Government

Former President Donald Trump will be traveling to Bridgehampton Friday afternoon, and Southampton Town has warned of extensive road closures and heavy gridlock as his motorcade makes its way from Gabreski Airport in Westhampton Beach to Bridgehampton.

On the website of the federal Citizenship and Immigration Services agency, these words appear in big letters, announcing an even bigger policy shift: “Process to Promote the Unity and Stability of Families.” For undocumented residents of the U.S. who have lived here for at least 10 years and are married to American citizens, that means there will be a new opportunity to lawfully obtain a green card.

Moody’s Investors Service Inc., whose credit-rating system is widely used by lenders working with municipalities and school districts, has once again awarded its best possible rating to East Hampton Town. 

Suffolk County Executive Ed Romaine is lobbying New York State for the county to get its fair share of money and resources. With that push, he said, come plans to address some of the most pervasive issues on the South Fork: the suffocating traffic on County Road 39, gaps in public transportation services, water quality improvements, and long-term plans for individual towns to handle municipal solid waste.

“I was shocked when I learned I was in a water recharge overlay, I had no information about this,” the owner of a property on Wainscott Northwest Road said at an East Hampton Town Zoning Board of Appeals meeting where he was seeking to overturn a ruling by Joseph Palermo, the town’s chief building inspector, that the parcel had been overcleared.

The Eastville Community Historical Society has received an emergency $25,000 grant from the East Hampton Town Board to help pay for a new cedar shake roof at its headquarters on Hampton Road in Sag Harbor.

In the hours and days following President Biden’s announcements on Sunday afternoon that he was ending his bid for re-election and endorsing Vice President Kamala Harris, Democrats here on Long Island and across the country have begun to largely coalesce behind Vice President Harris as they react to this political earthquake.

Southampton Town has announced that it is accepting applications from people living or working in town who are interested in buying a house or building an accessory apartment onto their existing home, “part of a broader strategy to address housing affordability,” the town said in a release.

The East Hampton Town Board has set Aug. 15 as the date for three important public hearings. One deals with adjustments to the town’s lighting code, another with the alienation of parkland at the intersection of Three Mile Harbor and Springs-Fireplace Roads in East Hampton, and the third with increasing the maximum density allowed per acre for senior citizen-only affordable housing developments. 

Playing out in the background of the rather apocalyptic and very visible destruction of the East End’s native pitch pines has been an equally devastating disease killing beech trees. With that in mind, East Hampton Town is working on ways to help residents remove dangerous trees, without running afoul of clearing restrictions.

The New York State Department of Environmental Conservation closes Three Mile Harbor to shellfishing before, during, and after the Clamshell Foundation’s annual fireworks show there, but have the East Hampton Town Trustees ever tested the water before and after the event to gauge the impact of the increased boat traffic?

A proposed 10,500-square-foot house with a rooftop kitchen and pool, to be built atop rare and pristine duneland on Napeague, got the unanimous approval this month of the East Hampton Town Zoning Board of Appeals, whose chairwoman called it a “significant environmental improvement” to a site that could accommodate three houses, three septic systems, and three driveways.