makes sense to save energy,” Councilwoman Sylvia Overby, who is the liaison to the town’s energy sustainability committee, said in the same release. “It not only saves money, but it also reduces the need for more fossil-fueled power plants and costly transmission lines.” 

Bruce Humenik, A.E.G.’s executive vice president, said in the same statement that “it has been a pleasure working with the Town of East Hampton. We applaud East Hampton for its ambitious sustainability goals and look forward to our continued partnership.” 

Residential and business owners can learn more and sign up for free and rebated energy saving and solar programs through Energize East Hampton’s website, energizeeh.org. Partners in the Energize East Hampton initiative include the town, Long Island Green Homes, Renewable Energy Long Island, and South Fork Peak Savers. Additional information is available at southforkpeaksavers.com or by calling 833-346-2181.

After a consultant conducting hamlet studies for East Hampton Town delivered an update to the town board on Tuesday, the board decided that each hamlet should have its own public hearing, the first of which may be held as soon as next month. 

The studies began in 2015, with public input beginning the following year. The consultants, Peter Flinker of Dodson and Flinker, a Massachusetts consulting firm, and Lisa Liquori of Fine Arts and Sciences, a former town planning director, have presented updates since then based on public comment from individuals, the hamlets’ citizens advisory committees, chambers of commerce, and East Hampton Village. The goal is to adopt recommendations for each hamlet to be incorporated into the town’s comprehensive plan. 

On Tuesday, Ms. Liquori asked if the board felt the studies were ready for public hearings now or if they should be further modified. After some debate, Supervisor Peter Van Scoyoc said the board would schedule the hearings and review any comments before determining any environmental impacts under the State Environmental Quality Review Act. The studies would then be forwarded to the Suffolk County Planning Commission, which would have 30 days to respond. 

A vote to adopt the recommendations would follow. But adoption, Mr. Van Scoyoc said, was “a broader stroke” than other regulatory legislation necessary to put recommendations into effect. The next step, he said, would be to “look at creating zoning laws or other means of regulation” to legalize the recommendations.

Councilman David Lys, the board’s liaison to the Amagansett Citizens Advisory Committee, said that he and the committee both felt that further development, or redevelopment within the present allowable density, of that hamlet’s eastern portion, near the I.G.A. supermarket and post office, was ill advised. Nonetheless, the board’s consensus was to leave the Amagansett study as is for a public hearing. 

In East Hampton, the raising of the railroad trestles over North Main Street and Accabonac Road is expected to allow greater truck traffic on both. The board indicated that a wait-and-see approach to how traffic patterns will change, and how traffic lights might be reprogrammed to better coordinate altered patterns, made sense. That hamlet study was accepted in its present form. 

Montauk’s hamlet study focused on its downtown, harbor, and train station areas. While the addition of roundabouts near Second House and at the confluence of the firehouse, Playhouse, and Long Island Rail Road station on Flamingo Avenue was generally opposed, Mr. Van Scoyoc recommended keeping them in the study’s recommendations for the public hearing. 

In Wainscott, where the board voted in June to extend a moratorium on development of properties zoned for central business or commercial-industrial uses for six months to allow the hamlet study’s completion, “a more walkable hamlet” and “get rid of the strip-mall feel” are oft-heard goals, Mr. Van Scoyoc said. 

A more unified architectural aesthetic, relocation of the post office, and the burial of overhead electricity transmission lines are other goals put forth by Wainscott’s citizens advisory committee, Councilman Jeff Bragman, its liaison, said. “My feeling at this point is, it’s shaped up enough to put in a public hearing,” he said. 

The Springs hamlet study is also ready to move to public hearing, said Councilwoman Kathee Burke-Gonzalez, the board’s liaison to its citizens advisory committee. 

Public hearings could be scheduled “just after Labor Day,” Mr. Van Scoyoc said.

Code violations issued in the Town of East Hampton fell by roughly 100 in the first six months of 2018 over last year, the town’s public safety director told the town board on Tuesday, and a crackdown on out-of-town taxi companies is largely responsible, he said. 

In a year-to-date report to the board, David Betts said that 1,279 violations were recorded from January through June, versus 1,372 in the same period last year. “If you look at taxi validation, that’s about the difference,” he said. 

