East Hampton Village prohibits nightclubs

Long Island Morning Edition

The man who died in a fast-moving Mattituck house fire worked for a local catering hall and restaurant, the business owners said yesterday. Nicholas Spangler reports in NEWSDAY that the Suffolk County Police Department's arson and homicide squad are investigating the Tuesday morning fire, but police had no updates Wednesday on the fire's cause and did not confirm the victim's identity. Joanne and Chris Richards, owners of East End Events Catering and CJ’s American Grill, both in Mattituck, said the man who died was Edy Herrera, a kitchen worker who grew up in Guatemala. "He was just a sweet kid who worked as much as he could," Joanne Richards said. Herrera had worked six-day weeks at the catering company cleaning, doing dishes and prepping food, according to the owners. When wedding season slowed this fall, he picked up shifts at their restaurant. Three other occupants of the two-story home were able to escape the fire without injuries. Southold police said a 911 call reported the fire about 9:45 a.m. Tuesday. The blaze quickly engulfed the home, police and fire officials said. Firefighters had the blaze under control before noon and were spraying down the smoldering remains of the home into the early afternoon. They were able to keep it from spreading to the adjacent lumber yard, Southhold Town Police Chief Steve Grattan said Tuesday. Meanwhile, friends were raising money to send Herrera’s body home and an online fundraiser for other residents of the burned house had collected more than $80,000 as of last night.The victim was found on the second floor of the residence, which sits behind Amagansett Building Materials, a supply store along Middle Road, also known as County Road 48, with a lumber yard in back. Occupants who got out safely told police they had feared a fourth was trapped and unable to escape. They also said 13 people from two families lived in the home, which is on the building supply store property.

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After public hearings regarding a prohibition of nightclubs were left open for almost two months, the East Hampton Village Board closed the hearings before adopting resolutions to define and prohibit nightclubs from the historic district last Friday. Christopher Walsh reports on 27east.com that the move resulted from widespread concern earlier this year that an outpost of the Zero Bond members-only club in Manhattan would occupy the Hedges Inn. In May, concerned about a potential influx of late-night clubs and attendant traffic, noise and disorder, the East Hampton Village Board amended the code to prohibit restaurants in the Main Street historic district from remaining open for business after 11:30 p.m. or taking orders for food or beverages after 11 p.m. Ultimately, a Zero Bond outpost did not appear at the Hedges Inn. The nightclub’s founder, Scott Sartiano, did execute a management agreement with the inn through September, but operated a pop-up restaurant there and not a nightclub. Along with the Hedges Inn, the inns that could be affected by the code amendments are the Maidstone Hotel, the Huntting Inn, 1770 House and the Baker House. One amendment defines a nightclub as a public or private establishment open beyond the normal time for dinner, engaged in the sale and service of alcoholic beverages for on premises consumption, and consisting of one or more of the following characteristics: age restrictions, dancing, music, live entertainment or performances. It does not apply to theaters with fixed seating, banquet halls or catering halls in the Village of East Hampton.

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Touted as an Awe-Inspiring Experience and that no holiday season would be complete without it…the Harvest Gospel Concert Series returns tomorrow evening. Since 1986, this non-denominational mix of eclectic gospel music has kicked off the local holiday season on eastern Long Island. For 2024, East End Arts’ annual community Harvest Gospel Concert Series will be presented this weekend on Friday and Saturday nights, Nov. 22 and 23 at 7:30 p.m. in Friendship Baptist Church, 59 Anchor Street in Flanders. Tickets are free and available here.

