A public workshop for the East Hampton Village comprehensive plan, which was last updated in 2002, will happen Friday from 6 to 8 p.m. at the East Hampton Emergency Services Building on Cedar Street.
The meeting, which follows workshops in December 2024 and May 2025, will include a presentation and an opportunity for the public to comment. Residents have been strongly encouraged to attend, ask questions, and share feedback before the village’s comprehensive plan committee finalizes its recommendations to the village board, which will conduct its own public hearing as part of the adoption process.
The plan will look at land use, housing, transportation, economic growth, environmental sustainability, and overall quality of life in order to provide a vision for the village’s future and a framework for decision making. It is also to guide future zoning decisions to align with the goals for those issues, ensuring that decisions impacting growth are part of a coordinated effort to promote orderly development, protect resources, and enhance quality of life.
A draft comprehensive plan has been posted on the project’s website, at bit.ly/ehvplan. The document incorporates findings from previous public workshops and online engagement, all aimed at ensuring the plan reflects community priorities. The draft remains a working document, and village officials have stressed that public input is essential.
The comprehensive plan website includes summaries of past events and is updated regularly with project news. Residents can sign up to receive email notifications.
The village has engaged BFJ Planning of Manhattan to lead the process.
Approximately 60 people attended the December 2024 workshop, which was intended to inform the public about the comprehensive plan and begin the discussion of what the village should focus on for the next 10 years. At that workshop, many familiar quality-of-life concerns Participants, who following a presentation broke into small groups for a discussion of matters of importance, took part in a series of straw polls. Asked which two issues should be prioritized in the village center, more shopping offerings for the year-round population and reducing traffic congestion received the most votes, with more restaurant offerings and maintaining or improving the village’s look and feel close behind. With regard to transportation, speeding in residential neighborhoods and congestion in the village center were the most popular responses, followed by new crosswalks for pedestrian safety.
Regarding recreation and cultural issues of importance, respondents gave preservation of open space and historic buildings the highest priority. As for sustainability and resilience, water quality and conservation were prioritized, followed by stormwater management and protection of plant and wildlife habitat.
“We’ve lost housing, we’ve lost the mom-and-pop feel of year-round shopping,” Beverly Kazickas, a member of the village’s comprehensive plan committee, said at that workshop. But she spoke for many when she referred to a feeling that if the commercial district were expanded, “there would simply be more luxury stores, and not what people are looking for year round.”
At the second workshop, via video conference on May 1, 2025, the consultant team presented visions and potential strategies for topics covered in the plan. Participants answered poll questions, providing a sense of priorities for certain issues and ideas. After a presentation, participants broke into discussion groups of around 10. Each group’s moderator then presented the key points of their conversations to the larger group.
A summary of each workshop can be found on the village’s website.
While East Hampton Town’s population has grown considerably over the last several years, the village’s declined from around 2,000 in 1980 to around 1,000 in 2010 before rebounding to around 1,300, and swelling by a factor of five in the summer months, according to Emily Tolbert of BFJ Planning. The village has a high proportion of retirees, its median age 57.4, she said. The number of residents over 65 increased by about 29 percent between 2010 and 2020, and East Hampton’s kindergarten through 12th grade school enrollment declined by 10 percent over the last two decades.
The number of housing units increased from 1,684 in 1990 to an estimated 1,821 in 2022, with more than 60 percent used seasonally or occasionally. The median house price, Ms. Tolbert said, was nearly $5.2 million.
