Eight million dollars seems like a lot of money for where the Sag Harbor Cinema lobby stood until it was destroyed in fire in December. However, the sum a civic group has pledged to buy the site and the relatively unscathed theater behind it and eventually build a new cultural center will prove well worth it in the long run.

In a deal announced this week, the Sag Harbor Partnership intends to raise what is needed to buy the property and continue and expand on the cinema’s reputation as a place to see smaller, art films by also offering educational programs. Conceptual plans call for two theaters as well as a screening room-classroom on the second floor.

With uncertainty about the Bay Street Theater’s long-term lease on Long Wharf, Sag Harbor and the surrounding communities should be especially eager to support what could be a new and vital cultural asset.

A mailing from the Garden Club of East Hampton with pretty painted images of plants native to this area arrived this week and piqued our interest. There, arrayed on a folding card announcing the club’s upcoming annual sale, were milkweed and arrowwood, viburnum, columbine, eastern shadbush, cardinal flower, New England aster, and bearberry — which hungry deer avoid and are in their own ways important parts of the ecosystem, enjoyed by bird and bug alike. 

’Tis the season. A day later, flipping through the most recent Audubon magazine, we read a statistic that a native oak tree can support at least 557 species of butterflies and moths — and myriad birds for which the butterflies and moths may be lunch. By comparison, a non-native ginkgo tree sustains just five butterflies and moths.

A nifty tool on Audubon’s website provided more information. The red-blossomed cardinal flower on the Garden Club’s mailing is like candy to hummingbirds, and it pleases wrens, grosbeaks, chickadees, and thrushes, among others. Sparrows like yarrows, and jays will gorge among the goldenrod. Enter your ZIP code and you can download a shopping list of sorts to take to local nurseries to turn your garden into an insect and bird-welcome zone. The Garden Club’s May 27 sale is, of course, another fine source.

In Riverhead, an organization will welcome volunteers this weekend and through next month to help germinate seeds and tend to young plants. This is in advance of the Long Island Native Plant Initiative’s sale days in early June at Suffolk Community College. Into the flats will go joe-pye weed, boneset, and germander; out to new sites will go the plants to attract insects and birds. 

If you are planning a garden this year or hope to do a good deed, consider going native. Hardy blooms and the creatures that thrive among them will thank you.

As the United States enters a dark age for environmental protection by Washington, the job has come down both literally and figuratively to our own backyards. 

A Republican Congress eager to remove what it views as unfair impediments to business has gained an eager champion in President Trump. The suppression of climate change programs and funding cuts are causing great alarm. A former anti-Environmental Protection Agency state attorney general has been put in charge of that agency. A lifelong oilman is the new secretary of state. Mr. Trump has vowed to return the coal industry to its lightly regulated glory days. 

Other moves have included a proposed $1.5 billion cut in the National Park Service allotment and hints that the administration will dump Obama-era vehicle emissions standards as well as longstanding water rules. The damage could take decades to undo.

States have taken steps of their own. New York is set to become only the second in the nation to get nonpolluting electricity from offshore wind turbines when the Deepwater project 30 miles east of Montauk goes online in 2022. Important, too, is $2.5 billion in the new state budget for clean water, including $110 million for land purchases.

On Long Island, the East End towns and Suffolk County have recently accelerated water-quality programs. East Hampton is finalizing the rules for septic system upgrade rebates. County Executive Steve Bellone has announced that grants and loans for homeowners will soon be available for new high-tech, low-contaminant systems.

The goal of all these efforts is to protect drinking water in this crowded county, as well as to reduce the nutrient pollution that is overpowering marine and freshwater ecosystems, killing fish, shellfish, and the micro-organisms on which they depend. In some cases, algal blooms can lead to elevated toxins and bacteria that are dangerous to humans. There are even atmospheric effects, particularly linked to nitrogen, that can raise ammonia and ozone, which can impair breathing, limit visibility, and hamper plant growth.

