Government

Sag Harbor Village Mayor Kathleen Mulcahy and Southampton Town Supervisor Jay Schneiderman signed an inter-municipal agreement Friday morning, transferring management of the John Steinbeck Waterfront Park to the village and opening the grounds to the public.

The Southampton Town Planning Board unanimously ruled last week that the site plan application for the demolition and construction of a new Bridgehampton Child Care & Recreational Center administration building.

The Southampton Town Planning Board is moving forward with an environmental review of a proposal to build a 27,000-square-foot Equinox fitness and health facility along Montauk Highway in Bridgehampton.

Southampton Town Board members, in a 3-2 vote, shot down legislation on Tuesday that would have permitted food trucks to set up at a handful of farm stands in the town, in exchange for using local produce.

New York State’s renewable energy agency will direct some $2 million over the next three years to a suite of environmental studies intended to forecast the effects of offshore wind farm construction in the waters off the Eastern Seaboard.

Residents groups from Montauk and Wainscott are circulating competing petitions, each seeking to convince state officials that their respective hamlets are the wrong place for the power cable from the South Fork Wind Farm to be connected to land.

A postponement of the 11 Burke Street case eliminated the need to use videoconferencing to provide a quorum for the six-member Historic Preservation and Architectural Review Board of Sag Harbor on August 15. Two members have recused themselves from the case. Two other members were away, one in Maine and the other in Italy; they will still be out of town on August 22 so will have to weigh in electronically then to provide the votes needed for a decision. A third member is also expected to be away. Another member, John Connor, has stepped down after five years of service.

The Sag Harbor mayor and trustees voted 5-0 on August 13 to have their attorney draft a proposed code amendment “to clarify our standards” for exemptions from licensing fees, as Trustee James Larocca put it in his motion. The exemption would not apply to reimbursements for the village’s police and other personnel costs.

Long Wharf businesspeople applauded a new plan that Mayor Kathleen Mulcahy and project engineer Jenny Lund presented to them on Tuesday that will allow trucks to make deliveries and customers to park on the south end of Long Wharf while it is being renovated beginning in September.

There were signs last week that the Sag Harbor Village Board of Trustees, under a new mayor, may be open to waiving the licensing fees it charges the non-profit Sag Harbor American Music Festival to use public facilities.

As recently as mid-July, a jurisdictional question threatened to impose one more regulatory hurdle on developer Jay Bialsky’s 2 West Water Street condo project just when it seemed he was ready to begin work after years of review by multiple government agencies.

Officials from Sag Harbor Village and Southampton Town will gather next week to celebrate the opening of the John Steinbeck Waterfront Park, named for the author who wrote “The Winter of Our Discontent” in Sag Harbor, but found contentment at home in the seaside village that embraced him and his wife, Elaine.

Tuesday’s monthly meeting of the North Haven Village Board focused on the same problem raised at the July meeting by residents of the private North Haven Manor community: short-term rentals with no village rental permit.

Sag Harbor Village Mayor Kathleen Mulcahy’s promised Environmental Advisory Committee is beginning to take shape, with the mayor announcing its first five members at the first work session of the Village Board under her leadership on July 24.

There were signs last week that the Sag Harbor Village Board of Trustees, under a new mayor, may be open to waiving the licensing fees it charges the non-profit Sag Harbor American Music Festival to use public facilities.