A decision last month by the East Hampton Town Board to toughen the rules about outdoor lighting, in particular to end the use of strings of bulbs to create outdoor gathering spaces at restaurants and nightclubs, is a good one. But whether it will be enforced is another question.

Officials have found it very difficult to limit the spread of bars and other establishments onto their lawns for crowds that can often number in the hundreds. By cutting the lights, so to speak, the town could tamp down on the party scene. As written in the new law, “The need for clarification has arisen as commercial properties are more frequently utilizing string lighting to delineate new, unapproved, outdoor areas for commercial use.” (Holiday lights will continue to be allowed, but limited to between Nov. 15 and Jan. 15.)

The effectiveness of the new rules will, once again, come down to how the Ordinance Enforcement Department performs. This is questionable, since it has for a long time had a near-perfect blind spot about lighting. This page has for years complained that a section of the East Hampton Town code prohibiting “internally illuminated” signs is essentially ignored. So, too, are many aspects of the more recent lighting rules. 

Yes, the Planning and Building Departments, as well as the appointed boards, follow the rules, but once something is built it seems anything goes. To some degree, string lights with visible filaments are already prohibited under the town’s dark-sky regulations; why no one in authority has noticed is a mystery.

We hope that the town’s code enforcers begin paying more attention. If there is one thing that should be easy to police it is the lighting law.

East Hampton is far from alone in dealing with the emerging health threat from a class of industrial chemicals used in firefighting and many other projects. Groundwater south and east of the town airport was found to be contaminated by perfluorooctane sulfonate, or PFOS, and perfluorooctanoic acid, or PFOA. The compounds also have been found near MacArthur Airport in the Town of Islip and near Gabreski Airport in Westhampton Beach. These chemicals are persistent and toxic at very low concentrations, but the Environmental Protection Agency has issued only an unenforceable health advisory about the safe level in drinking water. 

Since PFOS and PFOA were identified here, the Suffolk County Water Authority has installed more than eight miles of water mains in Wainscott in a massive joint project with East Hampton Town. State inspectors from the Department of Environmental Conservation got involved, as well, identifying four possible sources of the dangerous groundwater pollution. 

Federal agencies are notably absent from the PFOS and PFOA problem, and Washington has not offered help to the dozens, if not hundreds of communities affected by potentially harmful drinking water. A so-called action plan released by the E.P.A. late last week did not promise any help with remediation and failed to set a hard and fast rule for maximum exposure. As a result, state and local governments and water authorities have had to go it alone.

Meanwhile, a House of Representatives committee is looking into whether the federal Centers for Disease Control might have quashed a report that indicated that some classes of the chemicals could be harmful at levels well below the E.P.A.’s current advisory level of 70 parts per trillion.

PFOS and PFOA are a national problem. Michigan began statewide testing last year and discovered that nearly 19 million residents have been drinking water with measurable levels of the chemicals, reaching 540 times higher than the E.P.A.’s safety advisory level in one community. Other contaminated sites have been found in Pennsylvania, New Hampshire, West Virginia, and upstate New York. Gov. Andrew Cuomo is said to be considering setting an aggressive state limit of 10 parts per trillion.

The chemicals’ effects in humans are not as well understood, though in 2005 an E.P.A. panel concluded that PFOA was a likely carcinogen. Other studies have indicated possible thyroid effects and suspicions about the chemicals’ role in heart disease and cancers of the prostate and pancreas.

Despite the known and suspected risks, Washington has not set any enforceable regulations for the entire class of chemicals. The prospect for action is dimmed by the appointment of Andrew Wheeler, a climate change denier and former coal lobbyist, to lead the E.P.A. Mr. Wheeler has been the acting head of the agency since Scott Pruitt stepped down. In the last half-year, he has weakened emissions rules for coal plants, taken on federal regulations protecting streams and wetlands, and he wants to roll back clean-air regulations for cars and trucks. Observers of the E.P.A. say they have their doubts that PFOS/PFOA will be regulated at all during the Trump administration.

Relying on the states to act is a pig in a poke. Only a handful so far have set drinking water standards for human exposure. This means that without federal limits, millions of Americans have no protections at all.

More people are growing oysters these days, and that’s a good thing. Oysters can filter massive amounts of nitrogen from seawater. And with nitrogen a central focus of environmental protection efforts, the tenacious shellfish’s help is welcome. In New York Harbor, the Billion Oyster Project aims to use adult volunteer and student muscle to rebuild oyster reefs that once ringed the estuary. In East Hampton, the town trustees, after years of looking askance at any form of aquaculture, has now jumped on board. 

