It was perhaps only in passing that East Hampton Town supervisor Larry Cantwell mused last summer about a program by which troublesome nightclubs that draw the transient party crowd could be eliminated. But relatively little has been done about the nightlife issue since a massive public outcry at a July meeting in Montauk. That need not be the end of the discussion; a Southampton Town initiative suggests that local government, if properly motivated, can bring such excesses into line.

Summertime problems are complex, but many come from unchecked growth of bars and restaurants, which draw large numbers of people. The most successful among them are well known: Sloppy Tuna, Surf Lodge, Ruschmeyer’s, Montauk Beach House, Memory Motel, Crow’s Nest, and Cyril’s Fish House. But residents should be concerned about a crop of places that could be troublesome soon, including Gurney’s, Duryea’s, Moby’s, and any of the many other restaurants that could expand to offer outdoor D.J.s, concerts, and other activities. Right now, there really is little in the town code to stop them.

For a long time it was generally thought that only those who unfortunately lived close to one of these establishments were affected. However, when these venues are considered as a whole, the large number of patrons they attract has a huge impact on traffic, litter, and the need for beefed-up police. The costs, directly and indirectly, are high, and the positive role these seasonal businesses have in the East Hampton economy is negligible.

Several offending businesses try to buy favor by contributing to local causes. But as useful as the donations might be to the individual charities, the payola is essentially an admission of guilt and shouldn’t be allowed to paper over real problems or delay tough new approaches.

Southampton figured this out years ago. Its town code lays it out plainly: Nonconforming bars, taverns, and nightclubs were phased out, beginning more than a decade ago. Based on that town’s comprehensive plan, the law took on businesses in residential areas that created traffic, noise, or pollution and diminished neighbors’ quality of life and property values. 

East Hampton Town has been edging toward such a move, but with hesitation. One small step was adopting a law that requires accurate counts of patrons. It banned parking on a portion of Edgemere Street in Montauk near the Surf Lodge. And earlier, it experimented with requiring permits for music in restaurants. None of these were adequate and even together did not add up to even partial success.

Southampton’s law, by contrast, allows for review of nonconforming businesses, taking into account law enforcement records, noise, litter, parking, traffic, and fire and liquor authority violations. Next, the building inspector can issue a notice of termination. Businesses have a choice to either stop the problems or shut down.

In practical terms, it is too late for the East Hampton Town Board to conduct the required study and get similar regulation in place before Memorial Day. It should, however, recognize that broad steps like those in Southampton cannot wait. 

Town government must be of and for resident taxpayers. The days of looking the other way are ending.

As small pieces become known of the story of Ned, a free black man who lived in East Hampton during slavery’s waning days in the North, a larger question — about the scores of other African-Americans who lived here and how to memorialize them — has begun to come into focus.

What we know about Ned so far is that he was the town bellringer between 1780 and 1816 or ’17, a span of about 35 years, and that he was buried on a plot of land deeded to him by Jeremiah Osborn in 1804. His gravestone identifies him as Osborn’s manservant, though town records refer to him in several places as “Jeremiah Osborn’s Ned,” which may indicate that he had been a slave who gained freedom during a wave of manumissions in New York at the beginning of the 19th century.

Ned’s gravesite has been restored, but it is one of only two known here of people of African descent from the Revolutionary period and earlier. The other site, in the South End Cemetery, is of a Gardiner family servant woman.

The fact that there are only two such marked graves is significant, given that there were dozens, if not hundreds, of African-Americans living here in the 18th and early 19th centuries. These men and women, whose names can be found in birth and baptism records, died here and were presumably buried here — and yet there is little record and scant memorial.

We were talking about this with the Rev. Walter Thompson of East Hampton’s Calvary Baptist Church the other day, who said it piqued his interest. In another conversation, Hugh King, the town crier and director of Home, Sweet Home Museum, said that an effort might be made to at least get the names that can be found of these nearly forgotten East Hampton residents onto a plaque as a start.

There are monuments to the war dead and burying grounds filled with Hunttings and Daytons and such, but almost no sense at all of a part of the past that history-keepers, such as The Star’s own Jeannette Edwards Rattray, simply did not put down on paper. In the same way that the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in Washington gives honor to those whose names are lost, so too should something be raised to those whose legacies time has almost erased.

I am not sure if I can speak for even a small subset of newspaper people, but those of us who work at the Star office like to surround ourselves with things we pick up or have used in our work.

