Government

As the pandemic continues into the colder months, East End restaurants are extending the outdoor dining season with the use of heaters, tents, and igloos, and the East Hampton Town Board is seeking to draft a law that would allow restaurants to transfer up to 100 percent of their seating capacity from indoors to outdoors.

The Suffolk County Health Department traced a cluster of Covid-19 infections to the early voting site at the Stony Brook Southampton campus, County Executive Steve Bellone said in press briefing on Wednesday.

Voting this year for the first time, local teens weren't just #adulting — a popular hashtag that means taking grown-up life seriously, and a term that teens may not even be using anymore these days. Instead, they headed to the polls equipped with information and intent, determined to make their voices count.

Monday morning dawned bright with a stiff, northwesterly wind on the bay as I lifted the bedroom shades. I squinted as I tried to focus on my surroundings from the second floor. It was a little after 7, and not a single boat was in view. It was a sad sight to see but not a total surprise.

The counting of some 75,000 ballots cast by mail in New York's First Congressional District will not begin until next week, but as of yesterday Representative Lee Zeldin appeared headed for a landslide win in his quest for a fourth term.

With early voting and Election Day votes counted, the Republican incumbent Lee Zeldin appears to be the winner of the race to represent the First Congressional District, having garnered 61.31 percent of those votes to Nancy Goroff's 38.66 percent, according to unofficial totals from the Suffolk County Board of Elections.

If you're voting Tuesday, you have until 9 p.m. to cast a ballot at your regular polling place. Not sure where to vote? You can look it up at here, and here's a list of polling places by election district in East Hampton Town and eastern Southampton Town.

Since March, when fear of Covid-19 drove many second-home owners into town prematurely, and many of them permanently, the East Hampton Recycling Center has absorbed a vast surge in recyclable and non-recyclable materials.

Since Saturday, when New York State's early voting period began, hundreds of voters have been lining up daily to cast their ballots at the East Hampton polling site at Windmill Village on Accabonac Road, and the Stony Brook University Southampton campus, the only two sites for early voting on the South Fork.

With the sobering realization that another summer could come and go before the coronavirus pandemic is fully relegated to history, the East Hampton Town Board looked back at the 2020 season at the town's beaches and considered improvements that might be made for 2021.

Alanah Johnson, Tiffany Gilliam, Sharon Gilliam, and Betty Gilliam are all graduates of the Bridgehampton School. They can share stories of cheerleading for the Killer Bees at different points in history, and now they have a new story to tell in a history-making election year.

The East Hampton Town Trustees opened Georgica Pond to the Atlantic Ocean on Oct. 19, a biannual event that allows spawning fish to enter and exit and flushes the pond. Unlike in the last two years, though, the pond closed naturally just six days later.

Federal permitting delays will continue into next year, representing a significant setback for the developers of South Fork Wind, the proposed 15-turbine wind farm to be constructed approximately 35 miles east of Montauk Point.

Hundreds, if not thousands, of voters lined up and cast ballots on Saturday and Sunday on the South Fork as New York State's early voting period opened up. Long lines -- starting well before polling sites were to open their doors -- were common in East Hampton at Windmill Village on Accabonac Road and in Southampton at the Stony Brook Southampton college campus, the only two sites for early voting on the South Fork. 

Polling stations during the early voting period and on Election Day will be populated only by staff, poll inspectors, and, of course, voters, an official at the Suffolk Board of Elections said this week. "You cannot interfere" with voting, a Suffolk County Board of Elections official said, and the county will "have police cars with a bipartisan team of board of elections employees in every town if there's a problem."

Suffolk County completed a dredging of Accabonac Harbor near Louse Point in Springs early this week, removing a spit of beach that had narrowed a channel and made it difficult for boats to navigate through the water, according to Francis Bock and Susan McGraw Keber of the town trustees.

Representative Lee Zeldin and his Democratic challenger, Nancy Goroff, clashed in a 90-minute debate on Monday, each accusing the other of lying about their records and demanding they remove negative campaign advertisements. 

The town trustees voted unanimously to authorize the purchase of a third pumpout boat at their meeting on Friday. The move followed an especially busy summer in Lake Montauk and Three Mile Harbor and what one trustee described last month as "an effluent crisis" in Montauk over Labor Day weekend. 

The southern pine beetle, an invasive pest now considered by the D.E.C. to be an established species on the South Fork, has made a comeback in East Hampton Town and regions of the Central Pine Barrens, town and state officials said this week.

An altercation between a Town Lane resident and a man attempting to take her lawn signs that was caught on video on Friday provides an apt jumping off point for a look at the rules governing political signs.

The distribution of money that the developers of the South Fork Wind farm will allocate to East Hampton Town in exchange for easements allowing the landing of the installation's export cable was the subject of a long discussion by the town trustees on Friday, with several of them expressing acute disappointment with their counterparts on the town board.

As a campaign season characterized by mudslinging and often outright mendacity draws to a close, it was unusual to see the two candidates vying to represent the New York State Senate's First District engaged in a civilized discussion of the issues.

A plan to remove and relocate Little League fields from Pantigo Place in East Hampton to the former Child Development Center of the Hamptons property on Stephen Hand's Path in Wainscott took a step forward on Tuesday, with a majority of the town board agreeing on a plan to construct two state-of-the-art baseball fields with synthetic turf and multiple amenities at the site.

Every major bay and estuary on Long Island was afflicted this summer by toxic algae blooms, oxygen-starved waters, or fish kills, all caused primarily by high levels of nitrogen from household sewage, according to a recent water quality report by Stony Brook University scientists.

Nancy Goroff, the Democratic candidate to represent New York’s First Congressional District, has picked up the endorsement of two prominent Democrats in the state, Suffolk County Executive Steve Bellone and Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo. 

East Hampton Village's nonresident beach permits and the cost of daily parking at Main Beach and Two Mile Hollow Beach will both increase for the 2021 summer season — permits by 25 percent and daily passes by nearly 70 percent.

Jerry Larsen started putting his stamp on village government last week by hiring a new village administrator, choosing new chairs for appointed boards, and laying the groundwork to create a new office of business and tourism, and to bring the code enforcement office under the oversight of the Police Department.

New York State has set Nov. 2 as the opening of scallop season in state waters. But the trustees have traditionally opened waterways under their jurisdiction for scalloping shortly after the opening of state waters to allow additional time for scallops to spawn.

Democrats on the East End are turnign to a new voter base: second-home owners. According to the Suffolk County Board of Elections, 876 people with mailing addresses in New York City were registered to vote in East Hampton Town as of August 2020; 672 were Democrats.

Representative Lee Zeldin and his challenger, Nancy Goroff, answered questions posed by climate and environmental activists in an online forum on Tuesday night, three weeks before Election Day and 11 days before the start of New York State's early voting period.