Since 2016, the trustees have supported the town shellfish hatchery effort to get the public involved in oyster growing. From a modest beginning in Three Mile Harbor with a handful of participants, the program expanded to Hog Creek and Accabonac Harbor, and now Napeague Harbor in 2019. A for-profit oyster-growing operation has been in Lake Montauk, which is not in trustee jurisdiction, for several years and is going strong, too. On the North Fork, the Southold Project in Aquaculture Training has been a success.

There is a delightful Johnny Appleseed quality to the oyster-farming boom. In East Hampton’s program, participants get 1,000 seed from the hatchery. They get to keep half the oysters that make it to edible size, with the other half distributed in public waters. Behind the scenes, or more accurately, underwater, the oysters, protected in cages, spawn each spring, with at least some spat surviving to grow naturally attached to rocks or other substrates to their liking. The proof of the concept is already here: “Wild” oysters can now be found in places where they had been missing for decades.

Unlike Suffolk officials who stumbled into a confrontation with residents of Amagansett and Lazy Point over the location of commercial oyster-growing plots in Gardiner’s Bay, the trustees have been careful in placing the recreational oyster plots where they will create the least disturbance. This is a terrific program, and we hope that many more people get involved.

Creating affordable housing and providing financial help for first-time homebuyers have been among the major goals of leaders on the East End for decades. Results have been mixed. East Hampton Town has led the way in efforts to make units available, but has never been able to keep up with the demand. The pressure on modest-income families has been made worse by a shift among property owners away from year-round rentals and into the lucrative short-term-stay market.

Now, Assemblyman Fred W. Thiele Jr. has introduced a bill in the New York Legislature that would impose an additional half-point tax on real estate transactions, to help spur development of new housing initiatives. Like the community preservation fund’s 2-percent transfer tax, this proposed housing tax would be set aside for new low-income developments and town-managed loans. Mr. Thiele has estimated that the housing tax could bring in up to $13 million annually in both East Hampton and Southampton Towns.

The greatest obstacle facing the new tax is likely to be the real estate industry. Considering that it took about a decade to get the community preservation fund approved, adding another half-percent fee might be a hard sell. And, even if the objectives are unimpeachable, some might say it would not be quite fair to go back and again single out one sector of the local economy. 

But there are other potential ways to support affordable housing.

On Martha’s Vineyard, activists are hopeful that a new state tax on short-term rentals could fund a housing “bank.” As of July 1, Massachusetts will collect a 5.7 percent tax on rentals of fewer than 31 days, matching the tax applied to hotel rooms. (Property owners who rent for a total of 14 days or fewer a year are exempt, mirroring a federal tax rule.) 

One of the main concerns driving the Massachusetts law was that the rise of short-term rental services such as Airbnb was depleting housing stock that otherwise might be occupied by lower-income members of the work force, and others for whom home ownership is out of reach. It is much the same story here.

Though Airbnb, for example, collects hotel-occupancy taxes for a number of New York counties, Suffolk is not among them. This means that short-term hosts here are getting a free ride when it comes to sharing the cost of services their paying guests require. If visitors in other areas are already paying into their county coffers, it is hard to argue that extending such a tax to Suffolk would impose an undue burden.

Back on Martha’s Vineyard, they are saying that the rooms tax could bring as much as $4 million a year into the planned housing bank. On the East End, a similar rate might net significantly more. 

Mr. Thiele’s bill is worthwhile and should be pursued. But if it fails to get enough support to reach the governor’s desk, a high-turnover-rental tax would be a worthwhile alternative to explore.

There are plenty of practical reasons for issuing driver’s licenses to noncitizens, but one of the most important is mostly overlooked: vision tests.

Before Sept. 11, 2001, New York State allowed anyone 16 and older, regardless of their immigration status, to apply for permission to drive legally; in 12 other states that is currently the law. Now, a renewed push is underway to reinstate the policy in New York. This makes sense.        

Backers of the movement say that undocumented people should not face deportation or lengthy detention if caught driving without a license. They also say that a lack of alternatives to driving, especially in areas like ours with only the most minimal public transportation, can keep immigrants from getting medical care and other essential services. Licensed drivers are almost always covered by an insurance policy, and, advocates say, premiums paid by the rest of us have grown, in part to compensate for the shortfall created by accidents involving unlicensed and uninsured drivers and vehicles.

