Southampton To Cut Ribbon on Riverside Maritime Trail Park

Long Island Morning Edition

A new federal lawsuit alleges an East Hampton agency violated federal housing law by refusing to let a teenager with “mental health and other medical conditions” live with his emotional support dog for 19 months before reversing its stance. Joe Werkmeister reports on Newsday.com that the East Hampton Housing Authority repeatedly denied resident Kerry Morouney’s request for her son’s dog, a morkie named Lucky, to live in the Accabonac Apartments unit where the family has resided since April 2021, according to the complaint.

The agency, which has its own board of commissioners and isn't funded through town taxes, manages affordable housing developments.

The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development found “reasonable cause existed to believe that illegal discriminatory housing practices had occurred,” according to the lawsuit.

HUD referred the case to the U.S. Attorney's Office, which filed the litigation on May 9 on the family's behalf and later declined to comment. Morouney, 36, cited legal advice while declining to comment in an email.

The lawsuit names the housing authority, its executive director, Catherine Casey, and the property owner, Seymour Schutz LLC, as defendants.

The litigation says in February 2021, Casey told Morouney only “bona fide service animals” were allowed in the apartment complex and an emotional support dog was considered a pet. It says the housing authority then reversed its stance in October 2022.

But in the months without Lucky, the young man, then 14 and 15, suffered “increased night terrors, panic attacks, insomnia, nauseousness, vomiting, and decreased appetite,” and missed “significant time” in school, according to the complaint.

The teenager's health improved once Lucky moved in again, according to the complaint.

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Two South Fork beaches were listed in the Top 10 in the nation this week by Dr. Stephen Leatherman, the Florida professor known widely as “Dr. Beach,” who has put out a national ranking of beaches since 1991.

Coopers Beach in Southampton Village was ranked second, behind Duke Kahanamoku Beach on Oahu, Hawaii, and East Hampton Main Beach, ranked sixth, returned to the Top 10 list after a long absence.

“Main Beach provides the perfect blend of nature and built environment,” Leatherman says of East Hampton Main Beach on his website, DrBeach.org. “The big, wide sandy beach composed of grainy quartz grains has towering sand dunes and beautiful clean and clear blue water.”

Coopers Beach in Southampton Village has been a perennial Top 10. “The beach is backed by large sand dunes covered by American beach grass interspersed with large and extravagant mansions,” Leatherman says. “Some of the best beach access in the Hamptons exists on Coopers Beach, and a snack bar serving lunch and drinks can be found here as well.”

Leatherman uses a ranking system of 50 criteria to score beaches — from the softness of the sand and wave conditions to the food and drink amenities, the level of urbanization surrounding the beach and the ease (and cost) of parking.

Both Main Beach and Coopers have topped the list in years past.

Hawaiian beaches have taken the top spot in four of the last eight years.

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The Southampton Town Board will hold a public hearing at its 6 p.m. meeting this evening in Town Hall, 116 Hampton Road, Southampton, on a request from Canal BESS, the project proposed near the Shinnecock Canal that has galvanized the Hampton Bays community, for an exemption from the town’s moratorium on Battery Energy Storage Systems. The meeting can be viewed live on Sea-TV’s YouTube channel. Beth Young in EAST END BEACON also reports that this evening at 7 p.m., the Hampton Bays Public Library hosts a meeting with the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation on an expedited Superfund cleanup proposed for the Hampton Bays Fire District property at 69 Montauk Highway in Hampton Bays.

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A rash of lithium-ion battery fires — some deadly — has spurred New York lawmakers to approve a series of bills to regulate how the batteries are sold, charged and stored.

The package of five measures is aimed at e-bikes, or electronic bicycles, and not so much at large battery storage plants such as the East Hampton one that caught fire in 2023.

The State Senate passed the bills last Tuesday; the Assembly did so earlier this year. New York Gov. Kathy Hochul will have to sign or veto the bills by the year’s end. Yancey Roy reports on Newsday.com that the action comes following a dramatic increase in e-bike fires, including hundreds annually in New York City. In 2022, city officials said they were responding to an average of nearly four such fires each week.

Investigators say they are often caused by a lithium-ion battery, which can overheat while being charged and explode in an intensely hot fire.

Three pieces of legislation would change the laws around the sales of batteries, chargers and power cords.

One bill would prohibit the sale of batteries or chargers that aren’t certified safe by an accredited testing lab. Another requires chargers to have affixed tags providing information about safe use and storage and bright red labels suggesting power cords be unplugged when not in use.

