The imminent closing of the Child Development Center of the Hamptons Charter School in East Hampton is a sad moment for an educational institution that provided an alternative public school and did great things for many kids and families. A note of hope can perhaps be found in the site itself, which belongs to East Hampton Town, and for which creative reuse opportunities are intriguing.

Because the C.D.C.H. building was constructed to be compliant with the Americans With Disabilities Act, it might be readymade for use as a senior citizens center, particularly as the existing one on Springs-Fireplace Road in East Hampton is being rebuilt. Another idea might be for it to serve as an arts center, with low-rent studio space for professional artists and room for classes, workshops, and cooperative crafts spaces for dabblers. Converting it to affordable housing might be another idea, though pushback on that has been strenuous.

Perhaps it might instead be used as a business incubator with workspace for people just starting out or eager to move and expand a home operation. There are a range of tech and online professionals here who might benefit from an environment with opportunities to share ideas, skills, and even collaborate on new ventures. In this case, the property could be run at no net expense to the town and help stimulate new sectors of the local economy.

The possibilities are many. It is up to East Hampton Town officials to look beyond the obvious.

You can’t fault Scott Rubenstein for asking. And, frankly, we might assume that even he is surprised by how smooth the path in Town Hall has been so far for his plan for a bowling alley, miniature golf course, and 200-seat sports bar. 

We’ll repeat that last item, just so you don’t miss it — a 200-seat sports bar. Do we have your attention now?

Some neighbors are beginning to notice and have asked for the official love-fest to cool down a bit. This is appropriate. Even though the project is on a secluded site near the East Hampton Airport, its impact could be significant. Notably, property owners along South Breeze Drive, which is a shortcut between Route 114 and Daniel’s Hole Road and could be used by Mr. Rubenstein’s patrons, are concerned. 

It was myopic for some at a recent town planning board meeting to dismiss the South Breeze folks’ concerns as stompy-footed NIMBYism; put 200 seats of anything anywhere in town and there is going to be a serious impact, both in the immediate area and on a broader scale. Such projects cannot be vetted in a vacuum. Much as one might like Mr. Rubenstein, and think new recreational facilities are a good idea, far more official balance is needed.

Indeed, in an April 6 vote the Suffolk County Planning Commission suggested that East Hampton Town take a hard look at what the sports complex could generate. The town planning board has the option of ignoring this request if at least five of its seven members vote to do so. They should not back away from this responsibility. 

Having now been alerted by neighbors and the commission, the town must take a second, more detailed look, paying particular attention to what might happen if that 200-seat restaurant and bar is ever filled to capacity. We have already seen what kind of mayhem results from unchecked nightspots — particularly in Montauk. Planning board members would be totally out of line to blithely approve something even remotely similar anywhere in town. Some say that Montauk already approaches a yawning hell in summertime; exporting even some of it to another hamlet should not be countenanced.

Key also for town planners predisposed to okay the vast complex (Diana Weir and Reed Jones, we’re looking at you) is that although Mr. Rubenstein might be a great guy, approvals persist no matter who owns a property. The next owner or the one after that might have different ideas and by then almost nothing could be done about it.

It was Representative Lee Zeldin’s right, we concede, to endorse whomever he chose in the race for the United States presidency. However, it was an insult to a large proportion of the people he is supposed to represent that he jumped aboard the Donald  Trump train so quickly once his nomination appeared assured. By supporting Mr. Trump, Mr. Zeldin has appeared to hitch his political future to an incendiary demagogue, one who appears ready to throw the world into assured economic turmoil and closer to nuclear war. 

Mr. Zeldin is hardly alone. On Long Island, Representative Peter King, who is also a race-baiting demagogue, has come out for the presumptive Republican presidential nominee. The Atlantic magazine published a rundown late last week on who else among the party had supported Mr. Trump. These included Bob Dole, John Boehner, Dick Cheney, Eric Cantor, and Newt Gingrich. Even the speaker of the House, Paul Ryan, appears to be coming around after earlier hesitation.

It is all deeply disappointing: There was a time when being a Republican meant something other than hate and ignorance. That so many of the party’s leaders are climbing aboard the Trump ship says they are putting their careers above principle, and above decency. 

We would have hoped Mr. Zeldin would stand on the side of restraint. It is a sad moment for the American political process and the First Congressional District.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.