The Veterans Day holiday and the lingering impact of Hurricane Sandy were blamed for an attendance of precisely two at Monday night’s Amagansett Citizens Advisory Committee meeting.
One of the two was East Hampton Town Councilwoman Sylvia Overby, the town board liaison to the committee. The other was the committee’s vice chairwoman, Sheila Okin, who was to have run the meeting that night for the chairman, Kieran Brew.
A vote is expected this evening on East Hampton Town’s budget for 2013, after a few last-minute changes were approved by a majority of the town board on Tuesday.
As originally proposed, the budget totaled slightly more than $69 million and would result in tax rates of $27.86 per $100 of assessed value to most town properties, a 4.6-percent increase, or a rate of $10.93 per $100 of assessed value for properties in the incorporated villages of East Hampton and Sag Harbor, a decrease of 1.7 percent.
A Busy, if Confusing, Day at the PollsEast Hampton is comprised of 19 election districts, and each one tells a story. Depending on where they live, voters formed two lines at East Hampton High School Tuesday night. Voters from District 14 reported waiting up to an hour that evening to cast their ballots, while for District 1 there was no line at all. The latter district encompasses neighborhoods south of the highway in East Hampton Village. The former district includes areas around Accabonac Road and Town Lane.
A small piece of property in Springs spawned a stormy public hearing at the Oct. 23 meeting of the East Hampton Town Zoning Board of Appeals, raising the question of a landowner’s right to develop versus the greater good of the community.
Three issues important to the East Hampton Town Trustees were brought to the fore by Hurricane Sandy — shellfish, sand, and public beaches.
During a quickly scheduled meeting on Saturday, five days after the storm roared through, the trustee board voted to postpone the opening of scallop season in town waters until Nov. 19. The postponement follows the opening delay in state waters until Nov. 13 for fear of contamination of scallop habitat due to storm runoff and overwhelmed septic systems.
A hearing will be held at East Hampton Town Hall next Thursday at 7 p.m. on the purchase, for open space, of approximately four acres of land on Ardsley Road in Wainscott. The $2 million price would be taken from the community preservation fund.
Although voters undoubtedly are focused on the presidential candidates, Barack Obama and Mitt Romney, whose names appear at the top of the ballot along with their vice-presidential running mates, the ballot has a long row of slots for many other candidates.
The threat of Hurricane Sandy kept several politicians from joining the Concerned Citizens of Montauk’s annual Meet the Candidates forum‚ held at the Montauk Firehouse on Sunday. The afternoon event had half the audience it usually gets.
Representative Tim Bishop, a Democrat from Southampton, was busy working in Yaphank with representatives from Suffolk County, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, and local officials to coordinate storm planning across Long Island. He sent a representative to explain his absence.
The Concerned Citizens of Montauk's meet the candidates forum is on for today at 1 p.m. despite the threatening storm, but because of the storm, Representative Tim Bishop will not attend.
East Hampton Town
Committee Appointments
The East Hampton Town Board made several appointments at its meeting last Thursday night.
Two new members were added to the town’s nature preserve committee, which oversees public properties designated as nature preserves, develops management plans for them, and makes recommendations as to new preserves. Laura Stephenson and Phil Berg will be the new members. The committee is chaired by Zachary Cohen.
A hearing will be held at East Hampton Town Hall next Thursday night at 7 p.m. on a preliminary 2013 town budget of just over $69 million.
If adopted as proposed, the budget would result in a 4.6-percent tax rate increase for most town residents, and a 1.7-percent tax rate decrease for those living in East Hampton or Sag Harbor Villages, who are not taxed for certain services already provided by the villages.
Expected to attend the Concerned Citizens of Montauk's candidates forum on Sunday are State Senator Kenneth P. LaValle, a longtime incumbent, his Democratic challenger, Southampton Town Councilwoman Bridget Fleming, as well as Representative Tim Bishop and his Republican challenger, Randy Altschuler, and Wendy Long, who is challenging Democratic Senator Kirsten Gillibrand for her Senate seat.
A lawsuit brought by a neighbor of the Empire gas station site on East Hampton’s North Main Street, challenging a Zoning Board of Appeals decision that paved the way for construction of a convenience store on the property, has been dismissed in Suffolk County Supreme Court.
In an Oct. 5 decision, Justice W. Gerard Asher upheld the zoning board’s decision and dismissed the matter “in its entirety.”
Shout Down Phragmites PlanA state plan to rid approximately five acres of invasive phragmites within a section of the Walking Dunes on the eastern end of Napeague using an herbicide has been delayed until spring so as not to threaten the annual cranberry harvest.
The season might be over, but the summer days at Indian Wells Beach in Amagansett have not faded from the memories of local beachgoers, who found themselves inundated by large groups of visitors who were encouraged by blogs and online social media to meet at Indian Wells to “party hearty.”
