Environment

About 30 residents of Ninevah Beach and the neighboring Azurest and Sag Harbor Hills communities met outdoors with local officials one evening earlier this month to show how their bay beach has been eroded by the wandering outlet of Little Northwest Creek.

The Sag Harbor Village Board this week began pondering the possibility of creating an overlay district to prevent unwanted development along the waterfront by standardizing the rules across its six zoning districts.

Does the village of Sag Harbor have the authority to require a property owner to put in a nitrogen-reducing “innovative-alternative” septic system when it grants permission to tear down and rebuild a waterfront house and refurbish its pool only 30 feet from wetlands — even if the owner has a permit in hand from the country to install a new but old-fashioned. passive system?

Flights into and out of East Hampton Airport were up 7.5 percent in the first half of 2019 and are on track to climb by 10 percent by the end of the year.

The Village of Sag Harbor has received a State and Municipal Facilities Program grant of $125,000 to pay for most of the long-planned Havens Beach drainage and filter improvement project, on which work should get underway late this fall,

Mile-a-Minute weevils live to eat Mile-a-Minute weed, an especially aggressive invasive species from Asia that is popping up all over the region. The Village of North Haven last year bought 500 of them at $1 each from an agricultural lab in New Jersey to suppress a patch of the fast-growing vine behind Village Hall. Like the weed they love to eat, the weevils are transplants from Asia.

The 53-percent non-compliance rate the Sag Harbor harbormaster found in July is no indication of the proportion of vessels that might be illegally discharging sewage into local waters, he said during an interview in his office overlooking the harbor later in the week.

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.

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.

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.

Two U.S. senators announced last week that the federal government has allocated nearly $900,000 in funding to conduct a New York State health study to analyze the harmful effects of emerging contaminants known as PFOS and PFOA.

Several dozen community members attended the Southampton Town Planning Board meeting on Thursday, July 25, to speak in opposition to a proposal to build a 27,000-square-foot Equinox fitness and health facility along Montauk Highway in Bridgehampton.

Shopkeepers in Sag Harbor this week say they learned only by word of mouth and from local newspaper reports that Long Wharf would be closed to vehicles for a massive restoration project from September until June 2020.