Government

Representative Nick LaLota of New York’s First Congressional District has joined the bipartisan Climate Solutions Caucus, a group comprising an equal number of Republicans and Democrats.

A lawsuit brought by four Wainscott residents challenging the onshore construction of the South Fork Wind farm, one of many efforts to stop its construction via the courts, was dismissed by a federal judge this week. 

The Huntting Inn wants to add a swimming pool to its property, to which at least one neighbor has objected. “If the application is granted, I imagine the Maidstone Inn, Hedges Inn, Mill House Inn, and perhaps some B&Bs, will ask for [a pool], and the fresh precedent will be difficult to overcome,” Frank Morgan told the Zoning Board of Appeals on Friday.

Is your property overrun with invasive plants like honeysuckle and poison ivy? You may want to consider goats. That’s in part what Concerned Citizens of Montauk pitched to East Hampton Town for the roughly 40-acre Arthur Benson Preserve on Old Montauk Highway.

Auditors told the East Hampton Town Board on Tuesday that they found nothing amiss in a review of the town's finances. "Everything’s really in good shape,” Supervisor Peter Van Scoyoc said.

Tom Flight, a Democratic Party candidate for the East Hampton Town Board, is on the road to recovery after spending four days at Stony Brook Southampton Hospital following a seizure on July 4. 

Temporary roadside informational signs are being placed in East Hampton Town to raise awareness and enforce the New York State Move Over Law, which aims to protect law enforcement officers, emergency workers, tow and service vehicle operators, and other workers stopped along roadways.

A proposed teardown project on Oyster Shores Road in East Hampton, which came before the zoning board of appeals at a public hearing late last month, raised the question of whether more weight should be given to proposed improvements to a parcel and its surroundings, or to the dictates of the town zoning code.

The first substantive discussion of progress made by a work group charged with amending East Hampton Town’s zoning code happened at the town board’s work session on Tuesday, and many of the dozen residents who spoke about it during the meeting’s 90-minute public comment period tied the effort to curb development to the myriad manifestations of environmental degradation and climate change throughout the United States and around the world.

Stung, not by a wasp — which purportedly was a catalyst for Carl Icahn to build an unpermitted gazebo at his Nichols Lane residence — but by the East Hampton Village Zoning Board of Appeals’ March 14 refusal to grant retroactive approval for the structure, Mr. Icahn sued the village in April.

The East Hampton Town Trustees were agreeable to the proposed rebuilding of a bulkhead on Three Mile Harbor when they met on Monday. They were also amenable to a proposed installation, behind that bulkhead, of a permeable reactive barrier — typically a long, narrow trench filled with a material such as iron, limestone, carbon, or mulch to remove contaminants as groundwater passes through it — that would prevent an estimated 500 pounds of nitrogen from entering the water body annually.

Violations for the illegal taking of shellfish from East Hampton Town waters could be elevated to aggravated charges. The town board considered an amendment to the town code toward that end last Thursday.