Another bill in the NYS Legislature would expand the hazardous materials training administered by the state Office of Fire Prevention and Control to include protocols and guidance for responding to emergencies involving lithium-ion batteries.

Three lithium-battery storage sites in New York State caught fire in 2023…including the one in East Hampton. A study by the Hochul administration said “no harmful toxins” were detected at the sites.

That hasn’t satisfied some activists who have called for more research on the facilities — which are projected to sprout exponentially as the state tries to transition away from fossil fuels for its energy needs.

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New Yorkers playing fantasy sports on gambling platforms may soon be able to place side bets on novel wagers such as how many points Knicks guard Jalen Brunson will score in a quarter, whether Yankees slugger Aaron Judge will hit a home run in his next at-bat, how long the national anthem will be sung, and what color Gatorade will be used to drench a winning NFL coach. Michael Gormley reports on Newsday.com that a legislative proposal would legalize these increasingly popular “prop bets,” but only for New Yorkers playing fantasy sports on gambling platforms such as FanDuel, a niche market in sports gambling.

These proposition bets can spice up a blowout game or add to the excitement of a close game for as little as $5 a wager, according to the bill's sponsors and academic researchers. Parlays or multiple-prop bets can yield bigger payoffs.

But there is a danger, too. The allure of these small, quick bets can add up fast, resulting in many more bets each game than a gambler may have planned, or is able to afford, gambling addiction experts say.

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The Town of Southampton invites you to celebrate, with the Riverside community, the ribbon-cutting ceremony for the brand new Riverside Maritime Trail Park on the banks of the Peconic River tomorrow at 11:00 am.

Development of the Riverside Maritime Trail Park with pedestrian access to the Peconic River, passive recreation and shoreline/wetland restoration, was a cornerstone feature of the Riverside Revitalization Action Plan (RRAP) and the Riverside Brownfield Opportunity Area (BOA) Plan. The Park will facilitate a re-orientation of land use and community life toward the River, providing a linkage between a new downtown Riverside and the River and functioning as an anchor for new mixed use development and increased economic activity resulting in brownfield cleanup, blight mitigation and crime reduction.

As a public gathering space, the Park will provide a welcoming and safe environment, accessible and inviting to all ages and abilities. Programs, amenities and passive recreational activities that promote healthy living through design and enhance the livability of the community can begin to address the social isolation and other health issues that may be revealed in the Community Participatory Public Health Survey, which is part of the planning process.

The RRAP and the Riverside Overlay District envision and provide ultimately for a continuous, approximately 1.6-mile Trail from the east side of Peconic Avenue, eastward to Town owned land on the north side of NYS RT – 24 at the easterly end of the Riverside Overlay District, encompassing the County parkland as well as Town and privately owned properties that make up the balance of the river front.

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Acrid brown smoke billows and swirls in the air on a late spring morning as students emerge from the fire simulators at the Suffolk County Fire Academy in Yaphank. Tom Gogola reports on 27east.com that there, in the Suffolk County Fire Academy in Yaphank. they had just watched flames unfurl in a converted steel shipping container designed to show what a fire looks like up close — and to let the firefighter trainees sense how deadly a flash-over fire, where gas and gathered smoke ignites overhead, can truly be.

Jargon bounces between the instructors and students, including — and especially — the expression “dancing angels,” which describes a signal that a fire is about to get a lot more dangerous by entering flash-over mode.

For the students to reach this point, they have already completed months of classroom learning and nearly three days of hands-on training, or HOT, at the sprawling campus that draws fire agencies from across Suffolk County and beyond for world-class instruction in best-practices firefighting.

But volunteerism is down, way down, and while there are some incentives — length-of-services payments, or LOSAP, and college credits — the volunteers say they are not in it for the money. They want to give back, they explain, and are drawn to the camaraderie, if not the thrill of fighting a fire and possibly saving a life in the offing.

Among this particular group of probationary firefighters — or “probies,” as they’re called — are roofers and chefs, tattoo artists and baristas, college students and COVID-era full-timers who moved out east from New York City. There’s a Slavic contingency from the Riverhead Fire Department, and Latinos from Flanders, East Hampton and elsewhere.

They all have a story about why they’re here. But by the end of the training, they will all graduate with the same New York State certificate in hand, Firefighter I, as paid for and administered by Suffolk County and the instructors at the facility.