Government

The Montauk School is being considered as a potential location for a Covid-19 testing site that would be fully funded by Stony Brook Southampton Hospital.

Restaurants can begin offering outdoor dining as part of phase two of the economic reopening, which will begin early next week, and municipalities will be given leeway to approve sidewalk and even street dining in order for businesses to meet state guidelines.

East Hampton Town has alerted business owners intending to reopen that they must file with New York State an affirmation that they will follow mandated safety protocols and prepare and post a safety plan.

Voting for school budgets and board members will be by absentee ballot this year, and ballots must be returned by 5 p.m. on Tuesday, June 9. Here's what you need to know.

A State Supreme Court justice last month rejected New York State's request for a preliminary injunction to have the signs removed.

Southampton Town Supervisor Jay Schneiderman extended emergency orders closing the town's beaches to out-of-towners and restricting parking in beach lots and nearby roads through June 5.

The League of Women Voters of the Hamptons, Shelter Island, and the North Fork will hold an online debate among candidates for the Democratic Party’s nomination for New York’s First Congressional District on Monday via YouTube. Another debate, among Democratic candidates for the State Senate’s First District, will happen on June 8.

Two months of a nearly complete economic standstill came to an end Wednesday, when Long Island reached regional criteria necessary to reinstate some industries as evidence shows that the spread of Covid-19 here is increasingly under control.

With an assist from Mother Nature in the form of a gray, damp Saturday and windy Sunday and Monday, the “slow, soft reopening” to the summer season envisioned by East Hampton Town Supervisor Peter Van Scoyoc last week largely unfolded according to plan over the Memorial Day weekend.

In a significant development for the proliferation of renewable energy, LIPA’s board voted unanimously to adopt state rules and regulations authorizing a framework for community choice aggregation Islandwide.

East Hampton Village Mayor Richard Lawler appointed Ray Harden, a co-owner of the Ben Krupinski building company, as a village board member on Friday over the objections of two board members.

“We in E.M.S. are completely in the dark on what the plan is for the coming months and what to expect,” the Montauk Ambulance Company wrote in a letter to the town board. “We need clarity and, more importantly, to have our thoughts heard.”

Due to concerns about the economic impact the Covid-19 pandemic may have on East Hampton Village’s finances, village board members made it clear last Thursday that they will adopt a budget for the next fiscal year that will prohibit spending on any major capital improvements, public works projects, or equipment upgrades.

Earlier this month a federal judge reinstated the Democratic primary, rescheduling it to June 23, the date on which New York voters, both Republicans and Democrats, will choose their parties’ candidates for Congress and State Senate and Assembly.

The East Hampton Town Trustees, meeting by videoconference on Monday, heard a proposal to remediate erosion at Mulford Lane, where the beach on Gardiner’s Bay has been eroding by several feet per year for decades.

The East Hampton Town Board voted unanimously last Thursday to add business district hamlet studies to the town's comprehensive plan, leaving out a controversial long-range plan to relocate Montauk's oceanfront motels and other businesses.

Owners of the former Atlantic Terrace, a 96-room oceanfront resort situated in a residential neighborhood in Montauk, applied in early March for a liquor license from the State Liquor Authority, a move that quickly drew opposition from East Hampton Town government.

The New York State Department of Transportation has proposed allocating $13.1 million of state money to repave nearly eight miles of Route 114 next year, Assemblyman Fred W. Thiele Jr. and State Senator Kenneth P. LaValle announced on Thursday. 

The committee agreed at its first meeting last week to “make sure we don’t have a second wave” of Covid-19 infection “by opening too soon, by being careless when we open, by not looking at social distancing,” said Deputy Town Supervisor Sylvia Overby.

Several local officials were among those urging the Long Island Power Authority on Monday to authorize municipalities to enact community choice aggregation, which would allow them, singly or together, to issue competitive bids to choose suppliers of electricity.

The long wait that buyers of the 12 “manor house” condominium units on Accabonac Road in East Hampton have experienced because of the discovery of elevated levels of volatile organic compounds in the units’ cellars may be nearing an end, but the director of East Hampton Town’s Office of Housing and Community Development is taking a cautious approach to the contractor’s assertion that the issue has been resolved.

The Nassau/Suffolk Joint Summer Operations Task Force was established to offer hope for the summer, albeit one unlike what Long Island’s residents and visitors are accustomed to.

Members of the Village Preservation Society have asked the three candidates for East Hampton Village mayor and the five vying for two open trustee seats in the June 16 election to fill out a questionnaire explaining their positions.

A timeline that would make the 130-megawatt wind farm off Montauk operational by late 2022 will now not be met.

The East Hampton Town Trustees have an important role in balancing the summer popularity of the beaches under their jurisdiction with the protection of those most at risk of Covid-19 infection, a public health expert said.

Barbara Borsack, who is seeking to become the village’s first female mayor in the June 16 election, and her Elms Party running mates, Mayor Richard Lawler and Ray Harden, discussed their policy priorities and plans to help the village emerge from the Covid-19 shutdown. 

The Town of East Hampton has sued East Hampton Village and its liability insurance company over the perfluorinated chemicals stored and used at East Hampton Airport in Wainscott, which contaminated drinking water in that hamlet and caused 47 of the airport’s 570 acres to be included on the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation’s Registry of Inactive Hazardous Waste Disposal sites, or Superfund sites.

Arthur Graham, an East Hampton Village trustee and a candidate for mayor in the June 16 election, and David Driscoll, his running mate on the Fish Hooks Party ticket who is vying for one of two open board seats, talked in an interview on Sunday about how they would govern, and what it will take for the village to rebound from the Covid-19 pandemic.

An aggregation of purchasing power allows the negotiating of lower electricity rates and enables a town or towns to derive electricity from renewable sources. 

While it is one of the most areas most heavily affected by Covid-19 in the country, the county falls below the eligibility threshold for aid. The County Executive has asked the treasury secretary to reconsider Suffolk's eligibility.