On the eve of the Hamptons International Film Festival, a rumor that the East Hampton movie theater was going to be no more tore through town with notable speed. Facebook was alight with variations on a story that a developer had plans to remove the screens and turn the site over to retail. Calls to the theater, now owned by the Regal Entertainment Group, as well as to the corporate office, were answered by plausible denials. 

Think what you might about the first-run Hollywood fare that the East Hampton theater serves up most of the year, the movie house remains important in the cultural scene here. Summertime movie-going is part of the annual ritual of many part-time residents, as is taking the kids to see something appropriate on a bleak winter’s day when there is absolutely nothing else to do.

For a discerning audience, the East Hampton Regal really comes alive during the film festival. For 25 years, the theater has been the hub of this fall highlight, with quite a number of Academy Award-nominated and winning films among the titles that have been there. Without the cinema’s five central screens, the festival would have a decidedly lower profile and ticket buyers far less enthusiastic.

There is no escaping the reality that times are tougher for movie theater operators than they once were. Attendance is at a two-decade low as more people use on-demand streaming services at home — and now technological advances may allow ordinary audiences to slip into virtual reality goggles wherever and whenever they please.

There still is nothing quite like the sensation of taking in a movie in a big, dark room with a crowd of strangers, and the smell of popcorn in the air as the opening credits roll. This experience will keep movie theaters in the picture for the foreseeable future. There still is no substitute for the big screen.

About a year and a half ago, Jay Schneiderman was able to convince East Hampton Town officials that a mothballed restaurant at his family’s Breakers Motel in Montauk was, in fact, operational and that in any event the clock had run out on a neighbor’s attempt to prevent its reopening. 

Mr. Schneiderman is now the town supervisor in South­ampton, after having held that post some time ago in East Hampton Town, as well as having served on the East Hampton Town Zoning Board of Appeals. He runs the Breakers on the side with the help of his sister, Helen Ficalora. This month, they welcomed a new tenant to the property, Seamore’s Restaurant, a Brooklyn concern, with fresh seafood and a healthy dollop of dock-to-dish hyperbole. Expect the foodie-hipster scene to pop up in earnest at this Old Montauk Highway spot soon if it hasn’t already.

Mr. Schneiderman is hardly alone in profiting from adding on to existing properties in Montauk. The new owners of the Oceanside Beach Resort motel, now the inexplicably named Hero Beach Club, are trying to tack on an outdoor lounge area with food and drink service, and they have colonized a section of the nearby public beach with umbrellas and trendy seating. The Montauk Beach House, formerly the Ronjo Motel, blew up some time ago into a kind of swimming pool club; now it wants to get bigger still, with a tent on an adjacent lot for weekend events. 

The Surf Lodge, on Fort Pond, long a problem spot, recently obtained approval for outdoor capacity of more than 400 guests. Over on Second House Road, Ruschmeyer’s has been a source of great frustration for neighbors. Loud music outdoors at Sole East just down the road can sometimes be heard for miles. Another people-magnet, the Sloppy Tuna, with bands on the patio and banners towed by airplanes promoting daylong drunk-fests, is technically a restaurant. And the Montauk Manor is in the process of trying to win permission for an outdoor venue capable of serving hundreds of people. It is no wonder that Montauk is, uh, a wee bit crowded these days.

The evidence is plentiful that East Hampton Town is under­equipped to deal with requests like these. In the Breakers example, a lawyer pointed out that the town code failed to adequately define the word “exist,” leading to uncertainty over whether an observation that food had not been served in its restaurant for years mattered at all. Similarly lacking, it appears, is the will to do anything about commercial establishments that grow into something bigger. Take, for another example, EMP Summerhouse less than a mile away from Town Hall, where outdoor seating appears to exceed the property’s capacity under earlier incarnations. Nor, too, has anyone in Town Hall been brave enough to publicly link traffic, drunken driving, litter, and other issues to all of this excess. We wonder what it will take for someone in power to just say, “Enough!”

As for Mr. Schneiderman, as a public official with long experience in two towns, the fact that he is willing to enrich himself by adding to the Montauk mayhem is regrettable. If anything, he should have been the one setting an example of restraint.

With for all the world what looked like an eye on 2018 and a bid for higher office, Suffolk County Executive Steve Bellone went for a bicycle ride recently in Southampton Village. The camera-ready event (Mr. Bellone eschewed his usual jacket and tie for a T-shirt) was to promote a countywide bike-sharing program, like the ubiquitous blue bicycles in parts of New York City.