The New York State Department of Environmental Conservation began a campaign this week to encourage the use of phosphorus-free lawn fertilizers and native plants and grasses. It also is promoting letting lawn clippings remain in the yard and maintaining grass at a height of at least three inches to allow deep root growth, which is more able to withstand weeds and drought. These are steps in the right direction. 

Advocates of a soft approach to the home landscape say slow-release fertilizer, or, better, organic compost, is preferable to aggressive treatments aimed at getting the lawn emerald green by Memorial Day. The Perfect Earth Project, based here, has tips on more environment-friendly methods of lawn care — and favors a three-and-a-half-inch height for grass, among other things. The Peconic Land Trust offers free organic lawn-care advice on Wednesdays at Bridge Gardens in Bridgehampton; it also will answer questions at [email protected].

Earth Day is Saturday. Given the weather, many of us are likely to be tending our lawns and gardens and making choices about what products to use. This year, perhaps more than ever, organic, earth-friendly solutions are essential.

The rescue off Montauk Point of two people from a small boat taking on water Saturday should serve as a reminder of the dangers of cold water. 

A press release from the Montauk Coast Guard Station said the two people had set out from shore in a folding boat of the sort more appropriate for a lake or other enclosed waterway. Tides at the Point run hard, and their small trolling motor was quickly overpowered. A passing charter boat captain who heard a distress alert spotted the boaters and stayed with them until the Coast Guard arrived. Had he not been nearby, the outcome might have been tragic.

Though the air temperature here can be comfortable, the bays and ocean lag far behind. According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s buoy data, available online, the water temperature now remains about 48 degrees, low enough to produce hypothermia in a person immersed for under five minutes. For a sense of just how low that is, run 50-degree tap water over your hand for a while. Then try to imagine your entire body in it. Surfers this week were still in full neoprene suits, most with hoods, thick gloves, and booties. Other water sports enthusiasts should take note.

It may be easy to scoff at this story, but examples of people who take the water less seriously than they should are plentiful. For example, as the popularity of stand-up paddleboarding has boomed, too few of those heading out pay attention to the regulation that they carry an approved floatation device. 

The rescued Montauk boaters were lucky; they had with them a portable VHF radio with which they made an initial call for help. Though their choice to test Block Island Sound was a bad one, at least they were prepared to summon assistance. Consider theirs a cautionary tale.

School district budget planning has recently been without customary fireworks. In part, this is because a state cap on how much taxes can be increased has taken the heat out of the process, with a supermajority of voter approval necessary to pierce the cap. This is not to suggest that school spending is unimportant; rather, as the work educators do gets ever more complex, how money is allotted remains key.

Hearings at which the budgets are officially presented to the public will be held on Monday in Sag Harbor, Tuesday in Wainscott and East Hampton, and Wednesday in Bridgehampton and Montauk. Springs residents will get their turn to learn about the 2017-18 budget on May 8, and in Amagansett and Sagaponack on May 9. In all districts, budget voting takes place on May 16. 

The hearings are excellent opportunities to find out about the respective districts’ plans for the year ahead. Parents and other interested residents should make every effort to attend.

John Keeshan, who was in the news last week for folding his eponymous real estate agency into the Compass group, made the papers some years back with his push to get rid of the welter of utility lines that mar the view as one approaches Montauk’s commercial center from the west. The effort to bury the wires stalled, as do many such things, because of money, or, more accurately, the lack thereof. Elsewhere, well-heeled residents have banded together to create special tax districts to pay for taking down the poles; in Montauk that prospect was never good.

State Assemblyman Fred W. Thiele Jr., who has long heard complaints about the ugly overhead lines, and more recently the extension of utility poles, has offered a variety of solutions, which for the most part went nowhere. Now he has taken a different tack, presenting a bill that would create a statewide fund using money from the Federal Emergency Management Agency. His argument is that underground utilities are far less vulnerable to outages in storms. Long Island, with its susceptibility to hurricanes, and upstate, where ice storms frequently take down electrical service, would both benefit. And more and more violent weather events caused by global warming give greater urgency to fortifying New York’s utilities.