Taxi companies are required to register with the town using a local business address, and all taxis must have a town permit sticker. Taxi validations are down from 241 to 80, Mr. Betts said, because “if a company doesn’t come out here to have an office, we don’t do the inspection of the cab.” That, he said, translates to “161 taxicabs that are not operating in the Town of East Hampton at this point.” 

But violations related to contractor licenses, which are also required, as well as parking, have increased, Mr. Betts said. Enforcement efforts for the former, he said, “have gone up dramatically, almost 25 percent.” In the first six months of 2018, 123 violations were issued, versus 96 in the same period last year. “Parking tickets are dramatically increased as well,” he said. Last year, 88 violations were issued through June; 126 were issued in the first six months of 2018. 

Violations issued for artists’ studios fell from 124 to 98, Mr. Betts said. Such structures, which sometimes morph into habitable space, are inspected annually. “Some of them have stopped claiming use as an artist studio,” he said. 

Violations of determinations by the architectural review board, zoning board of appeals, and planning board stood at eight through June, versus 27 in the same period last year. Separately, violations of the zoning code, such as noncompliance with required setbacks, or pertaining to structures like fences or decks, are down from 243 to 208. 

Twelve violations were issued for peddling without a license through June, versus just one in the same period last year. Violators were often peddling wares from vehicles parked on commercial and public property, Mr. Betts said. 

Environmental infractions, such as illegal clearing of vegetation or improper drainage of a swimming pool, were down by just one, from 164 to 163.

Safety violations, such as open foundations or swimming pools that are not properly fenced, rose from 98 to 109, Mr. Betts said. 

Housing violations have fallen from 92 to 54. Rental registry violations fell to 28 from 31. Lighting violations were up slightly, from 8 to 12, but residential noise infractions fell from 36 to 20. 

Eight citations related to peace and good order — public consumption of alcoholic beverages and public urination are the common infractions — were issued between January and June, versus three in the first six months of 2017. Signage violations fell in the first six months of 2018 over 2017, 31 to 26. 

Violations of state code, which Mr. Betts said are mostly to do with property maintenance, were nearly static: 41 in the first six months of 2018, one more than the same period last year. 

“Keeping compliance throughout the town is not just about enforcing rules,” Supervisor Peter Van Scoyoc said. “It’s really about public safety as well.” He referred to the town’s execution of a warrant last week that resulted in the discovery that 32 unrelated people were residing in a four-bedroom house, 18 of them apparently sleeping in the basement, where a gasoline generator and storage tank were situated. 

“It’s comforting to know not only that the quality of life issues are being addressed through code enforcement, but it’s also public safety,” he said.

The East Hampton Town Board plans to buy a property on Three Mile Harbor in East Hampton at which to relocate the town’s shellfish hatchery, which is at present based on Fort Pond Bay in Montauk. 

The property to be purchased is adjacent to a shellfish nursery site in Three Mile Harbor. Moving the hatchery would consolidate the town’s aquaculture program, under which waterways are seeded with juvenile clams, scallops, and oysters. The effort is aimed at both restoring shellfish populations, which were decimated by algal blooms in the 1980s, and promoting healthier waterways, as the bivalves filter water as they feed. 

The board held a public hearing on the $2.1 million purchase of a 1.2-acre property at its meeting last Thursday. Of that price, $1.4 million would come from the community preservation fund, which can be used for water quality initiatives.

The hatchery’s present location, said Supervisor Peter Van Scoyoc, is less than ideal. The water there is colder than Three Mile Harbor during spawning season, and its nutrient content is lower, he said. Moreover, transporting the juvenile shellfish for placement in the nursery involves “some mortality” while also costing the town in the time spent by staff. 

“It has long been a goal to find another location that is more suitable,” he said. “Having all that in one location is much more efficient.” 

Structures on the property, other than the existing residence, would be removed, Scott Wilson, the town’s director of land acquisition and management, told the board. Its sanitary system would be upgraded and a permeable reactive barrier might be installed to intercept groundwater as it seeps into the harbor, he said, and bioswales and rain gardens, should they be installed on the property, would also treat runoff. 

The property may be equipped with solar panels, Councilman David Lys said this week, and serve as an environmental education center, demonstrating to the public the importance of clean, healthy waterways and how to achieve them.

The derelict structure that once housed the Swamp, for decades a landmark disco and gathering place for the gay community — as well as having been, in later years, the popular Star Room nightclub — was torn down late last week. 

