Government

The East Hampton Town Board set June 15 as the date of a public hearing on amendments to the town code regarding attached and detached affordable accessory apartments.

A new mixed-use proposal for the Amagansett Historic District, centering on a 112-spot parking lot, was unanimously panned last week at a meeting of the East Hampton Town Planning Board.

Marcos Baladron, the East Hampton Village administrator, unveiled the village’s nearly $28 million 2024 budget at last Friday’s village board meeting. While budgets are never truly exciting, residents can be pleased that for the second year in a row taxes will be lower — for the first time in the village’s history, according to Mr. Baladron.

“We’re going to have to regroup,” Francis Bock, clerk of the trustees, said of their dock inventory effort, “figure out exactly what got done last year, what needs to get done this year, and make it a priority. We have to complete it this year.”

New York State Supreme Court Justice Paul Baisley Jr. on Friday held the town in civil contempt for violating the temporary restraining order he issued last May to keep the town from converting the public airport to a private one or imposing restrictions on flight activity there. He ordered the town to pay the plaintiffs $250,000 and a fine of $1,000 per day “for each day it fails to comply with the T.R.O. from the date of this order.”

Last year, with the understanding that restrictions would reduce traffic, “we limited the access to the airport with an ‘Echo’ route from the north, and a ‘Sierra’ route from the south," said Jim Brundige, the East Hampton Airport manager. "The traffic was about the same,” which strained the air traffic control tower and residents south of the airport. This year the “November” route has been reinstated, to be used for arrivals, and only from the South Shore helicopter route.

Consultants hired by East Hampton Town to identify and recommend solutions to gaps in personal wireless service throughout the town estimated a need for 10 new antennas 100 and 140 feet tall and 44 smaller antennas over the next decade.

“You’ve been there 100 years. You have a roomful of locals, all we want is do go down there, have a dinner, have a drink and dance, and the town is trying to stop that, 100 percent," said the attorney representing the Shagwong Tavern. But the town's chief fire marshal tells a different story. “I did not cite Shagwong for dancing. I personally came upon an overcrowded issue in the Shagwong; I counted over 200 people."

East Hampton Town’s energy and sustainability advisory committee will recommend to the town board the All-Electric Building Act, which would require all appliances, including heating and cooling systems, hot water, and stoves in new residential and commercial construction, to be all-electric as of Jan. 1, 2025, eliminating their use of fossil fuels.

Carissa’s Bakery has made a difficult but necessary decision to reduce its restaurant capacity by six seats. Doing so decreases its septic waste, a move expected to speed Carissa’s application to merge two building lots, at 219 and 221 Pantigo Road in East Hampton.

Despite questions from some members of the East Hampton Town Planning Board, Joseph Palermo, the town’s chief building inspector, said a large expansion of the building at 44 Three Mile Harbor Road, which for decades has operated as a nightclub, would be considered a reconstruction, and not a new building entirely.

On Wednesday, the U.S. Department of Agriculture will officially kick off operations at its new National Bio and Agro-Defense Facility in Manhattan, Kansas, signalling the start of a slow and careful decommissioning process at the Plum Island Animal Disease Center, which for the last 69 years has been devising ways to identify and treat transboundary animal diseases.

A New York State Supreme Court Justice on Thursday ordered East Hampton Town and the town trustees, defendants in parallel lawsuits brought in 2009 over ownership of a stretch of Napeague ocean beach popularly known as Truck Beach, to pay a total of $389,060 in the plaintiffs' attorneys' fees. 

Reducing food waste is one of the top solutions to reversing climate change. Nearly 40 percent of food is wasted in the United States, according to the hunger-relief organization Feeding America. To mitigate that problem here, East Hampton Town will soon embark on a composting pilot program, an effort aimed at diverting, recovering, and reusing residential food scraps to create compost and return it to the soil.

East Hampton Town’s Coastal Assessment Resiliency Plan, known as CARP, will have its own website.

East Hampton Town’s Water Quality Technical Advisory Committee recommended that the town fund projects in East Hampton and Sag Harbor Villages, Montauk, and Springs. Among them: an expansion of the wastewater management district in Sag Harbor Village, a constructed wetland wastewater treatment system at Most Holy Trinity Catholic Church in East Hampton, and the upgrade of a failing septic system at the East Hampton Historical Society’s Clinton Academy.

The flame burning behind the Herrick Park bathrooms in East Hampton Village is not a new pyrotechnics display or art installation. Instead, it's a controlled burn of 400 gallons of propane. Dave Collins, the superintendent of the Public Works Department, said it will take two days to burn off completely.

The contractor charged with the annual sand replenishment at downtown Montauk’s ocean beaches began mobilizing on Tuesday for what was expected to be a 10-day project.

After 28 years fielding 911 calls as an East Hampton Village dispatcher, Gerry Turza will be hired at the May 19 East Hampton Village Board meeting for a new village position: fire and emergency medical services administrator. Mr. Turza served as chief of the East Hampton Village Fire Department from 2018 to 2022 and in many other roles, all in the field of public safety, for the last 30 years.

Proposed changes to the East Hampton Town Code pertaining to attached and detached affordable accessory apartments — legislation aimed at alleviating the acute scarcity of affordable housing while preserving neighborhood character, quality of life, and environmental resources — could soon be adopted.

The East Hampton Town Board has appointed Robert Connelly as the new town attorney. Effective May 30, Mr. Connelly will head of the legal department, with John Jilnicki staying on temporarily to help with the transition.

A trawl survey of the ocean floor near the landing site of the South Fork Wind farm’s export cable is being conducted this week, John Aldred of the East Hampton Town Trustees announced on Monday. The survey was to take place between May 8 and May 15.

One day before the W.H.O. announced that it was ending the Covid-19 emergency, the East Hampton Town Board recognized Robert Chaloner and Robert Ross of Stony Brook Southampton Hospital for their “dedication and determination” throughout the pandemic.

After reviewing an initial environmental analysis of the proposed Wainscott Commercial Center, the East Hampton Town Planning Department has found it insufficient and recommended further analysis to address lingering concerns.

A proposed management plan for the Amagansett Plains Preserve, also known as 555 Montauk Highway, will soon be reviewed by the East Hampton Town Board, which will “discuss it and decide if there should be modifications,” Town Supervisor Peter Van Scoyoc told the Amagansett Citizens Advisory Committee Monday night.

The Hampton Hopper’s “last mile” shuttle service, which takes commuters from the Long Island Rail Road stations in East Hampton Village and Amagansett to their places of work in the morning and back again in the afternoon, has quietly become a success.

Pledging “leadership, perspective, and common-sense solutions,” the East Hampton Town Republican Committee’s slate launched its 2023 campaign last Thursday with a fund-raiser at the Blend at Three Mile Harbor restaurant in Springs.

The long-awaited renovation, which has been split into three phases by the East Hampton Village Board, is underway. First up: a new softball diamond, tennis courts, and walkways, all set to be complete by summer, along with the restroom. Left out of this early work are pickleball and the baseball field.

With all hurdles overcome, Southampton Town is poised to become the first municipality on Long Island to implement a community choice aggregation program, a model that replaces the utility as the default sole supplier of electricity or natural gas and gives municipalities the opportunity to seek lower prices from alternative suppliers.

A bill that passed in the New York State Assembly, but has yet to win approval in the Senate, would restrict the use of popular pesticides known as neonics, which are commonly used on lawns to kill grubs but persist in the environment and are affecting populations of pollinators and causing water contamination.