Several contested races will be on the ballot when annual voting for school board members and district budgets takes place on Tuesday. Would that there were more challengers; the status quo isn’t apt to result in a fresh look for a solution to the growing inequities between rich and poor districts, and new blood might speed the way. 

That said, in the case of the East Hampton School Board, there is actually only one challenger, Alison Anderson, a former board member who now wants another term. She declined to answer a reporter’s questions about her goals and instead sent a prepared statement, which raised our doubts about her intentions. Instead, three incumbents, J.P. Foster, Richard Wilson, and Wendy Geehreng, should be re-elected.

Springs has two seats in play, with one board member seeking to return: Adam Wilson. The newcomers are Amy Rivera and David Conlon. Our endorsements go to Ms. Rivera, who works in the East Hampton Town tax receiver’s office, and Mr. Conlon, a seasoned professional and member of the district’s facilities committee. Mr. Wilson has never tried to offer much as a board member, from what we have been able to observe.

There is a real race on in Sag Harbor, with four qualified candidates battling for two board seats. Roxanne Briggs, who is a parent and businesswoman and who was once a member of the board at the Hampton Day School, and Susan Lamontagne, a marketing consultant and former press secretary for Senator Arlen Specter, are seeking seats. Susan Kinsella, who is now the school board president, and Chris Tice, its vice president, hope to remain on the board. Between the two challengers, we liked most what Ms. Lamontagne had to say, especially about the board’s questionable closed-door sessions when it was batting ideas around about whether to try to buy the former Stella Maris School. Her shake-it-up attitude would be welcome. Ms. Tice has made positive contributions on the board and seems to make her decisions in a reasoned way. Our endorsements go to Ms. Lamontagne and Ms. Tice.

In Montauk, Patti Leber, the board vice president, should be returned to the board, and Tom Flight, a business owner with corporate strategy experience, would be an excellent addition.

The elections in Amagansett, Bridgehampton, Sagaponack, and Wainscott are uncontested.

As to the budget votes, the Springs board and administration did everything they could to stay within the tax levy increase limit, and the spending plan proposed should be approved in recognition of that effort. 

Bridgehampton is asking voters to okay exceeding the cap, which would add about $117 a year in taxes to a $2.5 million property. While it is not clear that the board and administration did enough to hold the line, it is difficult to suggest a no vote, which would have serious consequences. Amagansett also hopes to be able to pierce the cap, but by a small amount, which appears justified, though its budget process was poorly explained to voters.

The annual school district meetings next week are one of the rare times that taxpayers get to actually vote on budgets. With the presidential election stirring things up, we expect good turnouts.

A for-sale sign sways in the wind outside the shuttered Star Room nightclub on Montauk Highway in Wainscott. The apparent lack of activity there, however, belies what is going on behind the scenes: A dangerous proposal to build a car wash on the roughly two-acre site is working its way through East Hampton Town offices. 

Extreme caution is needed on this application, especially considering how badly officials have already, and for years, allowed helter-skelter development along the Wainscott commercial strip. We hope the town board can find a way to step in, perhaps seeking to use the community preservation fund to buy the parcel and restore it to a natural state.

Despite the assurances of the backers of the Golden Carwash, as it would be called, it would be a disaster, and not just for Wainscott. The car wash would be on a section of Montauk Highway that is already the single most-congested in town, making it almost inconceivable that the application could receive serious consideration.

Town planners have said that at minimum a thorough study of its effects on traffic must be prepared. For example, though the car wash as planned could accommodate 18 vehicles queued on the property, its capacity would be 125 vehicles per hour, though only about half that number would be expected, even during peak operation. Just think of all the idling vehicles along the side of the highway. Does the town really want to encourage that? We doubt it.

As to ecological impacts, statements that the car wash’s wastewater would be entirely contained on-site are hard to believe. Since the land is squarely within the Georgica Pond watershed, the greatest degree of scrutiny — and pointed skepticism toward its backers’ promises — is warranted.

Richard P. Myers Jr., the chairman of the East Hampton Town Architectural Review Board, recently reminded other officials that the property is part of the western gateway to East Hampton Town and that any decision for its reuse should wait until the completion of a new hamlet study, which is under way. In addition to traffic and the environment, his concerns include noise, light, and air pollution, as well as the effects on nearby residential neighborhoods centered on Cowhill, Wainscott-Northwest, and East Gate Roads.

The “land is directly over our watershed area and serious runoff could occur from usage as well as drainage from storms,” he wrote, adding that the “vista entering the Town of East Hampton in Wainscott needs cautious study.” We strongly agree, especially after the HomeGoods store debacle, in which an outsize building was allowed to go up a few short steps away from the edge of the highway pavement.