The Town of East Hampton brought out the bulldozers to demolish the long-abandoned building as part of an ongoing effort to revitalize the business district of Wainscott, according to Michael Sendlenski, the town attorney. The town had been wrestling with the question of what should become of the site since at least 2015. 

The area in Wainscott is notable for having historically been home to a series of gay-friendly nightspots dating back to the late 1940s, which also included a dance hall and restaurant called Out of This World that catered to the Broadway theater crowd (near the present-day Cozy Cabins) and the Attic, farther east on Montauk Highway. The Star Room, which was not a gay club in that tradition, was popular in the early 2000s, attracting television and tabloid stars with D.J.s flown in from Miami and $400 table-service charges.

The 1.1-acre, commercially zoned property may become a park. The town acquired it for $2.1 million in January, using money from the community preservation fund and a $300,000 donation from the Friends of Georgica Pond Foundation, a not-for-profit organization founded by pondfront property owners dedicated to identifying sources of pollutants contributing to the algal blooms that have fouled Georgica Pond repeatedly over the years. 

A car wash had been proposed for the old Swamp and Star Room parcel, but that plan was met by opposition from community members, who raised concerns about increased traffic and the environmental impacts of a car wash. 

The buildings on the property, untouched for several years, were last privately owned by the estate of Isha Kausik.

The East Hampton Independence Party is under fire for accusations that petitions it filed with the Suffolk County Board of Elections nominating David Gruber as its candidate for town councilman are fraudulent, containing eight forged signatures and the name of a person who died in 2016. 

“We have a stack of affidavits saying, ‘I didn’t sign this,’ ” Amos Goodman, chairman of the East Hampton Town Republican Committee, said last week of several signatures on the Independence Party’s nominating petitions for Mr. Gruber. “We’re going to go to court to get him bounced” from the Independence Party line on the Nov. 6 ballot, he vowed. 

Manny Vilar and Gerard Larsen, who ran unsuccessfully for East Hampton Town supervisor and councilman on the Republican Party line last year, are petitioners in a suit filed on July 25 seeking to invalidate the petitions and thus the Independence Party’s nomination of Mr. Gruber, who is also set to face Councilman David Lys in a Sept. 13 Democratic Party primary election. 

The Independence Party announced its selection of Mr. Gruber as its candidate on July 14. The suit, which cites several additional irregularities in the nominating petitions, seeks to bar the board of elections from including Mr. Gruber’s name on Independence Party ballots for the primary or general elections. He was to appear at a hearing this morning at State Supreme Court in Riverhead, but it has been adjourned until Friday, Aug. 10. 

Mr. Larsen is a registered Independence Party member. Last year, he, Mr. Vilar, and their running mate on the Republican ticket, Paul Giardina, sought but did not receive the party’s nomination for supervisor and councilmen. Mr. Larsen attempted to force an Independence Party primary, but a state appellate court overturned an earlier decision and his effort failed over a minor flaw in the wording of his petitions. 

A July 17 release from the Republican Committee announcing Mr. Vilar’s candidacy for town board stated that Lisa Mulhern Larsen, Mr. Larsen’s wife, who made her own unsuccessful bid for town board in 2015, had considered a run this year but ultimately abandoned the idea and threw her support to Mr. Vilar. Ms. Mulhern Larsen is a member of the Independence Party.

Last week, Elaine Jones, chairwoman of the East Hampton Independence Party, accused the Republican Party of “trying to hijack the Independence Party” by “getting Independence people to run primaries.” Ms. Jones implied that Mr. Goodman tried to blackmail her, threatening to challenge the Independence Party’s petitions if the party would not allow a primary challenge by Mr. Vilar. 

Mr. Goodman dismissed the accusation of attempting to force Mr. Vilar onto the Independence Party line. “Frankly, I believe that we have to do things differently as a Republican Party if we’re going to have different results,” he said last week, referring to Mr. Larsen’s effort to force an Independence Party primary last year. “Part of that is applying strict scrutiny the way it applies to us. So when you see Jerry Larsen bounced off” an Independence Party primary bid in 2017, “you’re damn right I’m going to look at the petitions.” Ms. Jones “can call that blackmail,” he said. “It’s not.” 