Getting more people on bikes is a good idea, particularly in tandem with improved rail service that could help link workers with jobs. However, given lackluster efforts in the past for bike lanes and other safety measures, Mr. Bellone is getting out ahead of his handlebars.

Biking on the South Fork is nerve-racking. Its narrow roads often do not have shoulders and those that do may not have proper surfaces or adequate maintenance to keep two-wheelers safe. Sag Harbor Village is about the only municipality hereabouts that can boast bike lanes that are set off by clear boundaries, but, as if in a cruel joke, they just fade away at the village limit where Hampton Street becomes Route 114. 

It was not all that long ago that a young man just walking on the side of the road in East Hampton Town was killed, struck from behind on Old Stone Highway by a passing van. Less-serious accidents take place all the time, including one in Montauk just the other day in which a woman was knocked off her bicycle near the Catholic church after being struck by the mirror of a passing vehicle. That more incidents of this kind do not happen daily is a small miracle.

As Mr. Bellone and other elected officials start pushing more bike travel, they need to make sure there are safe places to pursue it. Handing out loaner bikes at train stations and similar locations, as envisioned, may make for great photo-ops, but it is premature. Wider roads, dedicated bike lanes, and clean and smooth pavement must come first.

East Hampton is in a crisis in which young adults, year-round workers, and ordinary residents struggle to find adequate housing they can afford. But the most recent town board discussion about housing involved temporary, portable units intended for Montauk’s seasonal, resort work force. Taking the proposal seriously is an unfortunate case of skewed priorities.

The median price for a house in East Hampton Town was a near-record $1.1 million in the first quarter of this year — four times the national average. That figure is the highest on the East End, and far beyond the means of most wage earners here. At the same time year-round rentals are few and expensive — with the supply being further limited by the astonishing growth of Airbnb and other online vacation accommodation services. 

For many, the lack of housing here leaves few choices. Those with jobs can stay with family or friends, find a reasonably priced illegal rental, travel daily to East Hampton from points west with commutes of up to an hour and a half when traffic is bad — or leave the area. Telecommuting is an option for some, but it is simply not viable as a long-term strategy, especially for those in the construction and service industries. Ask anyone who runs a business with midlevel, technically skilled, or management vacancies how hiring is going, and you will get a very discouraging picture. 

It is disappointing that the town board would spend its time on portable housing for seasonal workers, as it did on July 11. An owner of a trendy Montauk restaurant, the Grey Lady, took the concept to the board. Besides running the restaurant, Ryan Chadwick has a start-up that would provide modular, self-contained units on wheels that could be hauled away at the end of the season. There is sharp irony here — the tiny houses would go away just like the restaurant’s profits, its payments to food suppliers, and the lion’s share of the money paid to summertime staff. 

What makes Mr. Chadwick’s idea more troubling is that it would do nothing about unsafe and overcrowded low-end housing in Montauk unless there were an equal commitment on the town’s part to crack down on workers’ share houses and rundown motels occupied by the seasonal labor force. 

If anything, the town board should make housing for East Hampton’s existing residents and their young-adult children a priority. Officials should focus on our year-round commercial sector before responding to seasonal businesses of dubious local economic importance — many of which have brought problems upon themselves by expanding to require staff beyond those available locally.  In this, the town is complicit by failing to enforce effective limits on seating, in particular on bar and outdoor guest capacity. 

Real and lasting answers to East Hampton’s housing crisis are needed. Pop-up portable units for transitory laborers should not be even a small part of the solution.

A recent analysis by a private group has found that human and animal wastes were reaching the South Fork’s bays, beaches, and harbors at an alarming rate. The eastern Long Island chapter of the Surfrider Foundation took data taken from its Blue Water Task Force project and from the Concerned Citizens of Montauk and looked for trends. What it found should be alarming to anyone who cares about clean water and a productive environment.

The single worst spot identified in the Surfrider three-year look-back was in downtown Montauk, where a pipe placed by the United States Army Corps of Engineers through its sandbag seawall was found to have fecal bacteria in excess of a federal health standard 70 percent of the time it was tested. Parts of Lake Montauk exceeded the standard around half the time, as did the Georgica Pond access on Montauk Highway and Pussy’s Pond in Springs. Fresh Pond in Amagansett is another trouble spot.

New water quality improvement efforts are only in the planning stages. If the C.C.O.M.-Surfrider tests show anything at all, it is that existing measures are incapable of stopping the troubling flow. Both organizations are to be highly commended for pointing out just how much work remains to be done.

