What a mess the Marsden Street proposal has become. It’s the result of a toxic stew: school district officials hellbent on a project, with only passing interest in actually addressing... more
Three years is an arbitrary marker, for sure, but it seems important to note just how long COVID-19 has been part of our everyday lives — for an alarming time, the dominant feature. It’s also important to remember that marking the third year since the start of the pandemic in no way suggests it’s entirely over: Variants are still making people sick, Americans are dying every day, the virus is assuredly still in our midst. We now have a better understanding, and better tools, including vaccines that proved essential in turning the tide against a deadly disease. We also are ...
14 Mar 2023 by Editorial Board
Being near the water and among nature has long been a huge draw for living on the East End, whether full-time or seasonally. But, all too often, homeowners here push back wildlife and apply chemicals that pollute the bays and estuaries. Thirsty, fertilizer-addicted and pesticide-laden rolling green lawns are dead zones for beneficial insects, birds, turtles, frogs, salamanders and other creatures, which just adds insult to injury after their habitat was cleared to accommodate the footprint of a house with a pool, driveway and more. The fact is, not all green spaces are equal. Turf lawns dotted with ornamental trees, ...
by Editorial Board
Last week, Southampton Town Supervisor Jay Schneiderman said something that is not controversial. Speaking about the fact that town zoning, like most of the zoning on the South Fork, is rooted in a desire to protect the environment, he pointed out that all that land preservation has largely accomplished its mission — but has created a problem. “We did a great job protecting the environment,” he said, “but we can’t really function if there’s no one to pick you up in an ambulance when you have a heart attack.” That statement is plainly true, plainly accurate. The region’s historic land ...
28 Feb 2023 by Staff Writer
Assemblyman Fred W. Thiele Jr. doesn’t mince words when he has a message to deliver that he feels isn’t landing as it should. Stony Brook University officials might have gotten their first taste of that last week, when Thiele blasted the university as “the biggest slumlord on the East End” because of the condition of the Stony Brook Southampton campus. A surprising number of buildings on the campus have ominous markings designating them as uninhabitable, including a cluster of student housing that seems like a stunning waste of resources in a market desperate for affordable places for people to live. ...
21 Feb 2023 by Editorial Board
The ongoing, baffling and seemingly eternal legal fight over Sand Land Corporation’s bid to continue mining sand at a 50-acre site in Noyac is about a lot of things. But, with the State Department of Environmental Conservation’s inexplicable decisions along the way, it’s really about one important thing in particular: the rule of law. Because, as the state’s highest court ruled last week, there is no question that Southampton Town has the right to decide whether a sand mine operation should be allowed to expand operations — and the DEC has simply ignored the town’s role. As with all such ...
14 Feb 2023 by Staff Writer
Governor Kathy Hochul is pitching ambitious but necessary proposals to phase out fossil fuel-powered heating and cooking appliances in new homes, and to eventually prohibit the replacement of oil and natural gas furnaces and boilers with anything but “green” heating equipment. These are ideas that feel at once a little too premature yet long overdue. The climate crisis is here, and human activity — namely, burning oil, gas and coal, and destroying carbon-storing forests and peat lands — is the driving force behind it. The effects are experienced in more severe and more frequent extreme weather events and vacillations between ...
8 Feb 2023 by Staff Writer
Don’t look now, but all five East End towns are poised to have new leadership in their top posts next year. Jay Schneiderman will be term-limited out in Southampton Town in 2023, and the town supervisors in the four other towns — Yvette Aguiar in Riverhead, Peter Van Scoyoc in East Hampton, Gerry Siller on Shelter Island, and Scott Russell in Southold — have all announced that they’ve decided not to seek reelection this year. It may be coincidental, but it’s still significant: Starting in 2024, a fleet of governmental vessels will sail into uncharted waters with new captains at ...
7 Feb 2023 by Staff Writer
It’s rare to see a large group of people in Sag Harbor agree on most anything, but last Tuesday, at Southampton Town Hall, more than two dozen speakers came out to support the town’s involvement in preserving the Sag Harbor home of author John Steinbeck, where he wrote “The Winter of Our Discontent” and, a year later, won the 1962 Nobel Prize in Literature for his remarkable body of work. No one spoke against the purchase. The Southampton Town Board is considering using $11.2 million in Community Preservation Fund revenue to buy the development rights to the Bluff Point Lane ...
31 Jan 2023 by Editorial Board
Remember the hole in the ozone layer? Some smug anti-environmentalists have been known to cite the concern in the 1980s as an example of how science creates terrifying scenarios from time to time that get lots of media attention, only to forget about them when the next big thing comes along. Whatever happened to THAT, they laugh? Well, as it turns out, the scientists had it exactly right: In the mid-1980s, they found a dangerous thinning of the layer in the stratosphere that protects the Earth from harmful ultraviolet radiation from the sun, mostly caused by the use of chemicals ...
26 Jan 2023 by Editorial Board
As with so much happening in Sag Harbor these days, last week’s abrupt news — that the Water Street Shops property, once envisioned as a permanent new home, wrapped in soaring architecture, for Bay Street Theater, is going back on the market — is a head-scratcher. Friends of Bay Street’s ambitious purchase appeared to back up what theater officials have maintained for years: that its current leased home on Long Wharf, where it’s been for 30 years, is simply not adequate — that an extended lease there, no matter how generous, would not solve deeper issues with fundraising for a ...
17 Jan 2023 by Editorial Board