Mr. Goodman said that an investigator who examined the Independence Party’s nominating petitions found them riddled with fraudulent signatures, and predicted that enough will be deemed invalid to scuttle the Independence Party’s appearance on the November ballot. The party needs 54 signatures to put a candidate on the ballot. Of the 73 it submitted, the Republican committee charges that 32 are invalid, which, if substantiated, would leave them short of the requirement. “This was forgery, filing a false instrument,” Mr. Goodman said. 

Ms. Jones fired back yesterday, saying that she wished she had filed a challenge to the Republicans’ petitions, citing signatures and addresses she said were illegible and suggesting that many had been written by the same person. The deadline to challenge petitions was July 16, according to an official with the board of elections. 

In a press release he issued on Tuesday, Mr. Gruber questioned Mr. Goodman’s motives, saying that he “simultaneously carried nominating petitions for Mr. Vilar in the Republican Party and for Lisa Larsen in the Independence Party. It is highly unusual, to say the least, for a party chair to seek to nominate someone else to run on another line against his own candidate.” It was clear, he said, that Ms. Larsen’s nomination “was only a maneuver” by Mr. Goodman to put Mr. Vilar on the Independence Party line, “although the Independence Party does not want him there.” 

Earlier on Tuesday, Mr. Gruber said that he was grateful for the Independence Party’s endorsement but, as he is not a member, he had no control over the process. “I discovered, to my chagrin, that legally and formally, I am the respondent in the petition filed to invalidate those petitions,” he said. “Never having been involved in this, I was unaware. I’m trying to figure out what is the appropriate response.” 

“In a sense,” he said of the Independence Party, “I consider myself essentially a guest in their house. I am very grateful for their endorsement,” he said, pointing to “their recognition that I am very concerned about the fate of the local community here, which I think is their dominant concern.” 

He acknowledged that being kept off the Independence Party line on Election Day would be “a big disappointment,” but the Sept. 13 Democratic primary in which he will face Mr. Lys is “far more critical.”

Nothing less than the long-term viability of waterfront houses on Gardiner’s Bay is in the hands of the East Hampton Town Zoning Board of Appeals, according to an attorney and contractor representing a Cranberry Hole Road, Amagansett, property owner, and while the long-term solution is an erosion control district, in which a large-scale beach nourishment and dune reconstruction project would be undertaken, an existing sandbag revetment should be allowed to remain between a house and the beach for as long as five years. 

That was the message delivered to the board at its July 17 meeting by representatives of Nigel Curtiss of 393 Cranberry Hole Road.

With Gardiner’s Bay lapping ever closer to Mr. Curtiss’s house, “I don’t know if it’s going to be here next year, in 10 years, next week, or even tomorrow,” Richard A. Hammer, the attorney, told the board. “These things are very tenuous under the current situation.” 

The hearing, Mr. Hammer said, was “an opportunity for us to begin a discussion of one of the single most important issues affecting this particular stretch of coastline: the sustainability of approximately 30 houses” between the Devon Yacht Club and the defunct fish processing factory at Promised Land. 

But the house is in a coastal erosion hazard zone where erosion structures are prohibited, a prohibition based, Mr. Hammer said, on the absence of any such existing structures when the zone was established. “However,” he said, “even in the Planning Department’s own analysis, it documents a loss of 44 feet of protected dune land.” Historical aerial photographs, he said, indicate that the property has lost around 110 feet of protected dune in front of it since about 1962. 

The town’s Building Department issued an emergency permit allowing the revetment’s construction in September 2017, under a provision allowing sandbags for up to six months with the possibility of a three-month extension. 

“It was pretty much already known that we would be requesting some form of relief on this property absent some large, comprehensive solution,” Mr. Hammer said. “It just wasn’t known exactly when we would be here. I will guarantee that unless we take a more long-range view of these issues, pretty much all of the adjacent properties will be in front of you . . . for more permanent relief from the town code to protect their houses before they’re obviously consumed by the bay.” 

The applicant needs immediate protection of his house, Mr. Hammer said; the sandbag revetment is “a placeholder” to provide some protection pending a long-term solution. 

That solution, said Aram Terchunian, a coastal geologist and owner of First Coastal, a Westhampton Beach consulting and contracting company, is a beach nourishment project akin to that conducted by his firm on the ocean beach in Sagaponack, which he said had been successful. 

