Government

Gov. Kathy Hochul visited the South Fork last week with good news not just for coastal resiliency in Montauk, but also for the Retreat, a domestic violence response and advocacy group in East Hampton.

On a visit to the South Fork Friday, Gov. Kathy Hochul announced that the state will contritibute $2.5 million toward the second phase of a dune replenishment project at Ditch Plain in Montauk. East Hampton Town has already budgeted $1.75 million for the project.

The application process for the Green at Gardiner’s Point, the East Hampton Housing Authority's newest affordable housing project, opened up only two months ago, but 543 applications for the Three Mile Harbor Road project have come in since. On Friday, Katy Casey, executive director of the housing authority, presided over a preliminary lottery, to assign the order in which applicants will be vetted.

Updated plans for what East Hampton Town Supervisor Kathee Burke-Gonzalez is calling the Center for Modern Aging, include a new location for solar panels, different siding, and lower ceilings in some common rooms, but some town board members are wondering if the town is missing some opportunities with even the latest proposed design.

Forget the white pants or the crisp, sky blue shirts. Traffic-cone orange is the color of summer 2024 in East Hampton Village. “It’s a disaster. We want to make sure residents understand it’s not the village doing the work, it’s the D.O.T.,” Marcos Baladron, the village administrator, said about the multiple construction zones that have been impacting travel along Route 27, a state road that doubles as the village’s Main Street.

With mosquito samples from the South Fork so far testing negative for West Nile virus, East Hampton Town and other areas on the South Fork have avoided the county's aerial spraying this season, but that could change. “We’re still only halfway through the season. I would expect to see some West Nile virus activity in our traps in the coming weeks,” a Suffolk Health Department official said.

Moody’s Investors Service Inc., whose credit-rating system is widely used by lenders working with municipalities and school districts, has once again awarded its best possible rating to East Hampton Town. 

On the website of the federal Citizenship and Immigration Services agency, these words appear in big letters, announcing an even bigger policy shift: “Process to Promote the Unity and Stability of Families.” For undocumented residents of the U.S. who have lived here for at least 10 years and are married to American citizens, that means there will be a new opportunity to lawfully obtain a green card.

Suffolk County Executive Ed Romaine is lobbying New York State for the county to get its fair share of money and resources. With that push, he said, come plans to address some of the most pervasive issues on the South Fork: the suffocating traffic on County Road 39, gaps in public transportation services, water quality improvements, and long-term plans for individual towns to handle municipal solid waste.

Tommy John Schiavoni of North Haven, who is running on the Democratic ticket for New York State Assembly, picked up a big endorsement last week when Senator Chuck Schumer announced his support for the Southampton Town councilman’s candidacy. 

Former President Donald Trump will be traveling to Bridgehampton Friday afternoon, and Southampton Town has warned of extensive road closures and heavy gridlock as his motorcade makes its way from Gabreski Airport in Westhampton Beach to Bridgehampton.

A proposed 10,500-square-foot house with a rooftop kitchen and pool, to be built atop rare and pristine duneland on Napeague, got the unanimous approval this month of the East Hampton Town Zoning Board of Appeals, whose chairwoman called it a “significant environmental improvement” to a site that could accommodate three houses, three septic systems, and three driveways.

“I was shocked when I learned I was in a water recharge overlay, I had no information about this,” the owner of a property on Wainscott Northwest Road said at an East Hampton Town Zoning Board of Appeals meeting where he was seeking to overturn a ruling by Joseph Palermo, the town’s chief building inspector, that the parcel had been overcleared.

In the hours and days following President Biden’s announcements on Sunday afternoon that he was ending his bid for re-election and endorsing Vice President Kamala Harris, Democrats here on Long Island and across the country have begun to largely coalesce behind Vice President Harris as they react to this political earthquake.

The East Hampton Town Board has set Aug. 15 as the date for three important public hearings. One deals with adjustments to the town’s lighting code, another with the alienation of parkland at the intersection of Three Mile Harbor and Springs-Fireplace Roads in East Hampton, and the third with increasing the maximum density allowed per acre for senior citizen-only affordable housing developments. 

Southampton Town has announced that it is accepting applications from people living or working in town who are interested in buying a house or building an accessory apartment onto their existing home, “part of a broader strategy to address housing affordability,” the town said in a release.

The New York State Department of Environmental Conservation closes Three Mile Harbor to shellfishing before, during, and after the Clamshell Foundation’s annual fireworks show there, but have the East Hampton Town Trustees ever tested the water before and after the event to gauge the impact of the increased boat traffic?

Playing out in the background of the rather apocalyptic and very visible destruction of the East End’s native pitch pines has been an equally devastating disease killing beech trees. With that in mind, East Hampton Town is working on ways to help residents remove dangerous trees, without running afoul of clearing restrictions.

The Eastville Community Historical Society has received an emergency $25,000 grant from the East Hampton Town Board to help pay for a new cedar shake roof at its headquarters on Hampton Road in Sag Harbor.

Expect delays on Route 114 between East Hampton and Sag Harbor from Monday through Friday, July 26, as New York State creates new turning lanes at Goodfriend Drive. 

In a little over a year, East Hampton Town's Zoning Code Amendment Working Group has walked a tightrope between business interests, builders, real estate people, and others who fear over-restrictive zoning, and those who want the code strengthened to preserve what they say is a town that is quickly losing, or has already lost, its character. In the process of deciding what to change, compromise has begun to emerge.

A new zoning concept introduced at Tuesday's East Hampton Town Board work session would allow local businesses to house their workers in a multiunit development, with the employers owning the units and renting them to the employees.

John Avlon and Representative Nick LaLota, who are opponents in New York's First Congressional District race, called for unity and de-escalation of political hostilities in the wake of the attempted assassination of former President Donald J. Trump.

In a press release Wednesday, Gov. Kathy Hochul announced the beginning of construction on the Sunrise Wind project, the largest offshore wind project in New York State, to be located 30 miles east of Montauk.

Sartiano's, the ultra-upscale Italian restaurant owned by Scott Sartiano, owner of the private membership club Zero Bond in New York, is now taking reservations at the Hedges Inn for its new 80-seat summer pop-up. East Hampton Village officials are keeping a watchful eye on it, even appealing to the State Liquor Authority to question the establishment's liquor license.

Former President Donald J. Trump was shot at a rally in Butler, Pa., early Saturday evening. Shortly after the shooting, Representative Nick LaLota, a Republican who in January endorsed President Trump, and his opponent in the First Congressional District race, John Avlon, a Democrat, released statements.

The East Hampton Town Architectural Review Board granted a rare height variance to Bobby Flay, the celebrity chef and cookbook author, for a 7,405-square-foot barn he plans to reconstruct on his Stony Hill Road property in Amagansett.

Lt. Chelsea Tierney of the East Hampton Town police talked with the Amagansett Citizens Advisory Committee on the subject of e-bikes, which may replace gas-powered leaf blowers as the summer’s number-one irritants. There are rules for e-bikes, though many riders (and their parents) seem not to know them.

Faced with the daunting task of implementing the Wainscott hamlet plan adopted by the East Hampton Town Board in 2019, a trio of consultants advised the board to focus on the relatively easy stuff — things like burying the lines, installing sidewalks, and planting street trees — along Montauk Highway from West Gate Road to Hedges Lane.

Owners of four properties on Soundview Drive in Montauk found little support for their request to have the East Hampton Town Board grant a code change that would have made it easier for them to armor their properties with coastal erosion structures.