The East Hampton Town Board should in general be paying more attention to the effects of commercial redevelopment. Consider for a moment the pace at which Montauk is changing. The various studies the town has ordered, which might at some point recommend zoning changes, are not coming quickly enough to head off a number of troublesome proposals. Given the pace of change and the vast sums of money flowing into town, a temporary moratorium on certain nonresidential projects appears to be the only option. 

The changes that poorly understood development can bring are apt to last forever. Properly managing those changes — and in some cases just saying no — should be at the top of our leaders’ priorities. Some years ago, a rallying cry of local Democrats was “Save what’s left!” It is time that was heard again, and Wainscott and the Georgica Pond watershed are a fine place to start.

If you take the time to really think about it, East Hampton Town does not have an affordable housing problem, it has an economic problem — a problem of demand greatly exceeding supply.

The shortage of safe work-force housing is tied to growth — and a failure to manage it in an effective way. Successive generations of town officials have lacked the foresight that would have been necessary to keep development in balance with nature and infrastructure. And the village boards, despite being eager to preside over sparkling downtown business districts, have been content to hand over the issue of where workers live to the towns.

The crisis in housing is not going to be solved by building more rent-controlled units; there will never be enough. Proposals in Wainscott and Amagansett for two modest efforts have been met with unreasonable opposition. What elected officials and residents alike will have to understand — and then act on — is the cumulative cost as each new residential or commercial project breaks ground, each time a small mom-and-pop business morphs into something far larger. Until East Hampton realizes the time has come for a complete rethinking of zoning’s relationship to available resources, there is no hope of the town’s ever again having a sense of balance.

In November, officials are expected to ask voters to authorize taking up to 20 percent of the community preservation fund for water quality efforts. This may prove a mistake. While such efforts are necessary, better treatment will inevitably lead to increased development, despite tepid assurances to the contrary. It would be much better to keep the fund whole and to buy as much land as possible, even parcels of limited obvious environmental worth and those already built upon. An aggressive approach to reducing existing density appears now the only way to actually achieve the goals of the program. If water quality improves over the long term from more open space, so much the better.

Last week we floated the idea of a commercial building permit moratorium to buy time as East Hampton Town develops a radical new plan. Quite clearly, the town zoning code and staff cannot keep up with what is happening today; what about in 5 years? Or 10? Each new or expanded house, every revamped business adds incrementally to the burden — and housing deficits are only one of the many costs. At a minimum, figuring out how to tie all significant new construction to providing low-cost housing is a must. The time is now, before it is too late. 

As summer 2016 approaches, East Hampton Town officials, and those studying new hamlet plans, must take a look around and ask themselves if they think any more of almost anything at all is what the community really needs. The answer is obviously no.

We were rather pleased to see that Sag Harbor Village as regards an application for a new high-end residential complex on the waterfront near the North Haven bridge is taking a hard line. In meetings last month, Greystone Property Development was told by one of the village’s legal team to think again about its calculation that it could have 11 houses with private parking and boat slips. At issue was Greystone’s math on how much of the site it could build on. Greystone says one thing; the village says another. If the Sag Harbor is right, Greystone would be entitled to a somewhat smaller number of units. This is a big deal.

Just how many of the developer’s faux whalers’ houses it could build could emerge as a key issue for the future of the land. The Sag Harbor Village Board, the Town of Southampton, and many residents and visitors favor the public acquisition of the property for a park. If the permissible residential density there falls below some certain unnamed point, it is conceivable that Greystone might agree to sell. We hope.

Frankly, Greystone’s principals should have been willing to do the right thing all along. It is regrettable that their narrow, money-making vision includes permanently marring the Sag Harbor waterfront and potentially miring the village in litigation for years as the matter is fought in court. They could be heroes by working with the village to create a public space everyone could be proud of. Instead, they appear to be girding for a fight.

The East Hampton Town Planning Board now has in its collective lap a request that could turn the whole town zoning code on its ear. The board has been asked to retroactively okay the Dunes, a “luxury, inpatient rehabilitation center,” in its own words, which sprang up in a house in Northwest Woods about five years ago.

In a bizarre determination that was later reversed, the then-top town building inspector said the facility’s inpatients functioned as a family, thereby skirting the law about group houses, which provides that no more than four unrelated adults may live under one roof. It would be more than ridiculous to think that a facility with “clinical protocols and client relationships with counselors, advocates, and advisers,” according to the Dunes’s website, could be likened to a family home. But that is what it claims. Also noteworthy is that its website refers to those who stay there as “clients,” which ought to be a fairly big clue about what the Dunes actually is.

Once the town rethought the goofball ruling, the Dunes initiated a federal discrimination lawsuit, which was dismissed in 2015. It now says it will take the issue all the way to the United States Supreme Court. This is a shame; the Dunes’s management should have found a facility in a proper location instead of trying to draw the town into a cynical and potentially expensive legal battle.