Hard structures in the waters at the fish factory, where oceangoing vessels once docked in deep berths, are responsible for erosion at Mr. Curtiss’s property and others nearby, Mr. Terchunian said. He referred to a “classic jetty-inlet situation, without the inlet,” in which a hard structure interrupts the natural movement of sand, building up beach in one location while eroding it in others. “This caused the entire system to be thrown out of equilibrium,” he said. 

Adding sea level rise to the equation, “An unprotected dune and doing nothing spells catastrophe for this entire stretch,” he said. “Mr. Curtiss is just one of the first in that line.” 

In his experience, the creation of an erosion control district, beach nourishment, and dune reconstruction would span five years. “We’re looking at doing an erosion control district,” he said. “But we have to survive between today and when we can implement a project like this.” 

But Brian Frank, the town’s chief environmental analyst, offered the board a different perspective. Many of the town’s regulations exist to protect the beaches. “The town code identifies beaches as the signature of the town,” he said, “and, without me using hyperbole, uses the language that they are perhaps the single most important economic assets of the town.” 

This, he said, is why erosion control structures are a concern. A revetment such as Mr. Curtiss’s “results in accelerated erosion in front of the structures, and results in flank, or scour, erosion at either end.” That, in turn, prompts adjoining property owners to install their own structures. “This domino effect proliferates and results in extensive areas of beach loss,” Mr. Frank said. Mr. Curtiss’s application, he said, does not meet the town’s standards for an erosion control structure. 

Scour erosion at either end of the revetment was evident after each of the northeasters of last winter and spring, Mr. Frank said. “You have a loss of resource. This is what the town’s regulations against coastal erosion structures are intended to prevent: the permanent and irretrievable loss of resource. And if you have this thing sitting here for the next five years, I don’t see how you’re going to mitigate those impacts over that time period.” 

The emergency permit granted Mr. Curtiss last year “was to put a Band-Aid on that problem and prevent somebody from losing their house while a more long-term solution was developed,” he said, “ideally before the end of that six or nine-month period, not coming to you at the end of it here.” 

Mr. Curtiss bought the property in 2015, Mr. Frank said. “It was already a rough situation. We’ve got to break this cycle of going back and finding culprits that are 50, 60, 70, 100 years old, to say, ‘Because of something that was done there, we have to do something that is similarly damaging to the resources now, out of necessity.’ ”

Samuel Kramer, the board’s vice chairman, presiding in the absence of the chairman, John Whelan, asked Mr. Frank if he would object to a short-term variance allowing the revetment to remain while Mr. Curtiss pursued an erosion control district. There is no assurance that such a district would be created, was the reply. Moreover, Mr. Frank said, an erosion control district’s efficacy is unknown, given the reality of climate change and sea level rise. 

“I do think you’re going to have to take a look at making alterations to the structure for long-term viability,” he said, perhaps relocating it landward, perhaps raising it on pilings. 

Mr. Terchunian said that the two sides shared “a tremendous amount of common ground,” and asked the board to be mindful that “if nothing happens, the consequences are very severe, and it’s not just this house, it’s going to be a bunch of houses, and it’s going to happen in a very short period of time.”

The hearing was closed, but Mr. Kramer said that the record would be left open so that Mr. Hammer could respond to points Mr. Frank had raised.

Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo on Monday called on Ryan Zinke, the secretary of the interior, to support New York’s offshore wind initiative by delineating and leasing at least four new wind energy areas recommended by the State’s Offshore Wind Master Plan. The governor’s letter, issued on the heels of a report that President Trump is hostile to wind power, also enclosed the state’s comments on the federal Bureau of Ocean Energy Management’s Call for Information and Nominations, which closed on Monday. 

“New York’s commitment to offshore wind is real and unwavering,” the governor wrote to Mr. Zinke. “Our first 90 megawatts of offshore wind energy” — a reference to Deepwater Wind’s proposed South Fork Wind Farm — “are already underway, we have initiated a process to procure at least an additional 800 megawatts by 2019, and the U.S. Department of Energy recently selected the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority to head the National Offshore Wind Research and Development Consortium.”

This represents merely a beginning, the governor wrote, as the state aims to develop 2.4 gigawatts of offshore wind energy by 2030. “The realization of that goal will create thousands of new jobs and offer New Yorkers overwhelming benefits in the form of lower energy costs, a more resilient power grid, and a cleaner environment,” he wrote.