Chris Walsh, a reporter who covers East Hampton Village and the town trustees, has, among other things, a Leaning Tower of Pisa by his desk constructed of every issue of the paper since he started working here.

Files and official documents figure heavily in my co-workers’ stashes. Taylor Vecsey has in her possession a copy of the original Sag Harbor Bulova factory apartment conversion plans, for example. Taylor also occupies the late Rusty Drumm’s desk, one corner of which is covered in interesting-colored stones and ones shaped like hearts that he had picked up on many beach walks. Next to them you can see a short length of logwood, neatly chewed to tapers on both ends by a beaver.

Carissa Katz, our managing editor, has a large set of the late Richard Hendrickson’s typed monthly weather summaries, dating back at least a decade. This, of course, represents only a small fraction of his eight-plus decades of watching the skies. She also has a Wilkinson Team magnetic snack-bag clip, and she recently gave away a rare anti-Bill Gardiner for town board bumper sticker from 2003.

Over on Baylis Greene’s desk you can find one of Michael Galileo’s Real Time Earth Clocks in need of a battery. T.E. McMorrow, our cops and zoning reporter, proudly displays a genuine Town of East Hampton Building Department stop-work order. 

Jack Graves has kept nearly every one of his retired cameras, which are a lot considering that he started working here in 1968 or so. Among Helen Rattray’s items is a truly lovely gear out of the old Star press, from when we printed each edition in the back shop. She also has the original bill of sale of this newspaper, and all its appurtenances, for $100 from Geo. H. Burling to Edward S. Boughton in 1890.

I am perhaps the worst of the Star pack rats. My office is crowded with animal skulls, shells, old bottles, wooden fishing lures, and, cradled in an Old Seaman ashtray, two pieces of a chrome door handle I picked up at the site where the comedian Jerry Seinfeld flipped one of his sports cars onto its side at Skimhampton Road. Durell Godfrey, one of our photographers and an illustrator, featured a drawing of my workspace in her new adult coloring book, “Color Me Cluttered.” You’d think I’d take the hint, right?

Anyway, the hands-down winner for honors of the single greatest piece of memorabilia at The Star goes to Joanne Pilgrim for a piece of East Hampton Airport Runway 4-22 pavement, which she uses as a paperweight. After writing about the airport and all its controversies for too many years to count, at least she has this to show for it.

A reader sent in a photograph this week taken on Gerard Drive in Springs on Saturday during the blizzard. Taken roughly around the time of the morning high tide on what is known as the Second Causeway, it shows a raging Gardiner’s Bay surging where the road ought to be. Only you can’t see the road, only riled dark-gray water and feathery white spume.

We bring this up not only because Jane Umanoff’s photograph is so arresting, but for what it says about the challenges that are ahead for East Hampton policymakers in regard to the town’s entire shoreline.

Montauk might command the headlines, what with outrage over the Army Corps of Engineers’ sandbag seawall, but officials will also have to come to terms with assaults on the bayside. Gerard Drive will obviously be high on the priority list, but to do what? Like portions of Dune Road in Southampton, a multimillion-dollar project to elevate the pavement might be called for, but so too might a further-sighted effort to eliminate houses from its lower-slung portions and return their sites to nature. Meanwhile, the community preservation fund, which could be tapped for this, appears likely to be skimmed by up to 20 percent for a range of too-loosely defined water quality projects, if an extension of the law is approved by voters in a November referendum,  

Where the money is going to come from for a sensible coastal program of retreat is, of course, a very good question. For the time being, town officials seem content to believe that federal dollars will pour in as part of the Army Corps’s Fire Island to Montauk Point Reformulation Project. We’ll believe that when we see the check. And anyway, the last thing the Corps is interested in is stepping back from the danger zones. 

Meanwhile, the deal on the Montauk work looms as a financial disaster for the town — and Suffolk County — both of which agreed to cover the cost of keeping the sandbag wall covered with sand. Last weekend’s storm did a pretty good job of sweeping away thousands of tons of trucked-in ugly yellow fill, which, had the job been completed, would have been Suffolk and East Hampton taxpayers’ responsibility to replace.

What is so frustrating about coastal policy is that officials seem incapable of enforcing existing rules, much less of coming up with a strategy for the long term. We hope that the East Hampton Town Board at least made time to visit the visual hell that was the Montauk beach in the aftermath of Saturday’s storm. And we hope they see Jane Umanoff’s picture of Gerard Drive.