Monday’s monthly meeting of the Amagansett Citizens Advisory Committee saw an unusually small turnout, only nine people including the chairman, Kieran Brew; the vice chairwoman, Sheila Okin, and the committee’s liaison from the East Hampton Town Board, Councilwoman Sylvia Overby, who began the brief session with an upbeat report on Eli Zabar’s Farmers Market.
The Peconic Baykeeper organization has asked the New York Department of Environmental Conservation to reduce nitrogenous water pollution through more stringent septic discharge standards and has threatened a federal lawsuit if it does not respond.
The request, made on Sept. 17, seeks modifications to state pollutant discharge elimination systems, known as SPEDES, permits for sewage treatment and septic systems. The permits, said Kevin McAllister, the director of the Peconic Baykeeper, fall under the federal Clean Water Act, which was passed in 1972.
What to do about the town’s aging scavenger waste treatment plant, the question of whether residents would be willing to pay taxes to hire additional code enforcement officers, and issues of budget strategy — specifically, what to do with some $4.2 million that was borrowed to help address a budget deficit, but was not needed — took center stage during a discussion of East Hampton Town’s 2013 budget on Tuesday.
A hotly contested appeal by East Hampton’s senior building inspector seeking to overturn a certificate of occupancy issued by his predecessor was coolly disposed with by the town’s zoning board of appeals on Oct. 9.
Tom Preiato, the building inspector, was trying to reverse a 2008 C. of O. for two stone pillars with attached gates at the entry to 17 Beverly Road in Springs that he believed was issued by the late Don Sharkey based on “erroneous and misleading information.”
After a presentation by Dominick Ninivaggi, superintendent of the county’s Division of Vector Control, members of the East Hampton Town Board decided not to act on calls by several residents to ask the county to stop using the chemical methoprene to spray for mosquitoes in salt marshes here.
Mr. Ninivaggi said there was “a lot of misinformation and misunderstanding of what the scientific data show.”
The East Hampton Town Board will ask the Army Corps of Engineers to proceed with its “enhanced navigation” plan for the dredging and maintenance of the Montauk Harbor inlet. The plan will increase the depth of the inlet to 17 feet and will dig a “deposition basin,” essentially a trench, on the channel’s east side to collect sand that would otherwise allow dangerous shoaling to form. The $26 million fix will cost the town $801,000.
East Hampton Town Justice Lisa Rana dismissed four charges against Thomas Ferreira, a Montauk mechanic, on Sept. 24 on the advice of John Jilincki, the town attorney, and Robert Connelly, an attorney in Mr. Jilincki’s department. In doing so, she cited their brief of July 30, which cited a “legal impediment to the conviction of the defendant for the offenses charged.”
In an effort to address concerns about density, lot coverage, and “excessive use of land,” the Sagaponack Village Board is considering a number of changes to its village code to deal with maximum building coverage, seasonal rentals, and coverage as it relates to accessory structures like swimming pools, playing courts, fences, walls, decks, and patios. A hearing on the changes will be held on Monday at 4 p.m. at Village Hall.
East Hampton Town
Disciplinary Matters
The East Hampton Town Board turned its attention this week to several disciplinary matters involving employees.
Two employees of the East Hampton Town Human Services Department were suspended from their jobs for 30 days on Tuesday following disciplinary charges brought against them by Diane Patrizio, the human services director.
Jorge Kusanovic, an East Hampton Town Parks and Recreation Department employee, filed a lawsuit in late August against the town alleging that he was discriminated against because of his race, age, and national origin.
An American citizen raised in Chile, he had filed a complaint with the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission in 2007. The lawsuit claims that “Jorge Kusanovic was subject to a continuous pattern of harassment as a Latino pioneer in the overwhelmingly white employment of East Hampton Town.”
How could an effort begun by East Hampton Town in 2010 to construct a drainage system on Route 114 farmland that would resolve flooding in a nearby neighborhood, wind up in a gaping hole in the ground without anyone making sure that Suffolk County, which owns development rights to the protected land, had okayed the excavation? The East Hampton Town Board searched for answers at a meeting on Tuesday.
A new state-of-the-art hospital is in the works for the Stony Brook Southampton campus through a partnership between the State University at Stony Brook and Southampton Hospital, according to a nonbinding letter of intent signed by both parties and announced in a release dated Oct. 1. The 125-bed facility would join the university’s health care system, with a goal of the two hospitals’ working together to “improve health care quality and access, coordination of care, and efficiency for their patients.”
Congressional Hopefuls Hew To Old RhetoricCandidates disavow negativity, dish some anyway
The Bay Street Theatre in Sag Harbor has invited the public to watch the presidential debates between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney on Wednesday, on Oct. 16 from Hofstra University in Hempstead, and on Oct. 22. They will be shown on a large projection-screen television. The Joe Biden-Paul Ryan vice presidential debate on Oct. 11 will also be shown, as will election night coverage. Doors open at 8 p.m., and the debates begin an hour later.
Admission is free. Drinks and snacks will be available for purchase at the bar in the theater’s lobby.