Some in law enforcement insist that licenses open to everyone, regardless of immigration status, would make their jobs easier. Courts would not face the ridiculous situation of repeatedly revoking an offender’s nonexistent right to drive. As one East Hampton Town police officer put it, “Giving them licenses would mean that they had something we could take away.”

There are, of course, downsides. For example, it is possible that formerly unlicensed people who hitched rides to work would begin to buy their own vehicles, adding to traffic. But, weighed in the balance, that concern pales alongside the humanitarian concerns and safety benefits.

This takes us back to vision tests and the likelihood that at least some unlicensed drivers are on the roads with bad eyesight. In addition to a written exam and a road test, applicants must, of course, demonstrate an adequate ability to see. The demands of driving require a complex balance of central and peripheral vision, in varying light conditions. A study conducted in India found that the rate of accidents among people with poor vision was almost a third higher than that of the driving population as a whole. Indeed, some researchers say that current exams do not go far enough. 

We do not know how many unlicensed drivers are out there behind the wheel, unaware that they need corrective lenses. For this reason alone, changing the licensing law would make bicyclists, pedestrians, and other drivers a lot safer.

A recent fuss over the membership of the Amagansett Citizens Advisory Committee once again brings up the question of precisely what is the purpose of these groups.

Citizens advisory committees are created by town boards, which appoint more or less anyone who expresses interest. A town board member is assigned to attend and report back on matters of importance. In theory, this sounds good. But citizens committees run the gamut. 

The latest dust-up involved the Amagansett committee’s vote to eliminate members who did not, in the voting members’ view, attend enough of its once-monthly meetings. Some of the ousted members protested, and the town board is expected to reinstate them at a meeting tonight.

Over the years, citizens committees have inappropriately sent official-looking letters to other government agencies. At other times, members have bird-dogged development projects they did not like, despite what should be a strict firewall between the town board and its committees and semi-judicial bodies like the zoning and planning boards.

Then there is the question of who the committees represent. They were intended to be a way for town boards to gauge thoughts from far-flung neighborhoods. In practice, however, they too often have become forums for their members’ pet peeves or likes, and hardly representative of anything.

If the committees want to be freewheeling, they need to break off from town control. The committees that want to be part of government need to start acting that way.

Like Gov. Ralph Northam’s racial insensitivity in Virginia, an elected official in upstate New York was recently caught using slurs. Mark McGrath resigned from the Troy City Council on Monday, after a three-year-old voice-mail message that contained two highly offensive anti-black terms was reported in The Albany Times-Union. 

Mr. McGrath, a six-term Conservative Party member, did not apologize. Instead, he acted the part of a victim, saying, “It’s hard for us to fathom what kind of person would hang on to a voice mail I clearly didn’t know existed just to release it to the press more than three years later in an effort to hurt me and my reputation.” 

When he was first contacted by The Times-Union, he denied the recorded voice was his and refused to step down. Four days later, as pressure increased within the City Council and elsewhere in Troy, he admitted the voice was his and left office.

Mr. Northam first said he was one of two people on his page in a 1984 Eastern Virginia Medical School yearbook, one in blackface, the other in a Ku Klux Klan hood, then changed his story, saying he had once darkened his face to dress as the late pop singer Michael Jackson for a Halloween party, as if somehow that was okay. Neither explanation should have been acceptable even in the 1980s. 

It is unfathomable that when slurs of this kind come to light any politician would expect to stay on in his or her elected post any longer than a minute. As Senator Elizabeth Warren said this week, Mr. Northam admitted to enough involvement with racial stereotypes to disqualify himself as governor. That he remained in office as of yesterday shows there is still very far to go before racism is truly a thing of the past.

What’s up with Lee Zeldin? Once a decent young politician and Army vet making his way up through the Republican ranks, he has become an irresponsible pot-shooter for the right. 

It is impossible to peer into the congressman’s mind — and heaven knows he is not one who answers probing questions. Still, the transformation is surprising and at odds with his portrayal of himself as an aw-shucks family man gone to Washington to watch out for his hard-working constituents back home.

We are of two minds about Mr. Zeldin’s latest affronts. On one hand, when an elected official makes provoking statements, it counts as news. On the other, since it seems as if what motivates Mr. Zeldin most of all is attention, repeating his barbs is just what he wants. For example, his suggestion in 2016 that President Obama was a racist helped him secure a place on the Fox News commentators bench.  