There is painful irony to the message that President Trump delivered Friday in Brentwood. Speaking to a group of police that included members of all of the East End departments, Mr. Trump ostensibly addressed the violent MS-13 gang. But he also told the officers and assembled police brass that they should feel free to rough up suspects. A White House spokeswoman has said that he intended the off-script comment as a joke. If it were a joke, it showed unfathomable insensitivity; if Ms. Trump was being serious, it showed what seems like criminal depravity.

Violent encounters with law enforcement are nothing new. In some situations, they are an unavoidable aspect of the job. But what is entirely unacceptable is for the president of the United States to promote the unlawful treatment of people in police custody. By doing that he placed himself among a regrettable fraternity of the world’s repressive leaders, including President Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines, whom he is said to admire, and Turkey’s dictatorial President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who had a warm welcome in the Trump White House.

We find hope in the fact that many officers and police brass who reacted to Mr. Trump’s speech were alarmed. Though some in law enforcement here have been hesitant to speak out publicly, others, including the Boston, Los Angeles, and New York Police Departments, have issued statements reiterating their positions on the use of excessive force and decrying the president’s remarks.

At a moment when U.S. police have come under scrutiny for the shooting deaths of unarmed civilians, it is counterproductive for the president to condone violence. This is one reason why so many departments spoke out in opposition so quickly. Policing is difficult work. It should not have been made more difficult, especially among communities of color, by a thoughtless president’s incendiary remarks.

If your garden is anything like that of a friend of ours, your status with the neighbors, who often receive its ever-increasing overage, must be skyrocketing. This summer has produced one of the most bountiful home vegetable harvests in years, and the wonder is that it’s happening after an unusually cold spring, with temperatures in the 50s halfway into June. 

June was so cold, in fact, that memories of sixth-grade history lessons about 1816, the Year Without a Summer (also known as Eighteen Hundred and Froze to Death), returned to haunt the chilly nights. But then came deliverance, a seemingly endless succession of glorious sunny days, with just enough rain in between to postpone that purchase of an automated sprinkler system for yet another year. 

Whether or not it was the climactic heaves that did it, our friend’s beefsteak and heirloom tomatoes, which barely staggered into September last year, overran their supports in mid-July; only a quick run to the hardware store for more stakes has saved the floppers from certain death-by-bug. They aren’t quite ready yet — the late start did take some toll — but the little Sungolds are showing color, and another week in the 80s should more than do it for the big ones. That first tomato — with “its remarkable amplitude and abundance, no pit, no husk, no leaves or thorns,” as the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda puts it, really is the “star of earth.”

As for all the other supernumeraries — eggplants, peppers, beets, lettuce, arugula, zucchini, cucumbers (Aaargh, six more Kirbies after a good rain, hiding under that big leaf!) — nothing to do but drop them on nearby doorsteps, maybe with a brief note: “Kindly do right by these orphans of the storm.”

A minor accident in which a Bridgehampton fire truck responding to a call struck a passenger car near the intersection of Montauk Highway and Sagg Road on Monday should be a reminder to all motorists here to yield to emergency vehicles. It is not obvious from what we know so far who was at fault in the incident, but no one was hurt. Nonetheless, that something like this could involve so visible a piece of fire equipment suggests that other vehicles, like the personal ones used by fire and emergency medical volunteers to respond to a call, are less visible still.

Readers of The Star, we assume, know the meaning of the blue or green lights that signify a volunteer on his or her way to an emergency. Visitors accustomed to only official fire and E.M.S. vehicles may be mystified. The rule is that a driver should pull to the side of the road when one of these vehicles approaches; in reality this does not happen often enough.

Local officials have to think hard about how to get the word out. One obvious idea would be to place road signs reminding motorists to move right when they encounter a vehicle bearing a blue or green flashing light, as well as clear the way for marked ambulances and fire trucks. But that may not be enough. Luckily, social media and online advertising could be brought to bear. It would not be all that difficult — or expensive — for towns and fire districts to buy advertising space targeting searches such as “East Hampton vacation rentals” or “best Hamptons restaurants” to reach the transient audience. And posting on Instagram, Twitter, or Facebook is free. All it will take is a little creative thinking.

No one method is going to be effective with everyone who uses the South Fork’s too-busy roads, but that is no excuse for officials not to try every tool at their disposal. Lives are, quite actually, at stake.

A recent P.S.A. from LTV

Things move fast these days, so fast, in fact, that Americans are getting accustomed to radical change almost overnight. The country’s lightning speed acceptance of same-sex marriage is one recent example of how public opinion can shift in what seems an instant. 

