Government

"It's important to start now," Laura Tooman of Concerned Citizens of Montauk told the East Hampton Town Board, in urging it to adopt a plan that recommends a range of strategies to address risks to coastal areas as a result of climate-change-induced sea level rise, coastal erosion, and extreme weather. Among the plan's most controversial elements is a call for managed retreat in downtown Montauk.

The East Hampton Town Board is working on many fronts to tackle the region's most bedeviling problem, and this week, board members reported on their progress on specific initiatives to provide affordable rental and ownership options for those who live or work in the town. 

“As a result of the actions already taken and processes in place, the F.A.A. has significant concern that the court and the parties have introduced a major safety issue into this complex airspace system,” an F.A.A. official wrote in a letter to East Hampton Town after a judge on Monday blocked the scheduled closure of the airport as a public facility and its reopening as a private one with new restrictions.

At the end of March, in an ambitious effort to eradicate ticks on North Haven, the village relaunched its campaign to install "four-poster" feeding stations for deer. The stations bait deer with corn. While they feed, a tickicide is applied directly to their necks.

"As it fails, it will continue to leak material into Lake Montauk," said Brian Frank, chief environmental analyst for East Hampton Town, of an aging bulkhead on the east side of Lake Montauk, where David Zwirner, a New York City gallerist, hopes to create an artists' retreat, rebuilding 17 cottages and a large single-family house — but not the bulkhead.

Having beaten back a plan to site a 180-foot tower to house emergency and personal wireless communications equipment in the woodlands of their neighborhood, a group of Springs residents is now asking East Hampton Town to make the approximately seven wooded acres a nature preserve.

Both the East Hampton Village Zoning Board of Appeals and Design Review Board, at times appearing frustrated by questions of overlapping or insufficient jurisdiction, signed off unanimously last week on improvements sought by Guild Hall to its exterior. Both boards made it clear that they had no control over the more controversial future of the John Drew Theater and its iconic "circus tent" roof, leaving all the drama inside the building.

New York's First Congressional District would grow slightly under a proposed map by a neutral expert tasked with redrawing the state's congressional and State Senate district boundaries. The map appears likely to encourage Republican gains in Washington, D.C., in November, possibly resulting in a G.O.P. majority in the House of Representatives as well as the Senate.

A New York State Supreme Court Justice issued a temporary restraining order on Monday blocking East Hampton Town from temporarily closing its airport on Tuesday at 11:59 p.m. as it had planned.

Clearing the way for the Peconic Jitney's planned Greenport-to-Sag Harbor service, the Sag Harbor Village Board voted on Tuesday to amend the village code allowing for limited seasonal passenger ferry use at the end of Long Wharf.

On Friday, May 20, town officials will meet at the existing senior citizens center with current users of the building and staff as well as representatives of the town's Human Services Department and the architectural firms designing the new facility. The public has also been invited to a listening session in the main meeting room at Town Hall on May 21 from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m.

If voters approve a .5-percent real estate transfer tax in a referendum on the ballot in November, East Hampton Town will have what Supervisor Peter Van Scoyoc on Tuesday called "perhaps the most important tool" to address the scarcity of affordable housing.