Government

A community housing fund proposition that would authorize a .5-percent tax on some real estate transfers passed in East Hampton, Southampton, and Southold Towns. “The funds raised will be a significant part of the town board’s ‘All Hands on Housing’ effort to address the housing crisis here in East Hampton,” East Hampton's supervisor said.

A public hearing on East Hampton Town’s 2023 preliminary budget drew few comments during the town board’s meeting last Thursday, but one from a labor union representative conveyed appreciation for a key feature of the document, the salary increases that close to 200 of its members would see.

Residents of Sag Harbor’s historically Black neighborhoods, Azurest, Ninevah, and Sag Harbor Hills, showed up in force at a village board meeting Tuesday night for a public hearing on whether to create an overlay district for those neighborhoods, as a means of preserving their character in the face of recent development trends.

A new 185-foot emergency communications tower at Camp Blue Bay in Springs, including antennas for the four main personal wireless carriers, could be operational by Memorial Day. And there appears to be movement on a tower at the Springs Firehouse, where an attorney for the fire district said it was reviewing a shorter pole. “Until September, we thought we still needed a 180-foot pole. . . We didn’t have reason to prioritize review of a shorter pole. We do now."

Members of the Wainscott Citizens Advisory Committee are claiming that the Maidstone Gun Club, a private group that leases close to 100 acres of town-owned land in that hamlet, has violated multiple clauses of its lease.

The East Hampton Town Board voted at its meeting last Thursday to acquire 18.8 acres of vacant land at 66 East Lake Drive in Montauk, but will do so with general municipal funds and not community preservation fund money, as initially intended. The change in funding source spurred an accusation, during a public hearing earlier in the meeting, of a “secretive town board plan” to construct a sewage treatment plant for the hamlet at the property.

The war of words between attorneys over the 4,000-foot stretch of Napeague ocean beach popularly known as Truck Beach continued this week, when an attorney for the homeowners associations who successfully sued East Hampton Town and the town trustees to assert that their property deeds extend to the mean high-water mark of the beach submitted a motion to hold the trustees in civil contempt.

Despite the approach of winter, the East Hampton Village Board turned its attention to Main Beach and summer recreation issues at its Nov. 4 work session.

Unofficial results posted after midnight on election night gave the Republican Nick LaLota the win over Suffolk County Legislator Bridget Fleming in the First Congressional District. Republican State Senator Anthony Palumbo won over Skyler Johnson, and Assemblyman Fred W. Thiele Jr., a Democrat, was returned to Albany. A community housing fund proposition passed in East Hampton, Southampton, and Southold Towns.

As New Yorkers went to bed on election night the ABC and NBC news networks were projecting that Gov. Kathy Hochul had won her race against Representative Lee Zeldin of New York's First Congressional District, although only 1 percent of votes from Suffolk County, a stronghold for the Republican and Conservative Party challenger, had been counted. 

“There’s trouble in paradise,” Gail Pellett of ChangeHampton said outside East Hampton Town Hall last Thursday, where a group of elected officials and residents had gathered for a ceremonial groundbreaking for a community pollinator garden that will extend a pollinator pathway that includes another garden and a wildflower meadow in progress on the campus.

Months after the East Hampton Town Board approved a resolution to revoke all beach driving permits previously issued by the town clerk’s office, in compliance with a court order, the clerk is again issuing beach driving permits to eligible applicants.