And now, on Twitter, Mr. Zeldin has gone after Representative Ilhan Omar’s equating the Palestinian status in Israel with that of American blacks before 1963. Mr. Zeldin took this to be anti-Semitic, an opinion to which he is entitled even if it may be wrong. But then he went much further, claiming without evidence Friday on Fox’s “America’s Newsroom” that a supporter of Ms. Omar posted a voice message on an office line for him last week, among other things, wishing that Hitler would have finished exterminating the Jews in Europe, and taunting her to answer the hateful rant.

To her credit, Ms. Omar responded with poise, inviting Mr. Zeldin for a cup of Somali tea to talk about the hate calls she, too, receives, as one of the two first Muslim women in Congress. That is how a member of the House of Representatives should act. Mr. Zeldin might want to pay attention.

Try as one might, it is almost impossible to find any substantial, factual basis in the recent statements withdrawing support for the Orsted-Deepwater Wind South Fork Wind Farm by State Assemblyman Fred W. Thiele Jr. His central argument, that the increased potential output of the turbines is “a classic bait and switch,” is wrong on its face: The company that proposed the project no longer exists, having been absorbed by a Danish wind-power firm. New corporate entities are entitled to change the direction or scale of the companies they take over — that is a central idea in an open economy like ours. Consider the epic success of Southampton’s Tate’s Cookies, whose home-style, number-one favorite chocolate chip cookie now can be found coast to coast.

Similarly, opposition to a planned cable-landing site in Wainscott from the ocean beach has appeared almost entirely speculative, as have guesses about what the wind farm’s impact would be on electric rates. Somewhat more pertinent, but unspecific nonetheless, are concerns from some in the commercial fishing industry who fear the loss of productive grounds as offshore wind projects eventually multiply. 

There are any number of strange aspects to the no-Deepwater mania. One is that the site of the turbines, about 35 miles east of Montauk Point, is actually closer to Rhode Island than Long Island, that only the electricity produced and a cable will come here. In addition, some among the project’s ill-wishers seem to come from a perspective that not only is renewable energy better, but that Orsted-Deepwater expects to produce far more power than had been anticipated when the project was first discussed. The complaint that the wind farm will benefit consumers beyond the South Fork is a hard criticism to fathom when our region has been silent while using the often-dirty watts produced in other ways. It is not clear how a market-based green energy contribution to reducing global warming is a bad thing.

Of course, they could be right. The hardware associated with the cable under Beach Lane in Wainscott might be an eyesore. Electricity prices might rise. Commercial fishing might be affected. But these costs pale in comparison with the myriad negative impacts of climate change, some of which are already being felt here.

There could be a savvy endgame to Mr. Thiele’s opposition, however. He has long pressed for the disclosure of the Long Island Power Authority’s deal with Deepwater and its successor, to no avail. A bill he plans to introduce in the State Assembly would force the utility to release its contract with Orsted-Deepwater. By adding his high-profile voice, Mr. Thiele may be able to shake the company’s confidence and compel it to come clean on an arrangement with LIPA that should never have been kept secret.

That the Wainscott School District could absorb more students without compromising educational quality should be obvious, but, sadly, it is not to a handful of the hamlet’s residents who are stirring up opposition to modest affordable housing for a site on Route 114. It is not a question of money; most of the houses in the geographically sprawling district are empty during the school year and it contains plenty of south-of-the-highway vacation houses worth in the tens of millions. 

Rather, the concern is that the charming shingled schoolhouse and old-fashioned tiny classes would have to grow. Then there is also the possibility that it is not the number of kids who might one day go to the school there, but the socioeconomic status of their parents that bothers the objectors, at least in part.

The fault for the imbalance among schools here goes back to the drawing of district lines long ago, and the solution will have to involve state authorities redistributing students in a way that reflects current reality. A move toward centralized districts might be ahead.

It is wrong for low-population districts like Wainscott or Amagansett to have a relative abundance of space and educational resources when a few miles away, East Hampton and Springs have perennial issues with capacity and budget. It is outrageous that property owners in the small districts benefit from the services of people who live in the more populous ones, but reject the idea of their children being educated side by side. 

There are, of course, substantial challenges as districts gain students. That does not allow Wainscott to object to growing as the need demands, nor justify the shameful opposition to helping lessen the housing crisis in East Hampton Town, of which it remains a part.