One of the perennial problems in East Hampton Town is a kind of amnesia that falls on residents and policy makers alike once summer ends. The cool and quieter days of late September and early October wash away the high season’s many frustrations, and the torments that had marked July and August are forgotten.

We were reminded of this two Saturdays ago during a Concerned Citizens of Montauk forum, at which the conversation focused entirely on what to do about the eroding downtown oceanfront and not about how to tame growth and summertime chaos.

It was a good discussion, to be sure, with a larger and more interested audience than one might have expected in other parts of East Hampton Town. This was likely due to the freshness of the subject matter, as the Army Corps’s sandbag seawall had only recently been exposed by a prolonged ocean swell, but it also came from the impressive level of civic involvement you see everywhere in Montauk. 

Montauk’s problems involve far more than the oceanfront. Indeed, during the 1938 Hurricane, destruction mostly swept in from the north rather than the ocean as the storm passed over Long Island. The Army Corps’s new idea of pumping a larger quantity of sand onto the downtown beach than had been envisioned might help in the short term, but, human nature being what it is, it would take the pressure off and dangerously delay a long-lasting solution.

In the more immediate future, the imbalance between an increasingly corporate tourism economy and the desires of Montauk residents for peace and quiet must be addressed. Years ago, Sag Harbor went through a similar struggle, pitting business owners against ordinary folks who just wanted to continue enjoying their village and to keep taxes modest. For the most part, they got it right. About Montauk, we are not so sure. 

Some years ago, there was talk among some resort operators about incorporating Montauk as its own, stand-alone village in order to evade restrictions on building. Now, as East Hampton Town proves it is ill-equipped to deal with the barrage of new commercial projects and never-ending violations of the town code there, it seems as if they got their wish.

We would like to think that the results of a village bid would be different today. If Montauk were to incorporate, there is a good chance that voters would put in place a mayor and trustees more in line with their views about how the hamlet should be and less inclined to give business everything it wanted — a good question for another day.

The Maidstone Club has at last, it seems, gone too far, what with a spate of recent projects including a massive new irrigation system and with a proposal now for a new bridge over an upper reach of Hook Pond. The bridge has drawn the attention of no less formidable opponents than the East Hampton Ladies Village Improvement Society’s landmarks and nature trail committees, as well as well-known local environmentalists.

The question is why. The club’s representatives have told East Hampton Village that safety is paramount. We are not buying it — and neither should the village. Pedestrians, golf carts, the club’s greens keepers, and passing motor vehicles have co-existed for years on Dunemere Lane. The village lowered the speed limit there to 25 miles an hour relatively recently, and police frequently hide their patrol cars nearby to catch those who might scoff that particular law. 

Similarly, the club got along just fine since its founding in 1891 — and the first golf rounds three years later — without a major irrigation system. That it now needs to pump water from underground to spread on its fairways and greens has never been adequately explained. Taken with the request for the bridge, it is fair to suspect that something may be afoot.

By itself, the bridge, as laid out for the village zoning board, seems a bit much. It would be 352 feet long and made of steel and timbers, resting on 42 pilings driven into the mud. Sited to the north of an existing vehicle bridge, it would bisect the Hook Pond dreen — a habitat where ducks, swans, herons, and grebes often feed and aquatic turtles are seen from time to time — and destroy the scenic vista.

Among the standards that the zoning board is supposed to consider when granting variances is whether an applicant can solve a perceived problem by another means and whether the hardship for which relief is sought is self-created. Given that there has been golf at the club for more than a century, with players and employees sharing the existing Dunemere Lane crossing, and that the impact of the new bridge on the pond and surrounding wetlands would be substantial, there can be no reasonable basis for the board to approve the project.

“Oh, but we have been such a good neighbor,” the club’s representatives say. Well, tell that to the residents who used to be able to take an off-season stroll along the golf course or fish from one of its existing bridges who are now rudely chased away.

If there is something the club is not telling the board — perhaps that it hopes to host large-scale professional golfing events — it needs to come clean. And those officials and village consultants who may be willing to show deference to the Maidstone’s wealthy members instead of the public or the environment should think again about whose interests they are really supposed to represent.

Time was, during the weeks after Labor Day, the leaves magically changed into technicolor and blew down Main Street in a scratchy buzz, but otherwise there was mostly silence.

Although that blessed time is still celebrated in certain ways — champagne brunches on the beach in anticipation of the mass exodus come to mind — fewer people are actually leaving, opting instead to stay put for most of the year or at least 52 weekends. Many are refugees from the city and the suburbs who are attracted to a quieter, yet cultured life. Families, artists, writers, foodies, and other creative types are no longer transients but fully rooted in the year-round landscape.

