Questions about how Deepwater Wind’s 15-turbine project some 30 miles out in the Atlantic could affect East Hampton’s electric rates have emerged as criticism of the plan. At a joint East Hampton Town Board and town trustees hearing this evening at LTV Studios in Wainscott that issue is likely to be one of many. 

Deepwater has done itself no favors in keeping key terms of its contract with the Long Island Power Authority secret, notably how much LIPA will pay for the power generated offshore. This has allowed suspicions to grow that the cost to ratepayers will be exorbitant. However, even if Deepwater’s electricity is pricier, it would provide only a small fraction of the sources that travel over the Long Island grid. PSEG-Long Island supplies about 1.1 million customers; running at full tilt, Deepwater’s output is expected to be enough for about 50,000 households, and therefore have a negligible impact on electric rates.

Critics of the deal are right that the absence of price details makes it appear that Deepwater and LIPA are trying to avoid criticism and sneak something past the public. They are also right to question why LIPA and New York residents are being treated differently than the customers of other states, where Deepwater disclosed its contracted rates for electricity in the process of pitching its projects. Moreover, the mystery has made it difficult for those interested in sustainable energy to make the case for this project. 

It may be heresy to beleaguered taxpayers point out that there could be a positive environmental effect to higher prices for electricity. When gas prices rise, consumers in the United States have driven fewer miles and selected vehicles with greater fuel efficiency. Conversely, when the price at the pump drops, sales of gas-guzzlers increase. Higher electric bills could help move more people toward power-saving appliances, lighting, and habits. This is important. In fact, the power authority has made demand reduction a key part of its long-term strategy.

Several key points remain in favor of town officials’ cooperation with Deepwater and LIPA. These include the fact that the company could bring the cable ashore on state land, without town involvement. East Hampton’s goal is to have 100 percent renewable energy as soon as practical; Deepwater could help it meet that target. And, most important, the Earth is warming at a potentially catastrophic rate thanks to human activity. Fossil fuel-fired electric plants are a major source of the greenhouse gases responsible. Here in the Northeast, solar arrays can help but wind remains the most viable source of nonpolluting power.

If the issue is money, the cost of dealing with climate change, which will far outpace that of alternative electricity sources, is the most important calculation of all. While considering the potential impacts of the cable landing site is in the public interest, any further stalling by town officials is a mistake.

Several weeks ago the idea was floated that at least one of the often-packed ocean beach parking lots at Ditch Plain in Montauk be made residents-only. This came in response to complaints that the number of people had overwhelmed the lots, making it almost impossible on sunny summer days for East Hampton Town taxpayers to find a spot unless they arrived shortly after dawn. 

Town stickers are supposed to be valid for as long as the vehicle is owned by a resident or yearly renter, and an apparently unlimited number of permits is available for people from away. This adds up for a limited number of ocean parking areas. Given all that, it is no mystery why griping from all sides is the result.

There is precedent for making certain beaches residents-only to improve the parking situation. A few years back, after complaints that out-of-town renters were filling the residents-only lot at Indian Wells in Amagansett, a small shed for attendants was placed at the parking area entrance, turning back nonresident cars; order — and places to park — was restored.

Ditch Plain creates a different headache for town officials. It has one of the most popular surf breaks on the East Coast and is a favorite for visitors as well as those who call Montauk and the rest of the Town of East Hampton home. A hard-to-pin-down number of surf school operators have set up shop there, too, adding to the general mayhem. Change is needed. Our suggestion is simple.

On a trial basis, the town should make Ditch Plain’s three parking lots residents-only on Saturdays and Sundays from July through Labor Day weekend from 9 a.m. to noon. That way, taxpaying families would have a chance to get to the beach with their kids and all their gear. Nonresident permit holders could begin arriving at noon and likely find spots as the morning crowd moved on. Longer-term, the town might develop additional parking on Montauk Highway and offer expanded shuttle service — with surfboard racks! — to take beachgoers to the sand.

We believe that people who own property or actually live within the town’s borders year round must take precedence in meeting that demand. Visitors and nonresidents can be accommodated with a little creative thinking.

In the absence of budget controversies and with a state cap on tax increases, the lead-up to this year’s school district voting, on Tuesday, has been uncommonly quiet. That is not to say that the balloting is insignificant; spending plans await approval, and two districts have contests for board seats.

In the East Hampton School District, in addition to annual expenses, taxpayers will be asked to bless an $8.9-million bus and vocational education facility. East Hampton also has the most interesting race for school board, with two seats in play. 