In the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy, electricity on much of Long Island was cut off for up to two weeks, with damaging economic effects. Underground power lines would help avert that the next time. As a bonus, the entry to Montauk would sure look a heck of a lot better. 

Many people, especially urban users of ride hailing services, prefer summoning Uber or Lyft on their smartphones instead of calling for a taxi. Following a state budget deal, Uber and its competitors will pick up passengers legally in East Hampton Town, as well as upstate, where they had been unable to operate because of legal and insurance requirements. Expect traffic around the South Fork’s hot spots to get a lot worse this summer.

East Hampton’s rule that all for-hire vehicle companies have places of business within town limits is now likely to fall by the wayside. The regulation was never going to stand up anyway — it is difficult to imagine that a court would agree to give locals a total monopoly on a specific kind of economic activity, which is in part conducted on state and county roads. Now, because of the state deal, the tougher problem of what to do about the congestion that Uber and other companies will cause becomes harder to deal with.

At bottom, the problem is not the car services, but the people who use them. East Hampton Town has more than its share of overcrowded drinking establishments, and until they are brought in line or eliminated, people will want to get to them. Uber and the like are not the villains here. Instead, they are the end result of successive Town Hall administrations unable, or unwilling, to turn the party train around. 

We know ride-hailing services are popular, and for a reason. They are prompt and can offer superior service, driver courtesy, and vehicle cleanliness. Though Uber in particular has been criticized for fare spiking, through something it calls surge pricing, its upcharges have been significantly less outrageous than the late-night gouging reported by users of some traditional taxis here.

When you think about it, both the ride-hailing services and East Hampton Town’s taxi regulations have had the same goal: safe rides at reasonable cost. Since it cannot fight Albany on this, the town is seeking ways to minimize the expected influx of vehicles and drivers from away. This is bound to fail. 

The solution will have to come from reducing demand. Possibilities for this include stricter noise and capacity controls on once-modest restaurants that now serve hundreds of customers from afternoon to late night on a single day. Until the town comes up with tighter regulations, patrons will continue to flock to these places, whether in an Uber or Lyft car, taxi, or by another method

They said it could not be done: A public restroom in Amagansett. Now, on Monday, if officials are to be believed, the ceremonial first flush will take place. It will have been a long time coming.

Providing a place to go in the hamlet’s central business district has been a struggle going back to the 1980s, if not longer. Over the decades, ideas were floated for a site in Amagansett Square, which is privately owned. More recently, the town parking lot north of the highway appeared the obvious choice, though issues with neighbors and groundwater flow complicated matters. Throughout, businesses and, especially, the Amagansett Library have had to accommodate visitors in need. Headline writers’ puns over the years (“Finally, a Place to Go in ’Gansett!”) have been both unbearable and premature.

Despite Monday’s expected opening, work at the Amagansett restroom is likely to continue. As concerns about groundwater contamination grow, public facilities like this should be among the first to be fitted with new, low-nitrogen septic systems. Let’s hope that doing so does not take another 30 years.

Despite what Senator Jeff Flake from that great oceanfront state of Arizona said, the Montauk sandbag sea wall did what it was supposed to do this week as a northeaster pounded the beach. Senator Flake, you might recall, included the $9 million United States Army Corps of Engineers project among his annual list of wasteful government spending.

Though others differ, for the owners of the several downtown motels, private residences, and condominium complexes the sea wall was taxpayers’ money well spent. However, in the long run, the sea wall was a mistake. Senator Flake called it a boondoggle, and he was right. 

