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

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 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.

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.

As East Hampton Town prepares to go all-in on water quality, there is one place it is decidedly ignoring: Fresh Pond in Amagansett. According to tests done for Concerned Citizens of Montauk, Fresh Pond creek has as often as not been contaminated with fecal enterococcus bacteria. And this is not simply at mildly elevated levels: In a water sample last month, the bacteria count was almost 60 times higher than the federal standard for safe recreational contact. 

The Environmental Protection Agency says that a count of more than 104 viable enterococcus cells per 100 milliliters of water renders it unsuitable for swimming. A sample taken at Fresh Pond on July 24 indicated a level of 6,131 cells. 

Enterococcus is a common bacteria found in the human gut, which has been linked in multiple studies to gastrointestinal illness and skin and other problems. Additional sources of this bacteria include wildlife, but other sites regularly tested by C.C.O.M. and at other locations on the South Fork by the Blue Water Task Force of the Surfrider Fondation’s Long Island Chapter have plenty of birds and other creatures around, but far lower cell counts. 

A likely suspect in Fresh Pond contamination are the town’s own restrooms, which are about 30 paces from the creek. There are houses and a small cabin complex nearby as well, but hardly enough to immediately suggest their waste systems are the sole source of the problem; there are many similar locations in town where bacteria has not proved ominous.

Caregivers of the young children who play in the creek at Fresh Pond have not been warned about the risk. During a visit recently, a reporter watched as two girls about 4 years old splashed about in the warm, brownish water. A local camp had planned a nature field trip there this week and changed the location only at the last minute after being alerted to the C.C.O.M. test results.

Parents have for years talked about kids developing symptoms after swimming in the Fresh Pond creek. If these anecdotal observations reached Town Hall or the county, they were not acted upon. Official response has been lacking even after C.C.O.M. began tests. The town has said it cannot accept the data because the samples were not processed in a certified lab. The Suffolk Department of Health Services does not test the water at Fresh Pond because it is not, technically, a bathing beach with required permits. Nonetheless, the town requires beach-parking stickers there, which implies that the water’s fine when maybe it’s not. 

What is disappointing about the Fresh Pond situation is that neither the town nor the county considers C.C.O.M.’s results worthy of investigation. Consider, by comparison, what happens when the police hear complaints about a vehicle speeding on a particular street; an officer is sent out at once. Not so with East Hampton Town, which so far has just shrugged off what appears to be a legitimate health risk — one involving children, in fact. At a minimum, the town owes it to the public to conduct its own tests, verify or disprove the C.C.O.M. results, and post warnings that all is not well if elevated bacteria levels are confirmed. It defies reason that the town has not acted so far.

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.

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.”

East Hampton may one day look back and realize this was the summer that the internet changed everything. Just as online advertising took the strength out of many newspapers’ bottom lines and Uber cut a hole in the taxi industry, so too may the web and smartphone apps be changing the way people vacation. If so, it is likely to have long-term implications for East Hampton, where a new, highly transient resort scene appears to have had an underappreciated ripple effect.

As the high season draws to a close, it is worth taking stock. This was the summer when a national survey cited Montauk as having the highest hotel rates of any beach resort coast to coast. This was also the summer of long — and often inexplicable — traffic tie-ups that spread not just onto the known back roads but onto smaller streets. Beach parking outside the incorporated villages was too often too hard to find. Statistics on the number of emergency calls will be forthcoming, but it was clear that police and medical personnel were as busy as ever. 

And yet, despite all the people passing through, the familiar lament that business was off was heard from many retailers. Many have blamed the apparent increase in the proportion of short-term rentals. They say that people here for a weekend or even a week are hardly likely to shop for the kind of decorative items or clothes that summer-long renters would. People have to eat, so the restaurants and grocery stores have been packed, but many say there was a drop in the rate at which sundries have sold.

East Hampton Town is nearing completion of a series of so-called hamlet studies. These are detailed reviews of the various commercial clusters, such as Montauk Highway in Wainscott and Amagansett’s Main Street, and contain recommendations about how they might be changed to meet current needs. These studies may not adequately take into account the role of transient visitors and whether they are bringing unwelcome economic effects in some sectors and making transportation issues worse on the already crowded South Fork. Old assumptions about who is here, for how long, and what services they demand may no longer entirely apply.

