One of the good things here in 2018 could just as easily have turned out to be a tangled mess. After chemicals known to be harmful to health and the environment were found in groundwater in Wainscott, East Hampton Town, county officials, and the Suffolk Water Authority moved with remarkable speed to protect residents.

While the physical source of the contamination has not been identified, and may never be, residents were offered bottled water immediately and a water main’s extension went into overdrive. Now, just over a year since the scope of the challenge became evident, contractors are near completion of eight-and-a-half miles of new water main, able to provide safe drinking water to the approximately 520 properties in the area affected by compounds used in industrial applications and, perhaps most relevant, firefighting foam.

Questions remain to be answered, however. Some will be dealt with in court, in lawsuits by the town, state, and county against the foam manufacturers and fire departments that used the foam in the past at a practice site near East Hampton Airport. Other issues include the high cost of connecting houses to the water mains, which can run into tens of thousands of dollars, depending on the distance and complexity of the terrain. Also of concern is what might lurk in drinking water elsewhere in New York. Similar contamination has been identified upstate in Newburgh, Plattsburgh, and Rome, and on Long Island in Patchogue, Islip, Bohemia, Bethpage, and Medford. The list goes on.

Then there is a big unknown of the long-term effect on wildlife. Groundwater in the affected area tends to move toward Georgica and Wainscott Ponds. PFOS and PFOA, as the chemicals are called, accumulate in air-breathing animals, increasing in concentration as they move up the food chain. The long-term environmental impact might be years away from becoming known.

Right in time for New Year’s Eve, Utah police took zero tolerance for drunken driving to a new low — .05 percent blood-alcohol level. The message is clear: The state’s legislature and governor believe that drinking and driving in any amount is a threat to public safety. Utah is backed in this by the National Transportation Safety Board, which also has advocated a 0.05 percent impairment threshold. 

The new level is indeed low; it would take about three 12-ounce Budweisers for a 180-pound person to be defined as drunk in Utah, less than two glasses of wine for a 130-pound person. But people vary; one beer is enough to set some lighter drinkers reeling.

No surprise, opposition has come from bars and restaurants — and the American Beverage Institute, whose communications director just this week made the dimwitted claim that since many Utah residents are Mormons, who do not drink, they did not know what they were talking about when they passed the law. What? So one has to be a murderer to pass laws saying murder is wrong? Who knew? 

Anyway, the industry is scared. Between tougher driving-while-intoxicated laws and the creeping legalization of recreational pot, the fear is that consumption could move sharply downward. In the industry’s favor, however, the polling organization Gallup says the share of Americans who drink has been more or less steady since 1939. Police in Utah say that the new 0.05 level will not change the way they work; driver stops will be based on observing signs of impairment. 

From our perspective, reporting on sometimes double-digit D.W.I. incidents each week, a further encouragement for the use of taxis, ride-hailing services, and designated drivers is very welcome. Important, as well, is giving courts a new way to get repeat offenders off the road.

Having demonstrated by his surprise victory that the electorate as a whole is not able to ensure that a president is up to the task, it now is Congress’s job to rein in presidential power, if it can. One need look no further back than Christmas Eve, when President Donald Trump’s questioning staff about whether he could fire the chairman of the Federal Reserve took the Dow down about 3 percent in one day. 

Wall Street’s ups and downs notwithstanding, the fact that the president’s musings could cause share prices to tank shows that there is too much resting on a single person’s shoulders. Along the same lines, that a president could alone order the withdrawal of troops from a war zone — or their going in — presents far too great a risk for international stability. The consequences of an unhinged president ordering a nuclear strike on a foreign country are almost beyond comprehension.

Americans have gotten used to an imperial presidency, even if there was tension about it at the start. George Washington set the tone in 1796, when he chose not to seek a third term. Yet it was not until the 22nd Amendment was ratified in 1951 that the two-term limit was official.

The authors of the Constitution placed the sole right to declare war in Congress, but from Theodore Roosevelt onward, presidents have gained power, particularly overseas. With the start of the Cold War in the late 1940s, more authority has shifted to the White House, even in times of peace. The historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. observed, “by the early 1970s the American president had become on issues of war and peace the most absolute monarch (with the possible exception of Mao Tse-tung of China) among the great powers of the world.”

The 9/11 attacks pushed presidential power to an even-greater level, resulting in warrantless searches, terrorist suspects tortured in secret prisons, and a largely unsupervised global war on terror, which began under George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney and expanded under President Obama. Even now, for good or ill, most of the country’s regulations come not from the states but are controlled by the president.

Congress has not seemed eager to put the executive branch back into its intended coequal constitutional box. This may have a lot to do with the Oval Office’s influence on fund-raising, making the individual politicians dependent on a president’s good will. This, as the historian Eric Posner has pointed out, has “given the president various blank checks to regulate.”