In addition to peace and quiet, many full-timers are here for the artistic and cultural attractions. In the past few years, longtime museums and venues like Guild Hall and the Parrish Art Museum have expanded year-round programs, new institutions such as the Southampton Arts Center have begun contributing their own full schedules, and the Bay Street Theater has gone from mostly seasonal offerings to live events throughout the off-season.

Fall arts and music festivals have grown out of successful local events, including Sag Harbor’s American Music Festival and Southampton’s SeptemberFest. Throw in the annual Hamptons International Film Festival, and some might even say the South Fork has an arts scene like that of a small city.

What has been called the shoulder season, the first few weeks before and after summer, has been padded all the way through the holidays. It then emerges again, like the groundhog, on or about Presidents and Valentine’s Day weekends.

A quick peek at the region’s cultural calendars shows staged plays and readings, gallery and museum openings, comedy shows, film screenings, theater and opera simulcasts, book talks and lectures, a fully evolved music scene, and so much more.

You say there is nothing to do in the fall and winter? You’re not looking hard enough.

A proposition appearing on the back of Tuesday’s ballot that would add 20 years to the life of the community preservation fund and allow up to 20 percent of its future income to be used for water quality projects is almost sure to get a majority of “yes” votes. Multiple advocates have pushed hard for the measure, and many voters will have heard only that it will advance environmental protection and want to sign on.

Assuming that the proposition will be approved, it now falls to its supporters, both in and out of government, to do what they should have done in the first place — get the details right. 

East Hampton Town, having been burned once by vague language in the enabling preservation fund law, should have been way more rigorous this time around. If the water program is allowed to operate as written, the costly projects that could be provided for under the proposition are an invitation to misuse and corruption. Environmental groups, excited about the prospect of millions of dollars to further their goals, have been blindly willing to look past the vague proposal’s shortcomings.

It is likely that some of its backers have glimpsed problems with the proposition but agreed to rush, calculating that aligning the vote with an expected high turnout for the presidential election would assure its chances of passing. Were it scheduled in a midterm election year, its prospects might have been diminished. Tying the water quality question to the extension of the fund for its original purposes was another way to assure its approval. In fairness to the public and for the quality of the debate, the issues should have been the subject of separate referendums.

After Tuesday, the lack of clear definition of what can and cannot be done in the law must be remedied right away. 

A “no” vote on Proposition 1 would be a way to warn officials and the environmental community that they still have a great deal of work to do to assure that the public’s money is spent properly and does not spur excessive development while at the same time sharply cutting funding for land acquisition.

East Hampton Town and Southampton Hospital are moving quickly toward breaking ground on a emergency-care facility, possibly off Pantigo Road just east of Town Hall. Many questions remain, and we are concerned that in the eagerness to get moving, some of the numbers used to justify the roughly $40 million project are being overstated. A hospital adjunct of some kind appears necessary within the town’s borders, especially since Southampton Hospital may be relocated westward in a few years to a new site on County Road 39.

For East Hampton’s ambulance services, a treatment center closer by makes a lot of sense. Even now, a routine trip to the Southampton emergency room takes a considerable amount of time. During the peak season, ambulances frequently have to return east after an emergency with lights flashing and sirens blaring in order to get to another call. Being able to turn an ambulance around at an East Hampton facility and put it back in service awaiting another emergency could mean the difference between life and death.

Location is a question. The hospital administration prefers the town’s 4.5-acre ball field on Pantigo Place over a much larger town-owned property on Stephen Hand’s Path. Whichever site is chosen, it is highly likely that a new traffic light on Montauk Highway will have to be installed. A light controlling the entrance and exit at Pantigo Place may be less disruptive of through traffic, though this would have to be studied closely before anyone could say for sure. 

For patients from Montauk, Springs, and Amagansett, whether going to the new emergency facility in an ambulance or getting there by other means, the Pantigo Place location would be better. It also is important to consider our summer visitors, many of whom stay in motels and other accommodations on Napeague and in Montauk. According to Suffolk County figures, there were beds for about 11,400 motel and hotel guests in East Hampton Town in 2010 — most of them from Amagansett east — an astonishing figure with obvious implications for first responders.

Other numbers warrant more clarity. The hospital has proposed eventually having a 64,000-square-foot building, which would make it among the largest structures in East Hampton Town. Does it really need to be that large? Maybe. Another startling statistic offered by the hospital is 17,000, the number of patient visits to the hospital originating from East Hampton annually, which needs a bit more explanation. It ought to be made clear just how many of those thousands of visits would be handled at a new site and how many would still require going to the hospital in Southampton. It is not clear at this point how either the patient or building plan numbers were arrived at and whether they justify the calculations that led to the East Hampton plan.

