Fasten your seatbelts, here comes our annual editorial about beach bonfires. If you are among those who think it is still the 1970s, when the population was 9,000 and the number of summertime visitors maybe twice that, read no further. However, if you are among the majority, who understand that times have changed and that the pressures on public spaces have increased exponentially, and that the old rules no longer work as intended, we ask that you pay attention to what we have to say.

First, the problems: Popular bay and ocean beaches in both East Hampton Town and Village are too often left embarrassingly messy by the charcoal and log remains of bonfires. This is despite a relatively new law requiring them to be set only in metal containers, 50 feet from the dunes, put out only by water, and so on. The law has proven itself ineffectual; few visitors or even many residents seem to know about it, which is hardly surprising, given the impenetrable fine print on signs put up to inform the public. More proof? Town Marine Patrol and police officers issued 441 citations for improper beach fires in 2016. That is a staggering number, when you realize that the bonfire season is only about 90 days long.

Evidence of the law’s failings is everywhere. Beach Lane in Wainscott was dotted in a half-dozen places by fire remains on the sand when we checked a week ago. Charred wood had been placed in several locations behind a row of snow fence, and another pile of coals had been left dumped by the trash receptacles in the parking lot. We saw the same thing at Atlantic Avenue in Amagansett.

At Georgica Beach one morning this week, we counted three bonfire sites on the sand immediately to the west of the lifeguard stand, including one with its own jagged-stone fire ring, as well as coals and burned logs along the high tide line. It is more or less the same at beaches throughout town, although the situation in downtown Montauk and along Navy Road seems a little bit better this year, thanks perhaps to an increased Marine Patrol presence.

Second, possible solutions: One would be fire-debris receptacles at beaches of the sort seen in state and national parks. It was an oversight for officials to impose the metal-container rule without thinking through what the public was supposed to do with fire remains. Baffled, some people just pour everything into the surf or just leave everything for someone else to deal with.

Another solution, short of banning fires altogether, is to prohibit them within the areas of the beaches most used by swimmers and sunbathers. Off-leash dogs already are prohibited within 300 feet of road ends; it seems obvious that fires should not be allowed in the same zone. Given that officials have failed to make provisions for disposing of fire debris — and that compliance with existing rules is so poor — an exclusion area is a must. This could be easily and quickly imposed.

Failing new rules, town and village employees must be assigned to scour the shoreline on foot each morning between June and September, cleaning up the messes so that not one fragment of charcoal, wood, or other garbage remains.

East Hampton’s beaches are among its greatest charms and one of the main reasons people choose to visit and live here. They must be treated like the treasures they are and that starts with dealing with unsightly and dangerous fire remains.

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.

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.

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.”

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.

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.

East Hampton Town will start accepting applications on Sept. 1 from homeowners who want to replace their septic systems or cesspools with state-of-the-art low-nitrogen alternatives. However, lacking even the most rudimentary test data and without a science-based plan for rolling out the new program, the effort could end up with a lot of money being spent with few results to show for it.

Defining the problem with water quality and agreeing on what success would look like should be the first step. However, despite all the attention being paid to water quality, even these basic elements remain hard to define. According to the town, success might be measured by the reopening of shellfishing grounds and the handful of closed bathing beaches. But nothing in the law authorizing the rebates specifically targets the town’s few known problem areas. Nor does it provide for baseline testing so that the efficacy of nitrogen-reducing technology can even be measured.

Officials agree as almost an article of faith that nitrogen is the culprit in undesired environmental changes in the marine ecosystem on eastern Long Island, though there is a troubling absence of localized empirical evidence to support this conclusion. If this were a medical trial, there is no way a product based on so much supposition would make it past the Food and Drug Administration.

In addition to the rebates, the town will soon order that all new residential and commercial construction, as well as alterations that are deemed substantial, will have to include low-nitrogen waste systems. This, too, might be warranted, but it is irresponsible for the town to impose additional costs on property owners on an assumption, rather than on actual, hard-numbers evidence. Meanwhile, the town has ignored a federal order that long ago required that large commercial cesspools be phased out by 2005. 