New York’s commitment to offshore wind, he said, “is smarter, cleaner, and safer than the frightening federal proposal to allow offshore drilling. Instead of trying to revive the fossil fuel industry, I call on you to join us in our efforts to build a 21st-century clean energy economy.”

The Trump administration said at the beginning of this year that it would allow new offshore oil and gas drilling in nearly all coastal waters, including along the Eastern Seaboard. A spill, the governor wrote to Mr. Zinke, “would threaten 60 percent of our state’s population that live along our tidal coastline and put at risk the tens of billions of dollars in economic activity and hundreds of thousands of jobs created by our ocean economy. Now is not the time to trade our coastal ecosystem, our fisheries and ports, and our marine and other wildlife for greenhouse gas-emitting fossil fuels.”

The governor’s call for support of offshore wind development closely followed a report on the news website Axios stating that Mr. Trump has “a visceral hatred of wind turbines,” believing that they offer a poor return on investment, blight coastlines, and obstruct views. “Trump has even told officials to ‘think of all the birds’ that wind turbines are killing,” according to Axios, “though sources familiar with these comments tell us they doubt the president actually cares about endangered wildlife.”

Nonetheless, Axios’s Amy Harder and Jonathan Swan wrote, the administration’s energy policy is contradictory. For example, Mr. Zinke’s department “is working with Democratic-led state governments to lease federal waters for wind off Massachusetts and nearby states, and also working to streamline permitting to make it easier for companies to build offshore wind farms.”

Suffolk County Executive Steve Bellone has endorsed Perry Gershon’s campaign to represent New York’s First Congressional District. Mr. Gershon, who lives in East Hampton, won the June 26 Democratic primary and will challenge the incumbent, Representative Lee Zeldin, in the Nov. 6 election. 

“Perry Gershon has a proven track record of success as a small-business owner and job creator,” Mr. Bellone, a Democrat, said in a statement, “and I know he’ll use that experience in Congress to bring real change to New York’s First Congressional District. He’s going to Washington to address the biggest problems facing our district, including access to quality and affordable health care and lifting the caps on our state and property tax deductions. Perry is the representative we deserve and need fighting for our best interests, and that’s why I am proud to endorse his candidacy.”

Mr. Gershon’s campaign opened a Southampton office last weekend and plans to open an office in Farmingville shortly.

Assemblyman Fred W. Thiele Jr. and State Senator Kenneth P. LaValle passed a three-bill package to promote water quality protection. The bills passed both houses of the Legislature by overwhelming margins and will be submitted to Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo to sign into law. 

One bill would authorize towns in the Peconic Bay region to establish a septic system replacement loan program using money from the community preservation fund, a portion of which can be allocated to water quality improvement projects. As set forth in the bill, towns may require loans made under the program to be repaid by the property owner through a charge on the property benefited. Such a charge would be levied and collected in the same manner as town taxes. Revenue received by the town from the repayment of loans would be deposited back into the community preservation fund. Towns would be authorized to use a combination of grants and loans to incentivize septic system upgrades.

Another bill would clarify existing law by authorizing the use of the community preservation fund for the construction of public water mains and connections to provide drinking water to inhabitants whose drinking water supply has been contaminated by toxic chemicals, hazardous substances, or emerging contaminants. The East Hampton Town Board recently declared a state of emergency for residential wells in Wainscott that were discovered to be contaminated with perfluorinated compounds. Last month, it voted to enter into an inter-municipal agreement with the Suffolk County Water Authority to jointly apply for grant funding to extend water mains to affected properties. 

The third bill would authorize local laws requiring the monitoring of groundwater impacts resulting from mining or the reclamation of mines within a county with a population of one million or more that draws its primary source of drinking water for a majority of residents from a designated sole-source aquifer. 

“All levels of government are working together to address the problem of declining water quality on Long Island as we see increasing incidents of contamination from sources as diverse as sand mines, nitrogen, and emerging chemicals,” Mr. Thiele said in a statement, “The State Legislature must provide not only money but other tools to combat the continuing health threat to our water resources. Increased water quality monitoring, extension of public water, and nitrogen reduction through septic system upgrades are all steps to restoring our water quality. We urge the governor to give these tools to our local governments.”