Another concern is that the Pantigo Place property is adjacent to a Suffolk County Water Authority well and water tower. What the environmental impact would be of such a massive facility and whether sewage treatment would be adequate to keep chemical and pharmaceutical contamination from reaching drinking or surface waters must be studied.

A $10 million promise of a state grant puts pressure on East Hampton Town and the hospital to get moving on construction as soon as possible. However, making sure the facility is the right size, built in the best location, and would result in only minimal ecological harm should take precedence over haste.

As the year draws to a close, it is worth reflecting on the ongoing success of the Peconic Bay Region Community Preservation Fund in East Hampton Town. As of this week — and with several deals pending — money from a 2-percent tax on most real estate transactions had saved 2,063 acres of land from development. The money went for environmentally significant parcels as well as historic sites and properties that provided public access, recreational opportunities, and helped link the town’s growing woodland trail system. 

In November, voters here approved extending the 2-percent tax until 2050 and okayed a measure to allow up to 20 percent of future preservation fund income to be spent on water protection measures other than straight-up land acquisition. These could include rebates to help homeowners replace failing septic systems, which leach contaminants into ponds, bays, and harbors. 

In 2014, the fund brought in a record $32.3 million. With two months left before the final figure for this year is known, the town is on track to pull in somewhere upward of $27 million; in 2015 the year-end total was just under $29 million. Its low point in the past decade came in 2009, when a mere $10.4 million was banked.

The fund has come a long way since the first acquisition, in 1999, but in many ways the goals of the program remain unchanged. That year, the town bought a half-acre on the Sammy’s Beach side of Three Mile Harbor from John and Betty Ulrich for $145,000. The Ulrichs wanted to build a house on a lot that was mostly a saltwater wetland, but the zoning board of appeals did not approve it. Among the problems with the property were that it did not have its own source of potable water. The Ulrichs sought the board’s approval for a well on a property on the other side of Sammy’s Beach Road. Among the zoning board members apparently favoring its public acquisition were Jay Schneiderman, who is now Southampton Town supervisor, and Peter Van Scoyoc, now a member of the East Hampton Town Board.

Watershed protection and its improvement are today still at the top of the priority list for the people who oversee East Hampton Town’s preservation fund. Inner harbor sites, like the one bought from the Ulrichs in 1999, or the roughly 40 properties purchased in a multiyear effort to improve Lake Montauk, are highly desirable. 

Though we remain concerned about the potential for abuse of money for water quality projects, over all, the preservation fund has been an unqualified success, and its extension is good news. We look forward to more and bigger purchases using this powerful program in 2017.

Two recent bits of news concerning the area’s citizens advisory committees have further added to our sense that the concept needs a little refining. Instances involving the Amagansett and Bridgehampton groups, while unrelated, indicate that they could be stepping beyond their intended role.

Citizens committees were devised some years ago as a means for residents to speak about neighborhood concerns in an informal setting. The goal was to hash out truly grassroots opinion, then relay their ideas to the respective town boards; in many cases, a supervisor or board member would be on hand at their meetings. In some recent cases, however, these committees have become unelected influencers of policy, sometimes improperly communicating with their towns’ planning and zoning boards and meddling in controversies. 

In Amagansett the hamlet’s citizens advisory committee appears poised to have a deciding say on how town-owned property on Montauk Highway will be used. The town bought the parcel, called 555 or Ocean View Farm, using the community preservation fund two years ago. Proposals from private entities for growing crops there or other uses are expected soon. The town board would have to sign off on any deal, but it appears to be shirking its responsibility by offering the committee a decision-making role. 

In Bridgehampton, town planners solicited the citizens committee’s opinion on a commercial expansion, and the committee offered one in a voice vote to be followed with a letter. Then, when the expected letter did not arrive, holding up a ruling on the pending application, it turned out that the citizens committee’s shadowy steering committee had changed the group’s position. That the planners were relying on a definitive view from an essentially ad-hoc group was a mistake. It was made doubly so when the membership’s decision was apparently overruled by an informal leadership subset.

In our view, citizens advisory committees, if they are to persist, should be just that — purely advisory.

Unaccustomed lines were seen at some South Fork polling places on Election Day, but it would be hard to call the wait times long compared to those elsewhere in New York State. Various problems, especially in some parts of New York City, led to waits that appeared to New York Times reporters to be as long as five hours. Such delays for citizens simply trying to cast their ballots are a powerful argument for change, both within the separate county election boards and in state policy.

New York is not among the states that allow early voting. Considering the complicated lives many New Yorkers lead, even getting to the post office or the grocery store can be a challenge. Adding optional early voting would help increase participation in the political process.

