Government

Midway through the year, East Hampton Town is not only “on budget” for 2014, but is expected to end the year with surpluses in all its major funds, Len Bernard, the town budget officer, reported this week.

The New York State Public Service Commission has set in motion a process to address the depletion of phone numbers with the 631 area code, which is projected to occur by the first quarter of 2016, and has scheduled public hearings on alternate strategies for doing so. A public hearing before an administrative law judge will be held in Riverhead on Tuesday at the Riverhead County Center, 300 Center Drive, at 2 p.m., preceded by an informational forum at 1 p.m. Those wishing to speak need only appear.

The East Hampton Town Zoning Board of Appeals on Tuesday unanimously approved the variances needed to allow Temple Adas Israel of Sag Harbor to expand its cemetery on Route 114, just south of the East Hampton Town-Sag Harbor Village border, onto land it bought in 2011. Entrance to the new part of the cemetery is via a road under town trustee control, and the panel had already agreed to its use.

Suffolk County

Credit vs. Cash

Legislator Jay Schneiderman is cosponsoring a bill that would require gasoline retailers in Suffolk to display credit card prices as prominently as cash prices.

The East Hampton Town Trustees’ water-quality monitoring program, conducted in conjunction with Christopher Gobler of Stony Brook University, will soon gain greater exposure. At their meeting on Tuesday, the trustees voted to approve Dr. Gobler’s request to include trustee-managed waterways in the Long Island Water Quality Index, a weekly report issued by his laboratory and featured on News 12 Long Island and in Newsday.

A plan to build 12 affordable townhouse condominium units on land owned by East Hampton Town is being re-energized after languishing for five years.

A former tennis court at 181 Accabonac Road in East Hampton next to the Windmill Village senior citizens housing complex would house the one-bedroom, two-bedroom, and three-bedroom units contained in three “manor houses” on the two-acre property. They have been “designed to look like a farmhouse,” Tom Ruhle, the town housing director, told the town board on Tuesday.

East Hampton Town

Aircraft Noise Study

A study of noise over East Hampton and surrounding areas from aircraft using the East Hampton Airport got one step closer to fruition on Tuesday, when a committee that reviewed consultants’ proposals made a recommendation to the town board as to whom to hire.

A hearing on a new plan to curb drinking at Indian Wells Beach in Amagansett by banning alcohol during lifeguarded hours only on Saturdays, Sundays, and holidays through the rest of the summer is expected to be scheduled for July 17. But, by the time a new hearing is held and the law put into effect, there will be only a few weekends left of the summer season.

Nearly 600 listings but few Montauk vacancies

An Army Corps of Engineers’ amphibious vehicle known as a LARC, for Lighter Amphibious Resupply Cargo, will be out in the ocean and along the beach between Ditch Plain and the eastern edge of Washington Drive in Montauk today in preparation for the design of a beach protection and reconstruction project.

The “vehicle is designed to allow surveying in the water, across shoals, and even through the surf zone up to the base of the beach dunes,” according to a release.

The East Hampton Town Board will hold hearings next Thursday on several property purchases with the community preservation fund. Land in Northwest, East Hampton, at 32 and 36 Mile Hill Road, owned jointly by family members through the estate of Mary Whelan, is proposed for purchase at $4.8 million. The 18 acres would be preserved for open space.

East Hampton Town

Stop-work Order Upheld

The East Hampton Town Zoning Board of Appeals has upheld a stop-work order issued in January by Tom Preiato, the town’s chief building inspector, rejecting an appeal from the owners of Cyril’s, the bar and restaurant on Napeague. The board concluded on June 17 that Mr. Preiato was correct in finding that “the applicant did not have the proper permits and approvals to remove two 2,000- gallon underground fuel tanks from the subject premises.”

The East Hampton Town Trustees own and manage the town’s waterways on behalf of the public, as set forth in the Dongan Patent of 1686. They have debated the proposed ban on alcohol in several of their meetings, and have split on whether to support any ban, with a majority opposed.

East Hampton Town will seek proposals for the use of its new tract of public land in Amagansett, 19 acres of open space and farmland along Montauk Highway where a luxury senior citizens housing development had been planned.

The property was purchased this spring with $10.1 million from the community preservation fund for “the preservation of agricultural open space and recreation,” according to a town board resolution approving the deal.

Frustration boiled over as a group of commercial shellfishermen confronted the East Hampton Town Trustees Tuesday about the efficacy of the town shellfish hatchery’s annual seeding program, which the trustees help fund. The meeting was marked by multiple angry exchanges and those in the small room in the town’s Lamb Building on Bluff Road, Amagansett, talking over one another. When the shouting was over, all agreed that a survey after the seeding was completed would be in everyone’s interest.

A per-gallon fee added to the cost of aviation fuel at East Hampton Airport will be doubled, to 30 cents per gallon, beginning Tuesday. An East Hampton Town Board majority agreed to increase what is known as the “flowage” fee at its meeting last Thursday despite repeated pleas from Cindy Herbst of Sound Aviation Services, one of two businesses that sell fuel at the airport. The fee had remained static for 22 years. 