Christine DeSanti is seeking re-election, and Jeffrey Erickson and Sarah Minardi are vying for board seats. We are pleased that Ms. Minardi has chosen to run for elected office; she is smart, hard-working, and has experience in community organizations. Ms. DeSanti is the school board’s vice president and has been a strong advocate for the district’s growing vocational efforts. We endorse both. Mr. Erickson is a police officer with an interest in school security, but otherwise we know less about him, which makes him difficult to endorse. 

The $8.9 million being put before East Hampton voters covers the cost of purchasing three acres on Springs-Fireplace Road, where the town’s sewage plant had been, construction, and outfitting portions of the building for vocational training. The district’s buses are now parked both on school property on Long Lane and at a leased site on Route 114. Renting the Route 114 property, the former Schaefer Bus Company garage, costs taxpayers $200,000 a year, is in poor repair, and not suitable for educational purposes.

Students now travel to Riverhead at considerable additional expense for training in the trades. Keeping them in the district would greatly improve their school day, and in some cases, allow them time to play high school sports, something their travel schedules make difficult. For the business community, the bus facility’s educational role would prove a plus; many businesses struggle to find qualified workers. Students would have opportunities to be trained and licensed in such fields as auto repair, welding, and automotive computer programming, skills they could immediately use to find well-paying jobs or as stepping-stones toward even more lucrative careers. The bus bond referendum would add about $25 a year to the average property tax bill. It should be approved.

AMAGANSETT

In Amagansett, Mary A. Eames, who has spent countless hours keeping an eye on the school board and its spending priorities, hopes to unseat Dawn Rana-Brophy. While we respect Ms. Eames, we believe her presence would be disruptive on the five-member board of education, which could either turn out to be good or bad, while it is hard to make the case that the Amagansett School is in need of major change. Parents are generally happy, and taxpayers are, for the most part, without complaints. Though she sometimes expresses valid concerns, she appears to represent a limited constituency at best, and we see no compelling reason for the incumbent, Ms. Rana-Brophy, to be replaced. Whatever happens, Ms. Eames is sure to continue her valuable work as a watchdog, including posting videos of school board meetings online.

While there are few contests of note in the remaining South Fork school districts, it is nevertheless important that everyone who can vote does so. Taxpayers should be aware that only school district budgets provide them with a direct say on spending; municipalities make budget decisions after public hearings.

Poll times vary, so it is best to check with the respective districts. See you in the voting booths on Tuesday!

A report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention last month suggested that the United States is virtually awash in ticks — and the illnesses they can spread. Here, they include Lyme disease, a debilitating condition marked by lethargy and aching joints, among other symptoms. Over all, the C.D.C. estimated, some 600,000 Americans were affected by tick-borne diseases from 2004 to 2016, at a rate about three times that of the 12-year period before 2004.

Consider that on the East End, as well as in several other places around the country, ticks, specifically those of the lone star variety, can cause a dangerous allergy to red meat and meat byproducts such as gelatin. This allergy can be easily identified by a blood test, but those affected can often make an armchair diagnosis by noticing the onset of hives, coughing, and itching about three to eight hours after consuming meat, which can sometimes be followed by severe anaphylaxis requiring hospitalization.

Physicians here are increasingly familiar with this allergy, known as alpha-gal, after the carbohydrate suspected of triggering the condition. It is important to note that not all meals with meat trigger symptoms. For some, a lean cut of beef may be okay, while a fattier hamburger may mean a potential late-night trip to the emergency room. In almost all examples, the delay between a meal and the reaction is the telltale; those who suspect they may have the allergy should visit a specialist for confirmation. Unfortunately, the Centers for Disease Control have not caught up with the spread of the alpha-gal allergy.

Money is an issue at the C.D.C., as far as tick-borne illnesses go. Just as its May report came out, Senator Charles E. Schumer called for millions in already-appropriated funding to be freed for research and prevention. According to Mr. Schumer, New York, and especially Long Island, have more tick-borne disease than anywhere else in the country.

East Hampton has not suffered so shocking a loss in modern times as the deaths on Saturday of four people when a small plane crashed into the Atlantic Ocean. Ben Krupinski and his wife, Bonnie, both 70, were influential members of the South Fork community, as builders, restaurateurs, and quiet philanthropists. Their only grandson, William Maerov, 22, was a promising young man with the world in front of him. Jon Dollard, a pilot aboard the twin-engine Piper aircraft, was 47 and also anticipated many good years ahead. We grieve for the losses that their families and friends now must endure.