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Housing advocates and New York State officials labored this week to assuage unease among some Southampton Town officials about the state’s most recent effort to incentivize municipalities to encourage housing growth — maintaining that its approach is purely based on voluntary rewards that can be embraced or ignored by a community whenever and however it sees fit. Michael Wright reports on 27east.com that the Town of Southampton’s own housing staff had pitched the state’s Pro Housing Community Program earlier this fall as the new process that municipalities need to follow to receive grants from several robust state funds that the town has used in the past on housing projects and infrastructure upgrades. The demands of the program were simple and largely already being met by the town anyway. But when the Southampton Town Board held a public hearing on the matter last month, doubts flowed from two members of the board, Councilman Bill Pell and Councilwoman Cyndi McNamara, and residents riled by social media posts, who said they feared the measure was a veiled attempt by the State of New York to supplant local control of zoning in the wake of a roundly criticized and now abandoned mandate-focused approach from 2023, known as the New York Housing Compact. The proposal to sign on to the Pro Housing Community Program, as East Hampton and Brookhaven Town and Sag Harbor Village have done, was shelved. This week, Governor Kathy Hochul deployed one of her administration’s top housing staff to convince the Southampton Town Board to resurrect it, and to accept that the new approach by the state is one that offers only potential financial support to the town, with no threats of loss of local control of development patterns. “We’re not requiring any specific changes. The resolution is meant to be a statement of values and a menu of options that we’d like localities to look at to increase their housing supply in a way that you see fit — that makes sense for your community,” said Christine McFadden Benjamin, chief of staff of New York State Homes and Community Renewal, the state’s affordable housing agency. “We are thinking about how we can be a better partner to communities that want to grow.”

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New York City Mayor Eric Adams selected Sanitation Commissioner Jessica Tisch yesterday to replace interim NYPD Commissioner Thomas G. Donlon at the helm of the country’s largest police department. Tisch, 43, will be the second woman to lead the NYPD, the nation's largest city police department. The first was Keechant Sewell, a Nassau County resident who stepped down in June 2023 after 18 months in the job. Tisch will be the city’s 49th police commissioner. She lives in Manhattan and is the daughter of James Tisch, CEO of Loews Corp. and Meryl Tisch, former chancellor of the New York State Board of Regents. Tisch will earn an annual salary of about $250,000, according to city records.

On Wednesday in a comment to Newsday, former NYPD Commissioner William Joseph Bratton…who served from 1994–1996 and again from 2014–2016…applauded Tisch’s appointment, saying she was "an extraordinary manager and probably one of the best prepared persons for the job." Referring to the recent department turmoil that has seen two people occupy the commissioner’s job since Sewell's exit 17 months ago, Bill Bratton added of Tisch's appointment: "Thanksgiving and Christmas came early for the NYPD and City of New York."

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Brookhaven Town board members got an earful Tuesday night from angry residents who face the prospect of utility-scale battery storage facilities near their homes in Setauket and Patchogue.

Mark Harrington reports in NEWSDAY that in public comments before a regularly scheduled board meeting, more than a dozen residents expressed concern and occasional outrage. They said the facilities raise the potential for prolonged toxic fires and reduced property values and complained about their proximity to schools and that Brookhaven failed to inform them of the plans as they progressed.

Brookhaven is one of the few Long Island towns that has not only declined to put a moratorium on new battery storage facilities, but embraced them as part of the green-energy revolution. The batteries can store power from intermittent energy sources, such as offshore wind farms, that Brookhaven also has embraced.

Brookhaven earlier this year rejected a proposal for a battery farm in Mount Sinai, but several others are progressing to the permitting stage.

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The Hampton Bays Water District this month was awarded a $4.7 million grant from New York State that will pay for some 60 percent of upgrades to one of two well fields in the district that have been contaminated by the chemicals known collectively as PFAS. Michael Wright reports on 27east.com that the water district has already bonded for $3.7 million to begin the work to upgrade the well field off Bellows Pond Road, known as Plant 3, with a granular activated carbon filter that can effectively scrub PFAS chemicals from drinking water supplies. Along with the carbon filter, the Hampton Bays Water District is making other necessary upgrades to Plant 3, which is fed by three wells. The project will cost about $7.4 million. “We bonded the $3.7 million to get the project moving. We’re in design and engineering now, so we’ve already begun, but this funding will help us complete the work without having to bond any more money,” James Kappers, the superintendent of the Hampton Bays Water District, said this week. He said the district hopes to have the approvals for the work by early in 2025 and for the new filters and other upgrades to the well field’s infrastructure in place and running by the end of 2025. The water district has five well sites with a total of 11 supply wells, pumping up to 9 million gallons of water per day in the summer. Kappers said the source of the contamination of the Bellows Pond Road wells is unknown. In 2020, New York State set a new safety threshold of 10 parts per trillion for PFAS chemicals and earlier this year the EPA set a new national standard safety threshold of just 4 ppt that will go into effect in 2027 — requiring all public water suppliers to treat their water supplies to levels below that threshold.