Following Hurricanes Irene and Sandy in 2012, the area was left exposed and the buildings at risk of falling into the breach. The Army Corps’s work to save them was completed last year. Mr. Flake is correct that the money Congress appropriated after Sandy for erosion-related projects in the Northeast could have been far better spent. By building a sea wall in Montauk, the corps only delayed a lasting solution and left Town of East Hampton and Suffolk residents on the hook for untold millions to maintain a layer of sand on something that should not have been built in the first place. 

 Previous town boards had worked for years to draft a coherent erosion policy, with Albany’s approval, but that was sidestepped without explanation by every agency that had a hand in the project. This should not suggest that officials were corrupt, but rather that the challenges of managing the developed coastline are beyond current government regulatory abilities.

This week’s storm underscored a fact that was clear after Irene and Sandy: Downtown Montauk’s beachfront row of structures is doomed without costly and ongoing sand replenishment. However, since the Army Corps has said it would not take on such efforts in the coming decades, it will be the town’s responsibility. 

Already, local officials are getting spooked about their risky financial exposure, trying to convince the Army Corps that the project is not technically completed and, therefore, that it is still federal responsibility to pay for new sand in the aftermath of this week’s storm. That is a nice try, but hardly the stuff of long-term strategy.

Unlike in Sagaponack and Water Mill, where millionaire and billionaire homeowners pooled resources to fund their own private effort, downtown Montauk’s businesses simply do not have the means to go it alone. Moreover, taxpayers in Montauk or the town as a whole should not be expected to pay to continue the folly.

The officials who wrote the town’s erosion law knew this decades ago. They understood that the only option in the worst-hit areas was for the motels and houses to be shifted landward, away from the danger zone, or removed entirely. By allowing the Montauk sea wall to be built in contravention of the law, today’s town officials delayed a sensible solution that would have cost taxpayers far less in the long run than ongoing sand replenishment. We have to wonder what it will take to convince them to change course. 

Senator Flake apparently found the name Dirtbag Beach, as some local commentators called the Montauk effort, amusing. In his remarks, he said such federal spending should have gone to national priorities such as infrastructure and health research. It is hard to argue with that. But it is also hard not to see the need for a federal role in coastal management — as long as the Army Corps is not in charge.­

From conversations locally, it seems that a fair number of rank-and-file supporters of President Donald J. Trump really fear, deep in their hearts, the prospect of a terror attack within the United States by radicalized Muslims. As irrationally improbable as that may be — deadly violence in the United States since 9/11 is overwhelmingly a homegrown crisis — the so-called immigration ban makes them at least feel safer. They are not alone; according to polls cited by The New York Times, almost half of U.S. respondents favored more restrictions on migrants from “terror-prone” regions.

Such poll data might help explain why Representative Lee Zeldin, the First District congressman, was among those speaking out in favor of Mr. Trump’s precipitious order blocking entry to Green Card holders and others on Friday. But it does not explain how Mr. Zeldin, who has often sought to score political points by promoting his Jewish background, can so easily promote a policy so based on religous and ethnic discrimination. 

Mr. Zeldin appeared to want to have it both ways this week, by working for the release of a Stony Brook University linguistics doctorate candidate from Iran who had been detained at John F. Kennedy Airport as a result of Mr. Trump’s executive order. In a press release, Mr. Zeldin’s office said that he had been monitoring the situation.

Also worth noting is that Mr. Zeldin, during his overseas deployment with the United States Army, likely crossed paths with some of the Iraqi translators and other on-the-ground support staff now barred from entry by Mr. Trump’s order.

We would hardly expect Mr. Zeldin to turn on the president now. He was among Mr. Trump’s earliest supporters during the primary and won re-election by a large margin in November. Adding to his confidence perhaps is the fact that Mr. Trump easily beat Hillary Clinton in the First District. But bowing to the political winds does not excuse him from standing by as many core American values are assailed by the White House. We would hope that Mr. Zeldin would have a sudden change of heart, but we, sadly, do not see that happening any time soon.