Together, they are enough to make one fear for the future of this town. Supervisor Larry Cantwell and the rest of the town board are not paid to wallow in despair, they are paid to do something. Waiting for the Army Corps and its anachronistic approach just won’t cut it.

So what gives? Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo says he wants the state to spend $3 billion to redo the gloomy Penn Station in Manhattan, and at the same time he has his hands on the throats of school districts, which are being squeezed by his signature tax cap. 

This year, the tax-levy increase allowed for schools that are unable to win an almost two-thirds majority in a budget vote is .12 percent. This means that for a district like Springs, which is expecting enrollment to continue to climb, getting enough in taxes to adequately educate all of its children will be more difficult. Proposed increases in state aid are not likely to make up the difference. It’s odd, frankly, that Mr. Cuomo would want to be so generous with city commuters while kicking struggling public schools in the shins.

The tax cap is grossly unfair. Town boards and other government entities that do not face public votes on their budgets can easily vote to exceed the annual limit. In East Hampton, just three of the five town board members need agree to go past this year’s .12 percent. For a school tax to rise more than that, it would take 60 percent of those voting to say yes — a very high hurdle indeed.

Fredrick U. Dicker, writing in The New York Post last week, cited an unnamed Albany source that claimed Mr. Cuomo’s leftward posturing — money for transit! — is all about returning to Washington, where he was secretary of housing in the Bill Clinton administration. The calculation is complicated, but would center on Mr. Cuomo’s seeking the Democratic nomination for president in 2020. In the meantime, you would hope he would at least try to improve the public schools. Instead, he has short-changed prekindergarten funding and has hopes for an education tax credit for wealthy parents of private school students.

Critics of the governor’s education policies have pointed out that at a time when the state is enjoying a billion-dollar annual surplus, the tax cap, at least for schools, should be scrapped entirely. But, of course, if Mr. Cuomo is indeed thinking about a run for the White House someday, a tough-on-taxes record might be something he wants to protect. 

It is in many ways good that Mr. Cuomo’s tax-levy cap forces school districts to be wiser with their finances, but it is wrong to have left it at that. With ultimate control over education resting with Albany, more must be done to help either consolidate districts or control costs without impacting students. As things stand, the governor, State Education Department, and Legislature earn a failing grade.

A request from Sag Harbor Village to the East Hampton Town Trustees to discuss ways to manage an all-but-unregulated seasonal anchorage is an example of how demands on the area’s natural resources and infrastructure have outpaced government control.

What prompted Sag Harbor’s request to the town trustees was the expanding presence of private vessels kept on moorings or anchored for a night or two beyond the village breakwater. At present, the village has jurisdiction only within the breakwater, where moorings are strictly regulated and waste pump-out boats are available. 

Beyond the breakwater, things get wooly. According to a member of the Sag Harbor Waterways Committee, as many as 70 boats at a time might be found off Havens Beach and east toward Barcelona Neck. Some have broken loose in storms and washed up, becoming the village’s problem. Others have been known to illegally discharge sewage. Then there is the question of boaters coming ashore in Sag Harbor for shopping, services, and even to dispose of garbage, adding to an already crowded community in the busy months. “We’re getting the brunt of it,” the village harbormaster said. 

State Assemblyman Fred. W. Thiele Jr., whose other paying job is Sag Harbor Village attorney, recently introduced a bill in the State Legislature that would expand the area under village control from the current 1,500 feet from shore. But 1,500 feet is also the distance that East Hampton Town Trustee jurisdiction extends. This means that a cooperative approach is necessary no matter where a new line might be drawn.

Mr. Thiele is in an odd position, particularly since the bill he sponsored on behalf of the village could be seen as a land-grab attempt against the town trustees, whose interests he is also supposed to represent as a member of the Assembly. To avoid questions of an ethical nature, Mr. Thiele should swiftly seek to have his bill withdrawn. 

Meanwhile, Sag Harbor officials and the town trustees are continuing to talk. This is good. The waters beyond the breakwater cannot continue to be a no-man’s land, regardless of which local government asserts authority in the end.