He and others have argued that the fix will not come from Congress, nor the courts, nor the states because the complexity and speed of national affairs and a volatile economy require an effective executive. That has left the party system, the media, and the internet, and, by extension, the people, the only remaining check on presidential power, which, in the end, is what the founders intended. That is not an excuse for Congress to punt; each senator and representative must be willing to look past his or her personal ambition and ask himself or herself if an unbridled presidency is worth the chaos it creates.

There is a sharp-edged irony about affordable work-force housing on the South Fork: The sector of the local economy most responsible for rent escalation — and the one with the most power to do something to counteract it — has done little or nothing to ease the situation. 

Real estate firms and their associated buyers, sellers, and builders have benefited eagerly over a long runup that has at the same time priced many local people and job seekers out of the market. The boom has created ever more demand for labor, in no small measure leading to the dreaded morning and evening “trade parades” of service and delivery personnel clogging roads at least as far west as Hampton Bays. And yet, living on the South Fork remains out of reach for many, leading to a hiring crisis — ask just about any employer how things are in this regard.

Looked at over the long term, East Hampton has been a standout in the state among small municipalities on affordable and mixed-income housing.  

Yet, from the perspective of those searching for a place to live, it could seem that there was little available; the town affordable housing waitlist is maxed out and closed to new applicants. This is how private effort could help, filling the often long gaps between new officially sponsored facilities, which can be as long as eight years.

Now and then there has been talk of a transfer tax, like the one that powers the community preservation fund, only for housing. As with the C.P.F., buyers would pay a small percentage over the cost of their real estate purchases and the money would flow into an account set aside for new affordable construction. This might sound like a good idea, but there are concerns. First, adding a new tax could scare away some buyers, although with the market continuing strong, that seems unlikely. 

Rather than tempt elected officials with another source of quote-unquote free money, sometimes used to help win votes and reward pet projects, the real estate industry here, from brokerages to contractors, might join together in a private initiative to build or rehab apartments and houses to help meet the need. This would not necessarily enrich those in the industry in a monetary way, but it would offer payback in the sense of a job well done for the community, something to crow about.

If a new industry-driven, public-private effort produced only a handful of units each year, it would make a difference. As we have seen, government can do this, too, but not as fast; there has been an almost-decade-long gap since the last major project opened its doors. It’s time the property professionals got involved in a big way.

It is little surprise that the Trump administration is giving the go-ahead to renewed fossil fuel exploration in the Atlantic. What is hard to imagine is the potential environmental cost from both drilling and the seismic tests to determine where to drill.

Five companies recently were authorized to begin looking. They are to search from Delaware to Florida using powerful blasts to probe the seafloor. One respected marine environmental group has said the noise is so loud that it can be heard up to 2,500 miles away. And the work could continue around the clock for months, harming dolphins, the critically endangered right whale, and many less charismatic marine species. Studies from Duke University and the University of North Carolina indicated that fish had fled an artificial reef during seismic testing. How long it took them to return was unclear.

Beyond the immediate effect of the tests, they are but a precursor to oil and gas extraction, something opposed by nearly every sitting East Coast governor, as well as thousands of other officials, including the town boards of Southampton and East Hampton. Representative Lee Zeldin said he, too, opposes seismic tests.

Despite all this, the administration is undeterred. It may be that this will be settled in the courts. A host of environmental and fishing groups have filed suit. Let us hope they prevail.

East Hampton Village is about to jump on the water-quality train in a big way. After a discussion early this month, it was clear that the village board’s wait-and-see position on wastewater had gone on long enough and that it was ready to mandate low-nitrogen septic systems.

Elevated nitrogen levels are a cause of harmful algae blooms in fresh water and degradation of the marine ecosystem. That said, results of the few state tests of East End bays have been below the Peconic Estuary Program’s level of concern.

The Town of East Hampton led the way in 2017, requiring that modern waste disposal be mandated for new construction. Businesses that had failed to follow an Environmental Protection Agency rule on the elimination of cesspools were targeted. Upgrades also were part of the law, with penalties of up to $500 a day while a violation continued. Shortly after East Hampton anted up, Southampton passed a similar law targeting new houses, “major” upgrades, and increases of 25 percent or more of floor area in high-priority areas. 

Costs for the advanced, low-nitrogen wastewater systems can reach $20,000 for a house, with required annual maintenance on top of that. Rebates are available to help offset installation but not maintenance bills, with cash for the rebates coming from the community preservation fund, up to 20 percent annually. 

