Community Corner

Eye to the East: Study Favors Moving Plum Island Operations

Also this week, LIRR announced its intent to start an extra peak train to Montauk during summer season, and the Long Island Farm Bureau announced something it never had before.

Throughout the week, we do our best to offer you local news that hits close to home. With a wide network of Patch sites across Long Island, we thought we'd also make available a round-up of news from our East End sites.

For the first time in its 95 years of honoring members of the farming community, the Long Island Farm Bureau will be recognizing two women as the winners of its most prestigious annual awards at its.

Local farmer and Riverhead resident Deb Schmitt, of Schmitt Farms, and Randi Dresner, president and CEO of Island Harvest - a Mineola-based food relief organization - will be honored with, respectively, the Amherst Davis Memorial Farmer Citizen Award the LIFB Citizen Award.

Find out what's happening in Miller Place-Rocky Pointwith free, real-time updates from Patch.

A seasonal peak evening train from Hunterspoint to Montauk is among a series of "service investments" announced by the Long Island Rail Road Thursday.

Beginning in May 2013, the LIRR plans to restore a 4:30 p.m. train due in Montauk at 7:35 p.m. five days a week, connecting Queens to the South Fork. The service was reduced to Fridays-only in September 2010, as part of a number of controversial cuts in East End service that came down the pike around the same time the was imposed.

Find out what's happening in Miller Place-Rocky Pointwith free, real-time updates from Patch.

The restored service will be in season from May until mid-October.

According to reports from Newsday and the Suffolk Times, the National Research Council made recommendations regarding the future of Plum Island this week to the Department of Homeland Security, the governing body that oversees operations at the Plum Island Animal Disease Research Center.

The group did not favor maintaining the research center and suggested that plans for a new facility in Kansas, an idea that was first proposed in 2008, should be scaled back — if and when for the move.

Quidditch is coming to Quogue.

The game made famous by the Harry Potter series, will soon hit the village after Jeffrey Sherman, a Quogue resident and Quidditch player for the Rochester Institute of Technology, organized the first-ever Tournament for July 21 at the .

"All my friends were talking about how we will miss the game when we come home from college so I decided to create an event where college students and others could get together and share a sport with those who haven't heard of it and give them a chance to play over the summer," said Sherman, who is the captain of his college's team, The Dark Marks, which placed second in Division 2 of the World Quidditch Cup Tournament.


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