The danger for the town is that this is not just about money. If the Dunes prevails in winning special status, it might threaten the town’s basic one-house, one-family rule, which was intended to protect community character and prevent overcrowding. Officials already struggle with illegally occupied dwellings. A ruling in the Dunes’s favor might make enforcement all the more difficult. For an organization dedicated to doing good, a legal attack on the town’s fundamental zoning is an unfortunate contradiction, if not an outright affront.

If you look at a photograph from 100 years ago, you might be startled by how far the eye could travel over town, once upon a time. Standing near Hook Mill, you could see the Maidstone Club; stand in the windmill’s upper reaches, and you could see clear to Amagansett. From the second story of a house on Main Street, you could see the waves breaking on the ocean beach.

This observation about diminishing vistas came to mind recently, when discussion at an East Hampton Village Planning Board meeting turned to a relatively routine application regarding Lasata, a historic estate on Further Lane that once belonged to the Bouvier family. It seems the planning board would be pleased if lane-side plantings in front of Lasata were lowered, so that the landmark house could once again be seen by people passing by on the road.

People of a certain age are well aware of the way our once-pastoral views have gradually been shrouded: Houses have been surrounded by hedges, trees, gates, and fences, and these hedges, trees, gates, and fences have grown taller and taller; many a pretty streetscape — many a lovely old edifice — has disappeared behind evergreen plantings and magnificently groomed privets. Our once-common vistas have been privatized.

Preservation is an issue almost universally spoken of as a tip-top priority on the East End, of course, but many of us don’t often remember that the view and sight lines are as much worthy of preservation as any rare antique structure. Certainly, the general public is more likely to support the creation of historic districts and the continued use of tax dollars for the preservation of picturesque old buildings when it can actually see them.

We applaud the planning board for remembering this issue, and are happy to have heard through the grapevine that the Ladies Village Improvement Society has been talking about obstructive plantings lately, too. 

Village officials with yardsticks taking the measure of shrubbery might paint a rather comic picture, but this isn’t as trivial a matter as it might sound at first. Streetscapes deserve to be saved — or, along some byways, returned to an earlier state of openness — and we recommend that any resident who is proud of East Hampton’s tradition of civic-mindedness (not to mention anyone who likes to wax nostalgic for the way town looked in the olden days) pause to consider for a moment the height of their own cypress, privet, arborvitae, or stockade.

As soon as next year, the South Fork could see a rail shuttle designed to help cut congestion on the roads and provide a meaningful alternative for people traveling among the hamlets and villages. 

Credit is due to State Assemblyman Fred W. Thiele Jr. for pushing the idea over many years. It might be too soon for congratulations, but in a sit-down meeting at his Bridgehampton office last month, Mr. Thiele got the Long Island Rail Road president to commit to initial east-west rail shuttle sometime in 2017 as a goal. The service is envisioned as two trains in the morning and one in the afternoon, and it would use existing L.I.R.R. stock. Help would be sought from county and local officials with marketing and for transportation to and from train stations and workplaces or other places that riders might want to get to. 

As a sweetener, one of Mr. Thiele’s ideas is to free up about $37 million in the Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s capital budget that had been set aside to buy new, light locomotives for the South Fork shuttle. Instead, with existing trains likely to be used in the pilot program starting next year, that money could be used for other L.I.R.R. projects.

With only a single track running between Southampton and Montauk, it will take some juggling on the L.I.R.R.’s part to get trains running at times that make sense. However, it is a worthy undertaking and one that might help broaden the work force, particular out East Hampton way and farther east, where an already limited pool of potential employees is made that much worse by the difficultly of getting to and from attractive jobs.

A South Fork rail shuttle is something that transportation advocates have hoped for for a very long time. It would be a remarkable accomplishment if it were to actually become a reality.

Judging from the Memorial Day weekend crowds, East Hampton Town should adopt a zero-growth strategy. Unfortunately, the approach evident in a new round of official advisory studies is to encourage increased development, with commercial sprawl extended in some cases into predominantly residential areas under a smokescreen of “smart growth.”

East Hampton’s recently initiated hamlet studies, one for each section of town, have the makings of disaster. Instead of taking a macro view of existing development and coming up with overall guidelines for the future, the hamlets seem to be being reviewed in isolation. The net effect could well be to recommend zoning changes that add to commercial activity in some areas, without a clear understanding how they might link together or — what is most important — if the current road, water, power, and emergency systems can handle it all.