In that context it is interesting to think about suffrage and the struggle for the right of women to vote. Today, at a time when one of the leading advocates for the disenfranchisement of Americans of color enjoys a prominent role in the Trump administration, the fight for access to the fundamental act of democracy continues.

Locally, we have the League of Women Voters of the Hamptons to thank for keeping voting rights front and center. Today, at 2 p.m., members and supporters are to march along Main Street after gathering at a house where May Groot Manson, a suffrage leader, once lived. The league event will commemorate an early suffrage rally that took place on the Village Green in 1913 — four years before women gained the vote in New York State.

It is unthinkable today that women, more than half the adult population of the United States then and now, could have been denied a role in choosing elected officials. Yet today, many states engage in gerrymandering intended to block black and Latino voters from having an effective voice in government. 

As bad, the Trump administration has set a path toward wholesale purges baldly focused on getting people of color off voting rolls. 

The administration’s point man on this is Kris Kobach, who has headed voter suppression efforts in his home state of Kansas targeting young and/or black citizens more likely to vote Democratic and has said that he does not believe that Hillary Clinton won the popular vote in the 2016 presidential election. Despite his claim, there is no evidence by several orders of magnitude for anywhere near the 2.8 million votes needed for Mr. Trump’s favorite voter-fraud conspiracy theory to be true. 

A White House commission Mr. Kobach leads also touched off controversy earlier this summer when it requested a massive harvest of personal data on the nation’s voters from state election officials, something even some Republicans objected to.

At the same time, the Jim Crow laws that were purged during the civil rights era have been replaced with the mass incarceration of black American men, which has been rightly called suppression in another guise. It is as if he, and those Republicans who think like the president, truly fear democracy.

As we celebrate women’s gaining the right to vote a century ago, we must never forget that the struggle for equal access to the polls continues. White supremacists have marched in Charlottesville and elsewhere, and as they take to the streets with the effective blessing of the president, the fight goes on. Now as much as ever.

East Hampton Town is taking on restaurants that turn into nightclubs in a newly invigorated push. Focused on Montauk, this is an important effort to tamp down a party scene that has grown out of control. It is the end of the season, but the effort is nonetheless worthwhile since it sends a message for next year.

In one example, the town board sought a restraining order to block Ruschmeyer’s, on Second House Road, from continuing to turn its 48-seat restaurant into an after-dinner party place in which close to 200 people were counted over the Aug. 5 weekend. It also seeks to block an outdoor bar that the restaurant set up despite the town’s having rejected a commercial gathering permit for it. The town also is taking on the Grey Lady, a 68-person restaurant on the Montauk docks, which also has been the site of repeated overcrowding.

The new letter-of-the-law approach should be expanded. Many restaurants and hotels have turned improperly into crowd-drawing hot spots. This has had the effect on weekends of making much of Montauk seem more like frat row than a family-friendly destination. And it comes at a high cost, both in terms of required police presence and accessibility to a place beloved by residents and long-term visitors. Montauk sometimes feels like Daytona Beach of the North. The fact that some business owners are making piles of money from the chaos does not make it acceptable.

Tackling indoor dining areas converted into party spaces is a good step. But the town also will have to find a more effective way of dealing with outdoor commercial activity, such as at the Hero Beach Club, which has appropriated a portion of public beach, and at Seamore’s at the Breakers Motel, which has, like the Montauk Beach House, recently begun promoting weekend pool parties with D.J. music and rivers of rosé.

 As far as the Surf Lodge is concerned, however, all appears lost. It recently scored several overly generous concessions from the town regarding its limit on outdoor occupancy. Another that comes to mind is the EMP Summer House on Pantigo Road in East Hampton, where the restaurant’s expansion into the property’s backyard has gone mostly unnoticed. 

Lest you think the worries are limited to Montauk, the precedent-setting aspect of allowing restaurant conversions to continue unabated is significant. There are rumors that outside investors are circling several existing restaurant and takeout places, particularly in Amagansett, with an eye toward substantial expansion. This should set off alarm bells; there are quite a number of places which, but for the restraint of current owners, could become new crowd-drawing, public parking-stealing nightmares. 

It is interesting to note that Southampton used to be the party town on the South Fork. A long-term effort by local authorities to close down — amortize in the parlance of officialdom — a number of the persistent hot spots paid off, however. The heat moved east. We are glad that East Hampton Town is trying to turn the clock back to a quieter time, but much more must be done to reset the balance.