This year, 34 states allowed early voting. That New York does not is in part the result of its antiquated elections infrastructure. Opposition also comes from the Republicans in the State Legislature, who have shown little interest in getting bills to allow early voting onto the floor. According to an advocacy organization pushing early voting, State Assemblyman Fred W. Thiele Jr. supports the idea; Senator Kenneth P. LaValle has not come out in favor of it.

Estimates are that about two million eligible New Yorkers are not registered to vote. And among those able to vote, New York ranked nearly last in turnout in the 2012 and 2014 elections. Early voting could help change that, especially in urban areas, where long commutes can make finding time to visit the polls on a workday and still meet family and personal obligations all but impossible.

Another matter that early voting might reverse is the tone-deaf preference among local governments and some school districts to take the day off. The message sent by staying away from work to golf, shop, or just putter around the house does not encourage voting, particularly by parents of schoolchildren. Giving voters the chance to vote early might help keep municipal and school district staff members on the job instead of enjoying a vacation day at the public’s expense.

In the post-Trump victory period there has also been much talk about the Electoral College and whether this centuries-old relic should be scrapped. Not since Ronald Reagan in 1984 have New York’s Republican voters been on the winning side of a presidential race. This means that the will of millions of state voters who favored Donald Trump or Mitt Romney or John McCain mattered not a whit in the overall results in their respective years.

In May, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo signed a bill that committed New York to award its electoral votes to the candidate who received the national majority. If and when enough states join the National Popular Vote Compact, as it is called, all New York voters, regardless of party, would once again have a voice in choosing a president. That, and allowing early voting, would go a long way to assure the Empire State matters when it matters most.

For all the attention being paid to the hamlet studies being conducted about commercial centers in East Hampton Town, there is reason for worry that larger issues could be overlooked.

Led by Dodson and Flinker, a consulting firm brought in by the town board, officials and residents have been looking at business sections in Amagansett, East Hampton, and Wainscott, and were to have started gathering information in Montauk this week. The work was commissioned to fill out the town’s comprehensive plan, a kind of a master policy and vision document last updated in 2005. And therein lies the problem.

Though the comprehensive plan was intended to be useful for 20 years or more, enough has changed in the last 11 years to make the existing plan seem obsolete. To cite but a few examples of how different things are today: In 2005 online vacation rental websites were barely functional; today they are the basis of a booming sub-economy. In 2005, Montauk had yet to become “hip” or subject to very deep-pocketed corporate development pressure. Additionally, concern about waterways and the airport had nowhere near today’s fever pitch. We can’t help reminding our readers (even though they know) that traffic was only a fraction as bad as it is now, and there were still a few affordable places for year-round residents to rent if they looked hard enough.

The hamlet studies so far seem to be most concerned about traffic and aesthetics and how far one has to walk to shop. This could change, of course, as the consultants begin to study what they have learned in their weeks here and report back. However, it’s hard to escape the feeling that, given all the new realities, these individual efforts will, in the end, produce little of lasting value without a new look at the overall town comprehensive plan. 

Americans are used by now to the too-fast-to-think ecosystem that is Twitter, the online forum in which posts are limited to 140 characters and in which the like-minded essentially echo one another in endless spirals of wit, while antagonists go for sharp rejoinders. Twitter is also a place where politicians sometimes lay bare their odder passing thoughts. Such was the case on Monday when Representative Lee Zeldin made an almost incomprehensible comment following the capture of the man suspected of the recent Manhattan bombing. In its entirety, Mr. Zeldin wrote, “Suspect in custody. You are welcome, Colin Kaepernick.”

Mr. Kaepernick is the San Francisco 49ers football quarterback who has declined to stand for the national anthem in protest of police shootings of people of color. Figuring out exactly what Mr. Zeldin meant by his post is difficult; even he probably does not know. That did not stop plenty of people from going to Twitter to turn his point around, however.

One reaction read, “13-year-old Tyre King shot down by police from behind in cold blood. Thanks, Lee Zeldin.” Others made the point that Ahmed Khan Rahami, the terror suspect, was taken alive, unlike the many black, unarmed Americans killed by police. Another Twitter user offered “. . . if only Kaepernick had stood for the anthem these past two weeks, we could have caught the terrorist three hours sooner probably.”

Mr. Zeldin’s outburst mirrors the recurring bombast on Twitter from Donald Trump, who has made a campaign out of this kind of drivel. The comment can be heard as a kind of racist code, intended to speak directly to an embittered, paranoid fringe among First Congressional District voters. In a statement, Mr. Zeldin subsequently defended his post, saying, “I unapologetically love our country and our heroes who defend us. I’m insulted and disgusted when someone refuses to say the pledge or stand for the national anthem.” 

We have previously criticized Mr. Zeldin for jumping on the Trump bandwagon and called him unfit to continue to serve in Congress. He has shown that to be the case once again.