Hurricane Sandy, which had a significant, though not catastrophic, impact on the East End, has been described as a turning point for coastal policy — only it’s not true here on the highly vulnerable East End. Instead, local officials have been mired in a 1960s-era strategy embodied by the United States Army Corps of Engineers downtown Montauk project. There seems to be little more than a hope that sometime this year the Army Corps will unveil a magical plan for a vast undertaking for most of Long Island’s south shore. This is a dangerous failure of leadership.

East Hampton and Southampton’s support for armoring private property at public expense is indicative that both towns’ officials are incompetent in this regard. Yes, East Hampton recently created a committee to guide future coastal policy, but its record so far is not good. East Hampton bucked the law governing shoreline projects when it signed off on the Montauk effort. The town also got grant money to study the problem of its threatened beaches.

However, judgment must be reserved until the committee’s recommendations are announced and it is seen if the town will give them measurable support. Southampton Town is now led by Jay Schneiderman, who cast a yes vote as a Suffolk legislator in favor of the Army Corps’s Montauk work; this suggests that a visionary coastal program will not be likely there either.

The top priority for Long Island’s coastal managers must be preserving beaches, not saving private property. Retreat is the only solution that will ensure the public’s right to use and enjoy the beaches. If the Army Corps continues to dictate how the towns and villages act, the beaches will be lost. Instead, local officials, like their New York City counterparts, must look for new solutions. 

The East End stands in contrast to other communities, such as New York City, which recently won millions in federal funding for what is called resiliency projects. New York’s plan includes $179 million in disaster funding from the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development, notably not the Army Corps. The city’s proposal is for a combination of seawalls and grassy berms to protect downtown Manhattan from storm flooding, in keeping with the program’s goal of reducing current and future vulnerability. 

By contrast, the Montauk project will result in the loss of an important recreational beach and damage to adjacent properties unless an inexhaustible pot of money is found to place sand there indefinitely. Anyone who thinks the Army Corps is the right agency for the job simply hasn’t been paying attention to the coastline elsewhere. 

In recent days, the folly of the Montauk work was again made apparent when a minor storm scoured portions of the project area. Equipment and material were scattered by the tides and waves, underscoring the ever-changing conditions. Aerial photographs show the hamlet’s oceanfront hotels and residences bulging out beyond the natural line of the dunes in adjacent stretches. That they were built in the wrong place has long been understood. The real cost of that error is now being paid for.

There are other ways to cope with a changing shore, the question is whether officials will pay attention to those who call for a better approach. So far, the signs are not good.

Sag Harbor officials are moving ahead with new, tough rules to regulate the size of houses in reaction to a spate of super-sizing, which has left many aghast over changes to their beloved village. The changes are overdue and should, perhaps, be made even tougher.

Unlike several neighboring municipalities, Sag Harbor’s zoning code has been downright generous when it came to residential construction. This has allowed some speculative builders and well-heeled property owners to radically change several streetscapes. Profit is usually the motive for bloated fancifying; the more bedrooms and amenities, the more dollars a developer can make and the higher the market value. But an individual’s bank account should not be the basis of community planning. A new crop of officials is proving willing to act in the broader interest of preserving the village’s unique sense of place by saying, “Not so fast!”

The new rules, made public only recently, would tie the floor area of a new or renovated house directly to the size of its lot. This would be an extension of the existing zoning code, under which construction has been significantly less constrained. Even so, the proposals would allow more house, inch-for-inch, than is permissible in several nearby villages. Maybe this is fair, considering that Sag Harbor has a somewhat more urban feel than, say, North Haven, but, frankly, we don’t see any obvious justification.

Well-intentioned, but perhaps more trouble than it is worth, would be a separate fee on building permits for houses greater than 3,000 square feet. Money from the fee would be earmarked for affordable housing. Given that the hurdles for lower-priced housing within the Sag Harbor School District are likely to remain high, it is probable that little of the money would ever be used for its stated purpose, instead accumulating, like other towns’ and villages’ parking charges, in an untapped fund.

Worse, perhaps, is that the feel-good fee could, in the wrong hands, be misapplied later on to help squeeze questionably large house plans past future, more development-friendly zoning and architectural review boards. We would love to be proven wrong, but given the laughable record of Sag Harbor’s only to-date affordable housing initiative — buying an existing laborers’ camp outside village limits — skepticism is warranted.

That said, Sag Harbor officials should be supported for being on the right track in general. They should think about decoupling house sizes from the dubious fee and move ahead with overall limits, perhaps even making them more restrictive. 

Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo renewed his push for a smaller New York this week. Well, not exactly, but for a smaller bite into its residents’ pocketbooks, to be achieved through municipal consolidation. The governor is putting the state’s money where his mouth is, offering a $20 million reward to the local government partnership that achieves the greatest reduction in property taxes. Here on the South Fork, when one thinks about consolidation, one thinks of school districts, among which taxing disparity can be stunning. 

Some examples to illustrate the point: Sag Harbor School District taxes are almost three times those in Amagansett, and Springs’s are approaching seven times those of Wainscott. 

Among the districts, classroom opportunities are far from equivalent. The Springs School struggles for more space every year and faces perennial budget crises, while Amagansett enjoys virtual country-club exclusivity. Considering that much of the work force to keep all those big houses in Amagansett up and running probably lives in Springs, it would be much more equitable for the larger community to pay for schools altogether. And, tangentially, it is reprehensible that the Wainscott School Board agitated successfully to block town affordable housing that would have added only a relative handful of students to its small school. Taxes should not be so high in one part of East Hampton Town, or so low in another.

The problem with the governor’s $20 million bounty is that in order to work, all participants in a hypothetical partnership would have to want to take part. It has been generally understood that Amagansett does not want to be part of a consolidated school entity of any kind, and it appears that Wainscott is simply opposed to any change.

  School consolidation is not new. Far from it. For decades now, people have looked at the patchwork of small districts and thought that something had to be done. Studies have been commissioned, reports completed, but generally the conclusion has been that consolidation was not worth it. We have long believed that the opposition came as much from individual school administrators concerned about losing their jobs as from anything material. Certainly, among the first cuts as districts were combined would be the newly duplicative six-figure superintendents’ and assistant superintendents’ salaries.   

Looking past the resistance, the numbers have long been thought to be favorable for taxpayers should the number of districts be reduced. A citizens group that looked at the problem in 2009-10 observed that the East Hampton district spent far more per pupil than the county average. Consolidation, it found, would cut as much as 10 percent from tax bills. It was no surprise though, that no action ensued.

For there to be meaningful improvement in the way schools are funded — and to assure equal education for all — leadership will have to come from the top, whether from Mr. Cuomo or the Legislature. Left on their own, most school districts will simply maintain the status quo.

East Hampton Town’s planned purchase of the development rights on the 35-acre Whitmores landscaping nursery on Long Lane presents a dilemma. On the one hand, the $3.2 million deal would prevent the site’s ever being turned into a housing development. On the other, it does not appear to do much for the town as a whole, provide public access, or assure the land’s return to crop growing. A hearing on the purchase is scheduled for tonight at 6:30 in Town Hall.

When development rights programs were first created on the East End decades ago, advocates envisioned them as a way to protect farming and scenic vistas. What they did not foresee was the value of the sites for other purposes, be they raising nursery stock, stabling horses, or as annexes to extensive private lawns. What is unarguable is that development rights purchases have kept houses off the land; what is less clear is whether the town and county programs worked as intended. Groups like the Peconic Land Trust have for some time said these programs needed updating — even going back to property owners in some cases to negotiate food-friendlier arrangements.

From what we can tell, Whitmores would continue to use the fenced-in East Hampton site for a retail and wholesale business that puts heavy demands on the soil. After years of use as a nursery, it is likely that major rehabilitation would be needed before food growing might be efficient there. Drawing down the community preservation fund, the source of the $3.2 million, to continue the site’s intensive, commercial use seems shortsighted, and officials should press for additional rights.

Indeed, the wording of the town resolution on the proposed purchase describes it as for agriculture and open space. As things stand, it does not appear that the money would further either goal, even though the state considers tree farming to be agriculture, which would make the purchase legal. Before the town board makes the deal, it might seek some concessions from the sellers to improve the land’s value to the public, perhaps tying it to the nearby trail systems or obtaining assurances that crops might grow there again. The pending purchase becomes even more questionable when you consider that the town’s zoning rules would require an agricultural set-aside of about 70 percent of the land if it were to be subdivided for houses.

In general terms, the development rights approach has to be refigured to ensure that preservation fund money is spent in places of true ecological value or to assure that food production continues. Handouts so that businesses and landowners can pursue non-farming-related activities with the help of public funding should not be tolerated, even if it takes changing state law.