It is too early in the game to know if the modern systems, which cost more than traditional leaching pools, will result in demonstrable improvement of freshwater and marine ecosystems. This uncertainty comes from the lack of baseline studies of nitrogen levels, though some new studies are now underway. Given the lack of data, the program is really little more than a poorly designed experiment. Therefore, it is only fair that government provide subsidies in the form of the rebates. 

We remain concerned, however, about the community preservation fund being used on such a large scale for expensive technology that is untested. If East Hampton Village decides to sign on, it should seek a different funding source. Every dollar spent on unproven water quality projects is a dollar less for the fund’s original purpose — land and historic preservation. 

Nitrogen, this era’s environmental bete noire, also comes from road runoff, agriculture, lawn fertilizers, and atmospheric sources. Further limiting development in watersheds could well prove to be the most beneficial investment in the long run. About low-nitrogen systems, no one knows.

Six high-priority areas have been identified in Montauk for immediate water quality correction. Early this month, the East Hampton Town Board heard from its water quality advisory committee about projects to limit pollution in Lake Montauk and along the downtown ocean shore. These are welcome, important efforts.

Alarms had been raised by the closing of the South Lake Drive bathing beach because of bacterial contamination as well as the results of ongoing tests sponsored by Concerned Citizens of Montauk and the Surfrider Foundation. In the C.C.O.M.-Surfrider reports, fecal bacteria had routinely been found at levels harmful to human health. This level also was reported from an outfall pipe near the Atlantic Terrace resort. 

Most immediately, the town will seek to install antimicrobial filters to reduce the threat coming from the end of the drainpipe at Surfside Place. At the same time, it will begin looking for ways to intercept groundwater traveling from the Ditch Plain neighborhood toward the lake. Bioswales, or rain gardens, may soon appear along West Lake Drive and an underground barrier may be installed near Duryea Avenue. 

Officials might have been slow on the uptake in the past because the water tests had been conducted outside their supervision, but it is hard to argue credibly against the data. Year in and year out, the groups have identified trouble spots with remarkable consistency. To us, the town’s willingness to look at the numbers — and try to do something about them — is a terrific example of a public-private win.

What explains the criminal forgeries alleged last week against the former East Hampton Town Republican chairman and a leader of the local Independence Party is hard to pin down, but amid an atmosphere of overheated partisanship the matter is, sadly, not that much of a surprise.

The charges are easy to understand although the motivation for them is not as clear. According to Timothy Sini, the Suffolk district attorney, Amos Goodman, at the time the Republican leader, and Pat Mansir, a former East Hampton Town Board member and trustee, collectively forged at least 50 signatures on nominating petitions in advance of the special town board election in November. Mr. Goodman backed Lisa Larsen, but the party chose Manny Vilar as its standard-bearer; he eventually lost in a landslide to David Lys. 

Ms. Mansir was said to have broken the law while she was circulating a petition for David Gruber; though he got the Independence Party’s nod, he was dropped from the ballot after a state court justice found that the petitions were “replete with fraudulent dates and forged signatures and/or initials of signatories and/or subscribing witnesses.” Neither Mr. Gruber nor Ms. Larsen has been accused of wrongdoing.

So why did their backers supposedly commit felonies? In the quiet days of December it is difficult to remember the frenzy that led up, first, to a Democratic primary and then to the November vote. Charges and countercharges flew. The town Democrats split into factions, with Mr. Gruber’s side sticking to the low road and apparent all-out thirst to defeat Mr. Lys. Mr. Vilar’s chances were all but dashed in advance, if only to judge from his loss in a town supervisor bid the previous year. Amid all that — and the national picture of cheating, Russian involvement, and lack of compromise — perhaps a win-at-all costs mentality took hold.

Mr. Vilar is now the town Republican chairman, and if nothing else, his long career as a law enforcement officer and police union leader gives us more confidence that upcoming electioneering will be more orderly. As for the Independence Party’s prospects, its attraction always has had a lot to do with its outsider stance. Its chairwoman, Elaine Jones, who, among others, took the suspicions about Mr. Amos’s petitions to the district attorney, is in it for the long haul. 

As for the next election, all parties and their volunteers need to remember that trust in government is very fragile and that cheating not only diminishes the public’s confidence but can land the perpetrators in a whole lot of trouble.

Word that whales had been spotted off Amagansett and East Hampton earlier this week sent those who felt the magic to the beach. At Indian Wells shortly after dawn on Tuesday, cloudlike spouts could just be seen near the horizon. Sphere-shaped, the exhaled blows lingered in the air from a group of humpbacks, at least by one estimation. 

Adding to the mysteries of the ocean, what seems to have been a great white shark was observed attacking a large seal very near the shore in Montauk on Monday. This is something that plenty of surfers and others had assumed would eventually happen off Long Island, and a ripple of anxiety shuddered through that particular tribe. 