While it is difficult to assign responsibility to any single era of elected officials, it is clear that decades of poor foresight and outright, if not deliberate, mistakes have created the current untenable conditions. Some bad decisions include then-Town Supervisor Jay Schneiderman’s watering down of multiple occupancy enforcement, particularly in Springs, which helped create the school overcrowding crisis the district now faces. Later, financial mismanagement overwhelmed Town Hall during the Supervisor Bill McGintee years. And then, Supervisor Bill Wilkinson and a mostly like-minded town board basically gave Montauk away, implying that to seek peace and quiet was to be against “young people having fun.”

As we have been saying for a few weeks now, development pressures are coming so fast that town officials may find it so hard to keep up that a commercial moratorium is the only choice. With massive sums of corporate money flowing into town, particularly in Montauk, we appear poised to see even more visitors in coming summer seasons. 

Think about one fact: According to a county estimate, the overnight population of Montauk alone can leap from 3,400 to 27,000 on a peak weekend. 

That number places burdens on services and makes year-round residents feel like strangers in their own community. If that isn’t a definition of governmental failure, we don’t know what is. All money is not necessarily the same, and any of it that diminishes our quality of life should be discouraged. To the extent possible, this town should cease being an eager playground for Wall Street vanities and a willing partner in cold, corporate despoliations.

The time to get on top of it is nearly past. Chipping away around the edges with well-intended but inappropriate hamlet studies will not get the job done by any stretch of the imagination. Zero-growth, or figuring out how to actually turn back the clock through the aggressive use of the community preservation fund to buy and neutralize as many properties as possible, must be a key part of any effort to, as the town Democrats used to say, save what’s left.

East Hampton Town’s effort to rein in some of the excesses of the summer bar and party scene is beginning to show results. This is a welcome change, as it is safe to assume that the preponderance of residents and season-long renters do not choose to live or summer here to carouse; the area’s natural and cultural attractions are the draw. 

By the numbers, there are already, at peak, too many of us stuffed onto the 42 square miles of habitable area in town. Pile the highly mobile weekend party crowd on top of an estimated almost 100,000 people who put their heads down on pillows in summer, and you have the making of a nightmare. Credit is due the East Hampton Town Board and town staff for trying to gain the upper hand.

That an East Hampton Town Justice Court trial finally forced the eponymous owner of Cyril’s Fish House on Napeague to shut down for good is but one example. For years, officials looked the other way as the restaurant and bar was illegally expanded, with patrons spilling out onto a state highway right of way and traffic tie-ups extending for up to a mile in each direction some afternoons. And to what benefit? The jobs Cyril’s created were not year round, and the money in salaries and supplies flowed out of town as quickly as it poured over the bar. Unfortunately, this has been typical of many of the summer hot stops. For all the trouble they cause in terms of noise, litter, neighborhood annoyances, and police time, they give very little back. 

Separately, the town has begun looking at bar and restaurant liquor permits and whether some might not be in compliance with town regulations on live music. While we are sympathetic with local performers who might see lucrative summer gigs dry up, a quieter, less hectic town is in the greater interest. 

Some might characterize the town’s actions as a war on fun; we see it as demonstrating respect for others while some bar owners and too many of their patrons clearly do not.

The key question for elected officials is in whose interest they should act. For too many years, it seemed the voices of those who stood to gain monetarily at everyone else’s expense took precedence. As it has done concerning helicopter curfews at the airport, this town board seems willing to put residents first.

The past weekend’s reopening of BookHampton on Main Street in East Hampton Village, under new ownership, is worth celebrating. For years, we’ve heard new-technology enthusiasts say that print is dead, but what with BookHampton re-establishing itself, a couple of lively bookshops in Sag Harbor, a cozy and delightful one in Montauk, and others thriving elsewhere on the South Fork, it seems that reports of print’s demise have been exaggerated.

Holding a beloved book in the hand is a distinct pleasure, and, for many readers, retention and understanding just seem better with a hard copy than with a screen. Plus, and hereabouts this is a big thing, e-readers just don’t cut it on the beach. Under the sun and on the sand, there’s no substitute for real, old-fashioned books.

There’s evidence that the trend away from digital reading may be more widespread. In the United Kingdom, e-book sales have dropped, while traditional bound-book sales have risen. In the United States, Kindle and other e-reader content sales dropped 13 percent last year, with print books jumping about 2.8 percent. Noting the trend, perhaps, Amazon, the behemoth online marketplace, has opened its first brick-and-mortar bookshop.

Maintaining vibrant, welcoming places of commerce is important for our downtowns. Bookstores, which stay open late and frequently host talks by authors, reading marathons, and signings, are a crucial antidote to a problem we are all painfully aware of: Main Streets that have been held hostage by fly-by-night designer boutiques and corporate-fashion outposts that function more as million-dollar billboards than useful stores. We wish BookHampton and the rest all the very best.