The East Hampton program’s flaws will be exacerbated by the nature of the rebate program, which will draw on money from the community preservation fund. Because participation is voluntary, the effort will, at best, result in a patchwork with very little to show for all the expense. At worst, 5 or 10 years from now, the public might see continued water degradation, conclude that the plan was a failure, and end funding altogether. 

There are some glimmers of hope. The East Hampton Town Natural Resources Department is embarking on a limited nitrogen-test regime for Accabonac Harbor. And a town water improvement consultant working on several projects has long called for baseline testing before work begins. 

Also, in a recent statement, Sean O’Neill, the Peconic Baykeeper, argued for setting a regulatory limit on the amount of nitrogen entering the ecosystem and then working toward that goal. Mr. O’Neill pointed out that more than $4 billion already has been spent on water quality on Long Island, and he rightly asks why conditions are getting worse, not better. Money alone, he said, without strict controls that mandate actual reduction in loads, does nothing to improve water quality. 

These points seem to be falling on deaf ears, as elected officials pat themselves on the back for the rebates and construction mandates. It is unfortunately obvious that the policy has gotten out ahead of the science. There is time to catch up, but that might mean holding off on handing out those rebate checks until after the data is assembled and analyzed. That might be bad politics, but it is the right way to assure the program’s success.

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.

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.

Now that the United States Supreme Court has refused to review a lower court’s decision on local control of East Hampton Airport, the big question is what will happen next. This is a delicate moment; public outrage after another summer of aircraft noise could lead to a confrontation that could, in the end, most hurt the aviation industry itself.

Town officials are pursuing Federal Aviation Administration approval for the restrictions the lower court rejected, but this may be difficult to achieve. Meanwhile, helicopters and other loud aircraft will come and go, infuriating residents, irritating visitors, and adding to pressure on officials to do something about it once and for all.

There was a time when no one would declare in public that the airport be shut down and the land repurposed. Now such thoughts have moved from the margins to the mainstream.

Those who favor an airport without limits — mostly the New York helicopter companies — argue that its opponents are merely those who bought land nearby. This is an oversimplification intended to discredit the critics and deflect attention from the very real issues that airport traffic creates for people in a much greater area. 

North Fork residents have in recent times become among the loudest voices, decrying the too-frequent helicopter service. People in Sagaponack and other parts of Southampton Town have added to the chorus of complaints as well. Indeed, jet aircraft often roar toward the airport from the east, after having turned low over East Hampton Main Street, which was laid out by colonists from England in 1648 or so. Clearly, this is a region-wide and long-coming problem, not something created lately by a small group who live close to the airport and may — reasonably, it needs to be said — be worried about property values. 

It is important to note that in 2015, record money from out-of-town helicopter companies was spent on behalf of Republicans in a local election in which that party’s candidates went down in a historic and humbling defeat. The rout was so complete that even Republican town trustees, who are at the far end of the ballot, suffered unheard-of losses. That election should be interpreted as a referendum on the airport, in which an overwhelming majority of East Hampton voters soundly rejected the party most closely aligned with it.

Aviation industry interests and their sympathizers might want to fob off the opposition as a not-in-my-backyard crowd, but when that backyard includes tens of thousands of affected people on the North and South Forks, drastic measures that were once unthinkable become thinkable. Until the companies enriching themselves at East Hampton Airport earnestly try to help find solutions to noise, they are only exacerbating the risk that they could lose the facility entirely. This would mean financial harm for them and an unacceptable blow to hobbyist pilots who base their not-so-noisy aircraft there as well. The industry does not seem to get it and, instead, opposes sensible regulations with never-ending litigation.

East Hampton Airport should be saved. It is up to the very people now abusing the community’s hospitality to act differently to assure that it continues to operate for the long term.