This fall, as the hamlet plans begin to be finalized, extra care must be taken to ensure that they are accurate representations of the real conditions here in the new app-enabled world.

Last week’s revelations in a lawsuit brought by a former East Hampton Village police chief and his wife bring to light the distasteful truth that some local officials have long traded their influential positions for lucrative side businesses. 

It is no secret that Jerry Larsen, the former chief who is now a candidate for the East Hampton Town Board, has for years had a security business, though since about 2009 he has insisted the business was his wife’s, Lisa Larsen’s, not his. That is splitting hairs; he always remained a company officer, and it is clear that it was at least a joint effort.

Starting in 2005, Mr. Larsen ran Protec Security Services, which eventually got into the fire and burglar alarm business, as well as offered drug tests and estate watching. Trouble started when Protec began to compete with Scan Security, which employed Village Mayor Paul F. Rickenbach Jr. as an alarm salesman, the suit claims.

The Larsens say Mr. Rickenbach and Richard Lawler, a village trustee who had his own house-watching business, then took advantage of a section of the village ethics code to block Protec from taking on private clients within village limits as a way to limit competition and get more business for themselves. 

The village ethics code, in place since 2002, prohibits any officer or employee from accepting outside jobs or providing services that would create a conflict with his or her official duties — and that would have included the police chief. Mr. Larsen’s excuse, as described in the suit, is basically that everybody was doing it. Mr. Rickenbach and Mr. Lawler have not responded to the claims. 

The matter speaks volumes about Mr. Larsen’s character, in what can only be seen as unflattering terms. In his lawsuit, and without apparent irony, Mr. Larsen says he is trying to “hold those in power accountable for their actions.”

Rules barring this kind of outside employment were in place before Mr. Larsen became police chief. Even if he had some doubt about them, common sense might have suggested that he should not have sought a $300,000-a-year security contract at an unnamed village resident’s property while heading the village police force. 

After Mr. Larsen’s retirement in January, he took a job as head of security at the billionaire Ronald Perelman’s Creeks estate, which is in the village. Mr. Perelman was recently turned down by the village board in his bid for a new zoning classification that would have made certain problems with structures built without proper approvals at the Creeks go away.

If the allegations in the suit hold up, Mayor Rickenbach and Mr. Lawler may deserve even greater rebuke than Mr. Larsen for outright abuse of their positions for personal gain. When he went away on vacation, Mr. Rickenbach would ask various village employees to cover his up to 60 private customers for him, the suit alleges. This included asking Mr. Larsen to do so. The suit also alleges that the mayor used a village vehicle while making rounds for his personal clients, as did Mr. Lawler. The charge that they used their posts to hamper Protec is a serious one. If true, these officials have shown very bad judgment, if not serious ethical violations. 

But it is very surprising that Mr. Larsen is bringing this suit now, with the town board election about two months away. This would hardly seem the time to raise clear-cut ethical issues in which he himself is implicated. Voters might well remember this case come Election Day.

Politicians in Albany and Hauppauge find it easy to promote shrinking government when it is not their own government they are shrinking. New York Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo has long tried to squeeze local municipalities and school districts through a formula capping the amount that taxes can be raised from year to year. This dictate has come from on high with little in the way of state aid or guidance. Do it or else, the governor seems to say. There is a planned dollar-match program in the works for 2018, and perhaps it should be no surprise that next year is when Mr. Cuomo may begin his long-anticipated bid for the Democratic presidential nomination. As a governor from a high-tax state, he may well plan to point to his signature tax cap for political cover.

Now, Suffolk Executive Steve Bellone is getting in on the act. He is planning a series of meetings next month to personally pitch the smaller-government idea to local officials. A Bellone staffer told Newsday that money savings might be found if towns shared wastewater pump-out boats or pooled computer services. These are worthwhile ideas, but hardly  would make a real difference for taxpayers.

For property owners on eastern Long Island, the greatest share of taxes goes to the schools, but neither Mr. Cuomo nor Mr. Bellone seems willing to take this on. Parents, especially on the East End, generally like their tiny districts, even though the cost cuts after consolidations could be large. If Mr. Cuomo and Mr. Bellone want to get serious about saving money, the schools are the place to start, just don’t expect them to take on this sacred cow anytime soon.