The question on Election Day will be whether Albany could get any worse. New York voters will be asked on Nov. 7 to approve or reject a proposition that would trigger a constitutional convention, which could potentially revise state government completely. Support for the measure is divided along party lines, with conservatives generally urging against it and liberals saying yes. But thinking about the proposition in terms of ideological goals without considering the realities of how the process would work would be a mistake.

If voters agree to the possible rewriting of the State Constitution, a convention would be organized for the spring of 2019. Three delegates from each State Senate district would be elected, along with 15 at-large delegates. Once the convention got going, the delegates could throw out the entire State Constitution, pick and choose some portions to change, or even do nothing at all. Any revisions would have to be taken to the voters for ultimate approval.

A central argument in favor of a constitutional convention is that anticorruption efforts have failed in Albany and that the delegates might propose tough measures that would never make it through the State Legislature. Advocates also say that new rules, such as allowing early voting, would strengthen public participation in government and that a “bill of rights” could further protect access to abortion at a time when the Trump administration and Republicans in Congress are assaulting it. The convention could also break New York governors’ death grip on the budget process and some judgeships, and return more power to New York City officials. The State Constitution has not been updated since 1938, and some consider that enough reason for a yes vote.

Opposition comes not just from the right, but from many elected officials on the center and left who worry that union labor rights and pensions might be undermined. Some Republicans worry that a convention could shift the state even further toward liberal ideas. Firearms groups are concerned that anti-gun provisions might gain ground. Environmentalists say that important protections could be lost, depending on who the delegates are and how much pressure might be put on them to trade away existing rules.

Important for eastern Long Island voters to consider is who would represent them should a constitutional convention be called. Senator Kenneth P. LaValle, a Republican, has represented District One, which extends from Montauk to Port Jefferson, since 1976. It is safe to assume that the delegates elected to attend the convention from this district would be aligned with his views. However, they almost certainly would end up being drawn from the populous western end of the region, and not necessarily act in the East End’s best interest.

Odds are that the vote on Proposition One will fail, as did a similar proposition when the matter was last on the ballot, in 1997. As voters think about the issue, they should ask themselves to what degree they would trust those sitting for a constitutional convention to get it right. If the process is just an extension of how things are in state government now, the answer might well be not very much.

The East Hampton School Board will want to carefully consider a residents’ group apparent offer of $2 million to help the district buy a parcel on Springs-Fireplace Road for a school bus parking and service facility. It should also try to be more flexible about the bus depot question in general; so far the board has been somewhat inexplicably attached to a plan for a site it already owns at Cedar Street.

People who live on Cedar Street and in its vicinity are right to be concerned about the board’s desire to build a new bus facility there. The street, a shortcut around East Hampton Village, is already overburdened with traffic, and it is narrow. Unlike Route 114, where the district’s buses are serviced and parked on rented commercial property, and even Long Lane, where the high school’s main entrance is, Cedar Street does not have shoulders. Adding bus traffic at its intersections with Robert’s Lane and Hand’s Creek Road all the way to North Main Street would not be a particularly good idea.

Springs-Fireplace Road, where town-owned property is under consideration for a bus depot, should be carefully studied, although, to be honest, it is not all that much better. 

The depot would be on a busy stretch of road that is already overloaded with commercial traffic and poorly designed development. Nevertheless, it would be preferable and have far fewer significant ripple effects than the Cedar Street site.

One option that has not had enough attention is whether the district might find a way to put the bus entrance and exit on the Long Lane side of the high school campus. Certainly there is enough land for this, and the road is already used daily by buses during the school year. This might require a traffic light or four-way stop at Long Lane and Stephen Hand’s Path, but, given that the area is already difficult to navigate, some kind of solution is probably called for.

Almost the whole bus problem can be traced to previous school board decisions. Led by the district superintendent some years ago, the board chose to take over student transportation from a private company without really exploring private bus service obtained through competitive bidding. The situation has in some ways been a comedy of errors ever since.

If the board is wise about it now and tries to work with the community rather than butt heads with it, a solution good for everyone is possible. It will take work, however, and require that every board member keep an open mind about how to get from here to real, long-term answers.

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 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

Breitbart News, the arch-right website, helped set the tone some years ago when it posted a story headlined “Ten Reasons Why People Who Support Wind Farms Are Deluded, Criminal or Insane.” Brietbart is not alone; opposition to wind power is common among many on the right, who cite turbines’ wildlife-killing blades as a top concern, though at the same time they back gutting the Endangered Species Act and dismantling the Environmental Protection Agency. We noticed an op-ed this week in Newsday from a right-wing think tank decrying turbines’ blinking red lights at night and “harmful” noise levels. Would that were all we had to worry about as the planet rapidly warms.

Locally, it is difficult to figure out just which constituency here in East Hampton some Republican leaders and the party’s candidates for town board and trustee are trying to woo in their opposition to an offshore turbine project that would help meet Long Island’s growing power needs. Their statements against it may appeal to a certain pro-fossil fuel far-right audience, but at a time when the risks from anthropogenic climate change are becoming clearer, especially on the highly vulnerable East End, they risk being out of step with the times.

There is an extraordinary amount of negative nonsense out there about wind power. Opponents, many backed by the oil industry, say it is expensive or harmful or that it can change the climate itself. In fact, as far as electricity production goes, wind is competitively priced and has near-zero carbon emissions. Looking to the future, it is obvious that as fossil fuel supplies are used up, there will be more call for alternatives. Wind must be part of a shift to renewable energy if greenhouse gases are going to be controlled.

Certainly, concerns among inshore and offshore fishing interests about the placement of wind turbines and the delivery cables to land are legitimate and must be weighed. Deepwater Wind has proposed its offshore project in what is traditionally a productive fishing area; that may have to change. Also, the company may have to drop its original plan for an underwater transmission line in Gardiner’s Bay. Any flaws in its specific proposals, however, should not be allowed to subsume the general notion that reducing global warming will take an “all-of-the-above” approach, including a significant commitment to offshore wind.

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.

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 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.

A multiagency exercise conducted in Gardiner’s Bay and several other East End waterways over two weeks this month had a sobering premise, but it had at least one important benefit, too. 

Dubbed Operation Blue Trident, the practice involved a simulated search for “dirty bombs,” or radiological devices, that terrorists could bring into New York City by sea. Aside from the clear need to keep an eye on Long Island’s hundreds of miles of coastline, the exercise tested communications among many law enforcement entities, including the Department of Environmental Conservation Police, Coast Guard, local town marine patrols, and the Department of Homeland Security. The coordination that was tested during the drill could serve as a model in the event of a major hurricane or a disaster in which the region’s many official agencies would have to work together under difficult circumstances. 

Long Island’s deeply crenulated bays and harbors have had a long history of use by smugglers. As long ago as the American Revolution, boats delivered vital munitions, food, and other supplies to both the rebels and the redcoats. During Prohibition, contraband liquor from Canada and elsewhere was brought to within a few miles of shore to be landed under cover of darkness by swift small craft, much of it destined for sale in New York City. As recently as the 1970s, pot smugglers did much the same thing, hauling bales of Mexican weed ashore from speedboats. 

With air and road approaches to New York generally well monitored for radiological traces, it is not unthinkable that terrorists might turn to the waters right offshore as a means to deliver their deadly cargo. As disturbing as that thought may be, it is at least somewhat reassuring that so many local, state, and federal agencies are taking this seriously. Such are the times we live in.