Thing is, great whites have been feeding for some time on seals along Cape Cod, so this should come as no surprise. Experts say that it should be seen as a sign of a healthy ecosystem: Were there not forage fish enough, the seals would not be here at all. Were there not seals, the “men in the gray suits,” as an old friend used to call them, would ply their trade elsewhere.

Time was that the people of East Hampton kept regular watch over the ocean for whales. When one was sighted, a flag went up and the villagers rallied to the beach, some to see, others to row out in small, fast boats with hope for a lucrative payday. Debts could be settled in whalebone or oil; the minister in the early colony might be paid that way, if providence shone. In 1675, the town fathers decided to suspend school during the whaling season, from January to April, so that every able-bodied hand was available to help with the trying-out of the oil.

Whaling here ended for good in 1918. The last one taken, a right whale, turned out to be of little commercial value. Now, although humpbacks seem in fine form, right whales are dwindling away, with around 400 individuals remaining in the North Atlantic. 

The scarcity of whales, combined with their size, make them a compelling curiosity when they are sighted. Herman Melville, among their greatest chroniclers, understood they signified something more. 

“ . . . [L]ulled into such an opium-like listlessness of vacant, unconscious reverie is this absent-minded youth by the blending cadence of waves with thoughts, that at last he loses his identity; takes the mystic ocean at his feet for the visible image of that deep, blue, bottomless soul, pervading mankind and nature; and every strange, half-seen, gliding, beautiful thing that eludes him; every dimly-discovered, uprising fin of some undiscernible form, seems to him the embodiment of those elusive thoughts that only people the soul by continually flitting through it.”

As Melville knew, whales are symbols of the immensity of things we think exist but know almost nothing of and cannot explain. For a moment, sitting in our warm cars at the beach in winter, we, too, may get a glimpse of this truth.

This evening at about 6:30, the East Hampton Town Board will hold a hearing on a more than two-year effort to write a new master plan for Montauk, the culmination of a hamlet study by consultants whose goal was to create more attractive, walk-able, and economically vibrant commercial centers.

Business is a big deal in Montauk. A 2017 inventory counted 309 different concerns, occupying about 1.1-million square feet of indoor space, while about two-thirds of the houses in the hamlet are second homes or seasonal rentals. Montauk also is burdened with 70 percent of East Hampton’s hotel rooms and a staggering number of day trippers in summer. The study’s authors identified three principal geographic areas: the downtown commercial center, the vicinity of the train station, and Montauk Harbor around Flamingo Avenue and West Lake Drive.

Environmental challenges include threats to groundwater from pollution, saltwater intrusion, and habitat loss, particularly along the Lake Montauk shoreline. The deer population has burgeoned, bringing unwelcome change to the woodlands, nearly eliminating herbaceous plants and saplings, as well as being a habitat for ticks, with the potentially fatal illnesses and meat allergy they can cause.

Sea level rise’s impact on low-lying parts of the hamlet presents a distinct set of problems. The entire first row of hotels and residences along the ocean shore is within a high-risk, 100-year flood zone, and a good portion of the remainder, as well as what is around the Montauk docks, is within a potentially catastrophic 500-year flood zone. As such, the study foresees a bridge being needed some years out to get east of Fort Pond. And, because the oceanfront remains zoned for resorts, significant redevelopment could still potentially occur. This will have to change, the authors imply. 

Among the recommendations are relocating houses and businesses from threatened areas to higher ground — likely paid for by the acquisition of property for open space and wetland restoration. The public is already paying dearly in a fool’s errand at so-called Dirt Bag Beach in Montauk. Temporary storm protection would be allowed there in order to buy time for some businesses to shift away from the vulnerable shore or use development rights credits elsewhere — rebuilding protective dunes where the oceanfront row of hotels had been. 

The consultants also warn of the possibility of a new project of “significant size” around the Gosman’s Dock properties near Montauk Inlet. Maintaining the fishing fleet as the harborfront is gentrified will be a challenge, they say. A real, working fishing industry, not a “Disneyland idealized version,” should be the goal.

One of the most pressing issues is how to expand affordable and seasonal housing for workers in Montauk’s service and fishing industries. Changes to town law after 2005 reduced the estimated total buildout significantly, but the study notes that more than 600 new housing units could still be constructed.

Other recommended changes involve downtown parking and traffic, better street lighting, and making the road around Carl Fisher Plaza at the center of downtown one-way only. And throughout the hamlet, development should be based on thoughtful new standards for buildings, streets, sidewalks, parks, and other public spaces, focusing on mixed-use pedestrian-friendly places.

Tonight’s hearing is more or less a formality at which residents can have a last say at the overarching goals within the plan. What happens next is up to the members of the town board. They have a very good basis to work with.