Ben and Bonnie Krupinski were at the top of a multi-faceted empire here. The Krupinski company was known for high-end houses, as well as a string of public and charitable projects, from the now-iconic new Parrish Art Museum in Water Mill to the restoration of a modest house in East Hampton that had been the home of George Fowler, a Montaukett Indian whose tribe was the victim of the brutal dispossession of their ancestral lands in the late 19th century. Ben and Bonnie Krupinski understood that they had benefited from having grown up here, and they were dedicated to giving back. 

They were restaurateurs, too, operating the local favorite Cittanuova and the consistently impeccable 1770 House on Main Street in East Hampton. They also were founders of the East Hampton Business Alliance. Ms. Krupinski, a member of the Bistrian family, was a force independent of her husband, advocating for her extended family’s interests, lately on the future of land they owned in Amagansett. They also were politically active, contributing to local Republican candidates and speaking out frequently at town and village government meetings.

But beyond the Krupinskis’ business and political accomplishments and their considerable charitable giving, they cultivated and maintained ties to others who helped make this place a real community. The Krupinski organization has been described by many since Saturday as like a family. Its members were loyal and had the ability to excel at what they did. Mr. Maerov and Mr. Dollard were part of that extended family.

This feeling of family is perhaps the greatest legacy that Ben and Bonnie Krupinski leave behind — and though the pain is unfathomable to their families and friends, their kindness to others and guiding hand will be what we remember most.

To hear farmers and other purveyors describe it, a proposed Saturday morning market in East Hampton Village, possibly in Herrick Park, is a nonstarter. The problem is that East End growers, food producers, and craftspeople who take advantage of existing markets already have a full weekly schedule. Asking them to take part in another on Saturday would require additional staff as well as vehicles and equipment. 

East Hampton’s Friday market in the Nick and Toni’s restaurant parking lot opens for the season tomorrow at 9 a.m. and runs until 1 p.m. On Saturdays this summer there will be markets at Ashawagh Hall in Springs and on Bay Street in Sag Harbor. Montauk has its market on Thursdays, and Calvary Baptist Church in East Hampton, which had one on Thursday evenings last summer, is expected to revive it. We were sorry to learn that the market that had been at the Hayground School in Bridgehampton on Friday afternoons will not be held this year.

Herrick Park in the village does not seem to be the right place for a market anyway, even if farmers and vendors could make time for it. Though the park is large by local standards, it is well used by sports leagues, schools, and members of the community. Farmers markets and the foot and wheeled traffic they produce would be hard on the grass, requiring more groundskeeping and eventually perhaps additional footpaths. Parking in the village on summer Saturdays already can be a problem, and vendors’ trucks and customers’ vehicles would add to the headaches. 

The Nick and Toni’s lot can be difficult to reach, what with its being near two traffic choke points. A market there on Friday afternoons seems out of the question since the restaurant needs the space by early afternoon. An idea that has circulated for some time is relocating the market to the East Hampton Historical Farm Museum on North Main Street, though access would remain an issue and there is some question about whether a market would be appropriate since the property was purchased with money from the community preservation fund.

One alternative might be for the town to buy or convert some land elsewhere for the express purpose of a farmers market. Thought then could be given to locating it nearer to where people live, for example, within walking distance of the Accabonac Apartments or Windmill Village. At best, the Nick and Toni’s market should be viewed as an interim answer for getting fresh food into consumers’ hands. With a little more foresight and creative thinking, a better solution could well be found.

If there is a single measure of how insane the absence of meaningful gun regulation in this country has become, it can be found in certain schools that are equipping students with bulletproof shields to carry in their backpacks. A report in The New York Times this week said a Catholic school in Chad’s Ford, Pa., recently handed out the heavy, composite sheets, each a little bigger than a laptop computer, to its eighth-grade class. The shields can stop a handgun shot and deflect pellets from a shotgun blast, but are no match for a round from an AR-15 rifle, the preferred weapon of recent school shooters. And anyway, in the case of attack, which part of their bodies are the students supposed to protect with the shields, their torsos or their heads?

Perhaps the shields are really intended to provide a sense of security for those who carry them, children who might otherwise be too frightened now to go to school. Or they may be an attempt to assure parents that administrators are doing something to protect their kids. Unfortunately, in a country that has far more firearms than it has common sense, such measures are meaningless.

A little more than two weeks from today, it will once again be Memorial Day. The East End will get an early look at the coming summer, eager crowds, lines, headaches, but also a sense that we are all in it together, lifelong local and visitor alike.