Last week, the East Hampton Town Zoning Board of Appeals considered a six-foot-wide boardwalk. Next week, it expects to come to terms with bodies six-feet deep.

East Hampton Town Supervisor Larry Cantwell has suggested a countywide ban on disposable plastic shopping bags.

Mr. Cantwell said he had proposed the idea at a recent meeting of the East End Supervisors and Mayors Association. “That is a more comprehensive way to do it,” he said. “I’m hoping that the supervisors are going to support that request to the county.”

It isn’t usual for the East Hampton Town Planning Board to actually welcome an application for site plan review of commercial construction, but that was the reaction on June 11 when a proposal for a two-story building in the downtown area of Montauk came up. Two other site plan applications also were on the agenda, and in those cases the board called for more narrative.

The Town of Southampton earned the highest rating possible from Standard and Poor’s Rating Services on Tuesday, when it was upgraded from AA+ to AAA. Supervisor Anna Throne-Holst said the new rating was the result of fiscal discipline at Town Hall over the past four years.

According to a statement from S&P, the rating reflects the agency’s view of the town’s economy, management, budgetary flexibility, liquidity, budgetary performance, debt and contingent liabilities, and institutional framework, which were identified as being “strong” or “very strong.”

The Republican Party’s primary election to determine the candidate who will face the incumbent, Representative Tim Bishop, will take place on June 24. The primary pits Lee Zeldin, a two-term state senator from Shirley, against George Demos, an attorney formerly  with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission who lives in Stony Brook.

Mr. Bishop, who is seeking a seventh term in what is expected to be a closely contested election, does not face a primary challenger.

The Army Corps of Engineers has agreed to adjust its estimated value of the benefits of rebuilding a stretch of downtown Montauk beach — and thus the potential extent of a beach reconstruction project it will undertake, at federal expense — by half again as much as its original $103.8 million estimate, Aram Terchunian of First Coastal Corporation told the East Hampton Town Board this week.

Additional revisions may be forthcoming, said Mr. Terchunian, based on further analysis.

A hearing last week on revisions to East Hampton Town’s 2006 “smart-lighting” law, designed to reduce nighttime sky glare, centered on the Kelvin level of outdoor lighting, a measure of the light color spectrum of a particular bulb.

Blue light, speakers agreed, creates more glare, interrupts night vision, and is less desirable. Speakers disagreed, however, on where the line should be drawn: a provision in the legislation sets a “goal” of lights at no more than 3,000 Kelvin, but would allow the planning board to approve Kelvin levels up to 3,500.

The chairman of the Amagansett Citizens Advisory Committee easily withstood a challenge when the group re-elected officers on Monday. Of the 21 members who cast ballots, 17 voted for Kieran Brew to remain as chairman, with 4 votes for Rona Klopman, a former chairwoman and vice chairwoman. Michael Diesenhaus and Susan Bratton were unanimously re-elected vice chairman and secretary.

A hearing in State Supreme Court in Riverhead this week may have been the beginning of the end of an ongoing battle between East Hampton Town and the owners of Cyril’s Fish House, the popular eatery and bar on Napeague, but the case is not over yet. The town is seeking a preliminary injunction to prevent the owners, Michael Dioguardi and Cyril Fitzsimons, from operating a business in any other form than existed in 1984, when it was a small roadside cafe. They, in turn, have brought suit against the town for what they say is malicious prosecution and abuse of process.

East Hampton Town

Hearing on Beach Drinking

The East Hampton Town Board will hold a hearing next Thursday on a law that would ban drinking at Indian Wells and Atlantic Avenue Beaches in Amagansett during the hours that lifeguards are on duty, on the beach within 1,500 feet of the road endings.

Sagaponack Village is considering revising its code as it relates to construction after some residents asked village leaders to put a stop to work on weekends and holidays.

An informational meeting will be held to hear residents’ opinions on the subject on Saturday at Sagaponack Village Hall at 9 a.m.

East Hampton Town’s scavenger waste treatment plant, which has been operating since 2012 solely as a transfer station for waste trucked elsewhere to be treated, will be decommissioned and closed for good by the end of November, according to a resolution passed by the town board last Thursday.

The owner of an 11.8-acre parcel at 8 Five Rod Highway in Wainscott received final approval to build two houses on it from the East Hampton Town Zoning Board of Appeals at June 3 meeting at Town Hall. Two houses on a single lot are prohibited under the zoning code, but an exception was made in this case because the lot was itself created in the subdivision of a 19-acre parcel approved by the town planning board in 1983.

The owner of three properties at Ditch Plain in Montauk has been before the East Hampton Town Zoning Board on consecutive weeks, seeking variances for construction at two of the sites.

Sean MacPherson, a New York boutique-hotel developer, bought the house on Miller Avenue where he still lives in 2007, according to Tyler Borsack of the Town Planning Department. It is a small house, at 864 square feet, on a 37,081-square-foot parcel.