East Hampton Hamlet Studies Begin Public Input Next Week

The long-awaited effort to draft economic and development guidance plans for each of East Hampton’s hamlets and business districts will kick off next week with the first community meetings in Montauk and East Hampton.

The first public meetings with the consultants who will conduct the study and draft the guideline recommendations will be held next Tuesday, March 15, at Town Hall and the Montauk Playhouse.

Residents of Amagansett and Wainscott, which will each be the subject of their own hamlet/business studies, can attend the kickoff meeting for those studies at Town Hall at 4 p.m.

Montauk residents and business owners can attend the kickoff meeting at 7 p.m. in the Montauk Playhouse gymnasium.

A second round of meetings about the Montauk studies—there will be two separate hamlet studies conducted for Montauk, one covering the downtown area and the other covering the harbor area—will be held on March 16 at 1 p.m., also in the Playhouse gym. Both regions will be discussed at both the March 15 and March 16 meetings.

The hamlet studies are being conducted by Dodson & Flinker, a Massachusetts planning and engineering firm, which is being paid $280,000 by the town to develop the plans.

The studies aim to lay out guidelines for development that will encourage economic development and social vitality while protecting the important aesthetic and cultural characteristics that each hamlet values as representative of its area.

As the studies progress, there will be a series of additional public meetings with the consultants in the respective hamlets.

The consultants will look at a broad range of existing conditions in each business district, from parking to walkability, and make recommendations about how to better bolster the hamlet’s strong suits and where to make changes where development missteps were made in the past.

The East Hampton Energy Sustainability Committee will host a wind energy forum this coming Saturday, March 19, at East Hampton High School.

The subject of the forum will be a proposal for a large scale wind farm in the Atlantic Ocean, south of Block Island. Representatives of the development company Deepwater Wind will be on hand to explain the project and answer questions.

If approved, the project could supply enough energy for about 50,000 homes each year.