East Hampton Town Meetings Will Shift Back to Evening Schedule, and Maybe Montauk

The East Hampton Town Board will resume evening meetings at Town Hall, twice per month, starting in the new year, Supervisor-elect Kathee Burke-Gonzalez said this week.

Starting on January 4, the first regular meeting under Burke-Gonzalez’s administration, all of the board’s Thursday meetings will all begin at 6 p.m. in the meeting room at Town Hall, on Pantigo Road.

“We want to resume the past practice of holding those Town Board meetings the first and third Thursdays of the month at night because it’ll afford folks who work during the day the ability to participate in public hearings either in person or remotely,” Burke-Gonzalez said this week. “Because we know that the more people we hear from, the better and more informed our decision making will be.”

The Tuesday work sessions — which were long known as the “Brown Bag” meetings because board members would bring their lunch for discussions that could, and still do, stretch for several hours — will continue to be held at 11 a.m. and broadcast live by LTV on Channel 22 and on its YouTube channel.

Prior to the pandemic, the Town Board had traditionally held its Thursday meetings in the evenings and the Tuesday work sessions during the day. When the pandemic hit in March 2020 and the board shifted to live-streaming on Zoom, all the meetings were moved to daytime schedules — the work sessions at 11 a.m. and the Thursday meetings alternating between 11 a.m. and 2 p.m.

But the change drew some criticism after lockdowns were lifted, from residents who said they could not attend meetings or tune in during working hours. The board resisted shifting back to the evening schedule, however, saying that the daytime livestreams were proving to draw a much larger audience than most in-person meetings ever had.

Large crowds of residents have turned out for the board’s daytime meetings, but Burke-Gonzalez said she felt that making it easier for working residents to attend in person if they wanted to was an important accommodation for the town.

Burke-Gonzalez said that the evening meetings also free up two more days for the Town Board members and staff to focus on their jobs, rather than the meetings.

“It’s going to be much more productive for us,” she said. “When you’ve got an 11 a.m. meeting, you can’t schedule anything else really. So it’s going to open up two full days where we can work.”

Burke-Gonzalez said that the board is also going to try to resume holding one of the Tuesday work sessions each month in Montauk — another long-standing practice that was halted during the pandemic — to make it easier for residents of the town’s most far-flung hamlet to be able to address Town Board members face-to-face.

The Montauk work sessions used to be held at the Montauk Fire Department headquarters, but the building is not equipped to handle the live-stream equipment used by LTV to broadcast the meetings live, and the meeting room’s acoustics were poor, Burke-Gonzalez said. She said town staff and LTV are looking at the Montauk Library as a possible alternative location to hold the meetings that can accommodate the needs of hosting a live stream, but that working out the logistics will take some time, so the meetings will remain at Town Hall at the start of the new year.

“We’re working on it now, so we’ll see,” Burke-Gonzalez said. “We’re hoping to make it work.”