Truth is, the high season does not really get going at the end of May anymore, if it ever did. June is quiet, at least until the kids get out of school, with weekends the exception.

One thing on our minds lately, is how new shorter-term rentals affect life and business in and around the South Fork. Anecdotally, some retailers say that Airbnb people passing through don’t spend money the same way monthly or seasonal renters might. In one example, a woman who used to sell a lot of throw pillows to people looking to add a splash of color to rental quarters no longer sees that kind of traffic. A lingerie shop owner’s take is that short-termers bring everything they need for two or three nights, while people in town from June through early September might come in to stock up on a whole drawer full of what she offers.

Chances are high that we will look back on this era as one of tremendous change. It used to be that to get a piece of East Hampton or Southampton one had to ante up five figures or more. Now, just about anyone who can scrape together $1,000 and a gas card can buy into the game for a couple of days.

Local governments have made half-hearted attempts to tamp down the short-term scene. Nonetheless, many property owners, hosts in Airbnb parlance, have just carried on with impunity. It is not that short-term visiting is all bad. It has certainly been a boost for restaurants and helped pay the bills for many people. But there is little doubt that the trend is transformational. The problem is that none of us even remotely understands yet how transformational it will be in the end.

A collective madness has gripped many in East Hampton over the proposed Deepwater Wind South Fork Wind Farm, and it has proved the near undoing of the town trustees. Things hit a low point during a May 17 hearing on the proposed landing site of an electric cable from the distant offshore turbines when an elected trustee tried to prevent someone with whom he disagreed from speaking. 

What is odd about the clamor that has mushroomed as the Deepwater company’s project has advanced is that the wind farm site itself is closer to Rhode Island than to Montauk Point. The cable landing site might be under a trustee beach, requiring an easement in the same way another utility might seek permission to run power lines along a private road. But it might not, running instead under state-owned parkland.

Opposition has predictably come from offshore commercial fishing interests, which oppose the industrialization of the seabed, apparently preferring to keep it for sometimes-damaging bottom trawls and indiscriminate long-line harvests. It is strange to hear some traditionally anti-science voices among the fishing fleet speak out for the environment, when the same voices have stridently opposed the creation of marine monuments or sanctuaries. And their claim of providing an important food source raises the question: For whom? At $18.95 a pound for flounder in the markets, for example, fish is more of a luxury than a staple for most Americans.

Pity the town trustees, whose meetings have become the de facto sounding board for many of those against the South Fork Wind Farm. Trustee Rick Drew has been the point person on all of this, reading heaps of documents, and as the chairman of the trustee harbors and docks subcommittee, perhaps getting too close to the trees to see the forest. 

A low point came during the May 17 hearing when Mr. Drew tried to stop Gordian Raacke, the director of Renewable Energy Long Island, an independent green-power group, from making a statement. Shouting into a microphone, Mr. Drew said he objected to Mr. Raacke’s statement, claiming he was paid by Deepwater, which he was not. It was a relief when Town Supervisor Peter Van Scoyoc took charge, defending Mr. Raacke’s right to speak, and the fuming Mr. Drew quieted down. Mr. Raacke explained later that neither he nor Renewable Energy Long Island had received any money from or had any formal relationship with Deepwater Wind.

In an ideal world, commercial fishing and environmental protection would go hand in hand, and the Earth would not be rapidly warming because of human activity. However, and as we have said before, although every viable alternative electricity should be pursued, wind power now remains the best available source. 

Wind turbines are going to be a part of the United States’ near-term energy future. What cannot be overlooked is that climate change will damage the oceans far more than will scattered wind turbines. This is what Mr. Drew should have had in mind before he tried to stop a wind proponent from providing relevant details about the cost of the Deepwater project. 

The sooner the town trustees and fishing and environmental advocates begin talking to one another and realize that we are all in it together, the better. Mr. Van Scoyoc struck the right note when he said that while we might not agree, we must all listen to opposing views if we are to move forward, saving fish, fishermen, and the planet.

On this Memorial Day weekend, it is important to remember that East Hampton men and women have fought and died in this country’s wars since the American Revolution. Marches and other observances will take place on Monday, but reminders of their sacrifices can be seen year round in the many monuments and the Hook Mill Green war memorials.

New this season is a small but moving exhibition at the East Hampton Historical Farm Museum, “World War I in East Hampton,” commemorating the end of the Great War in November 1918. In it are soldiers’ and sailors’ uniforms, medals, mess kits, and patriotic posters. The museum is open Saturdays and Tuesdays and worth a visit to stir appreciation for those who served and for those who never came home.