With an important East Hampton Town Board election ahead, any groundbreaking initiatives on affordable housing are somewhat delayed, lest anything upset the status quo. But even if work already were under way on, for example, a modest plan for such housing in the Wainscott School District, it would hardly be enough to meet the demand.

The paradox is that while there are plenty of opportunities here for first-time homebuyers and renters, Manhattan-level incomes are necessary and few in the South Fork work force make that kind of money. And for renters, the picture is growing desperate, as online services facilitating short-term turnover drive prices upward.

It is not entirely fair to say that nothing is happening on this in Town Hall. A revised rental registration ordinance is expected to be aired soon, and an enforcement push netted a few notable housing-rule busts this summer. We have argued before that a well-crafted rental registry would discourage some lawbreakers and give the town more tools for prosecutions. The paperwork nuisance it would entail would be worth it to get a handle on the flood of rentals that have turned many single-family houses into de facto hotels.

If owners think twice about allowing rentals for, say, a weekend bachelor party, as one East Hampton High School teacher is said to have done in August, netting $3,500 for three nights, they might opt instead for a legal, yearly rental to someone who actually wants to live in and contribute to the community. At the same time, it is imperative for the town to go after the online marketplaces that make such housing violations possible. Airbnb, Craigslist, and Vacation Rental by Owner blithely facilitate illegal transactions on a daily basis and should be challenged in court the same way the drug marketplace Silk Road was taken down by federal authorities in 2013. Town officials should ask New York State Attorney General Eric Schneiderman, who has already expressed interest in the subject, to get involved.

But seeking to control rentals will only go part of the way toward increasing the supply of affordable housing; direct attacks on the problem from government are necessary. One possibility is a fund that would impose a fee on new luxury construction to make low and no-interest loans available and pay property owners to make more affordable residences available. A bill from Assemblyman Fred W. Thiele Jr. would impose a $10-per-square-foot fee on floor area beyond 3,000 square feet — a McMansion tax, if you will.

This is a reasonable concept in that it taps the rich in an effort to assure that some of the labor force necessary to keep their summer palaces functioning can live in the area. The omission of funding in Mr. Thiele’s bill for building new, affordable rental housing is significant. With a proposed loan cap of $250,000, few among the region’s work force would be able to buy into a market where the median residential sale was $980,000 in the second quarter of this year. A dedicated program along the lines of the hugely successful community preservation fund may well be needed. As politically charged as that might be, it will take giant steps to solve the affordable housing conundrum, and everything should be open for discussion.

The East Hampton Town Trustees were approached recently about allowing a small pilot oyster-growing program in waters that they control. We believe it would be a good project and should be allowed.

What several residents and oyster-fanciers were talking about is something along the lines of something already happening in Southold and Southampton Town waters. Private growers would get fingernail-sized seed oysters from the East Hampton Town Shellfish Hatchery and raise them to edible size in floating cages or bags. Commercial sale is not the goal; the point is to engage residents more fully in the natural world, with a side bonus of giving them delicious shellfish to savor.

The community at large would reap a bonus, too, in that the oysters would be a kind of marine Johnny Appleseed, in line with the true, stealth genius of the Cornell Cooperative Extension-connected SPAT (Southold Project in Aquaculture Training) program, spat being a word for oysters when their larvae attach to a suitable substrate.

The beauty of the program is that individuals tend relatively small bunches of their own oysters, nursing them past the vulnerable youthful stage, keeping their enclosures free of potentially choking seaweed and other algal growth, and helping them avoid predators. It takes at least 18 months for such coddled shellfish to reach edible size; more time is better, as much as two or three years for a really nice specimen. During that time, the oysters would have spawned at least once, sending out millions of microscopic veligers to bolster the natural population.

Oysters are thought of as a kind of vacuum cleaner of the seas, thanks to their prodigious filtering capacity. Efforts are even under way to return New York Harbor’s oyster beds to what they once were. Billions of planned oysters would, in theory, greatly rid the water of vast amounts of potential contaminants.

Around East Hampton Town, where concerns about surface waters are mounting, such an effort would be welcome — and tasty, too. Get those oyster knives ready!

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Note: This has been updated from a previous version. The source for the seed oysters would be the East Hampton Town Shellfish Hatchery, not the Southold Project in Aquaculture Training.

Support for outside commercial interests over home rule and the promise of meaningful noise control is a red line that candidates for East Hampton Town elected office should not cross. But Tom Knobel, Margaret Turner, and Lisa Mulhern-Larsen have been willing to finance their supervisor and town board campaigns largely with money from businesses and individuals seeking to block tough new aircraft limits.

By the most recent count, HeliFlite and related individuals, as well as a handful of pilots and airport businesses, have provided the Republicans with $115,000. It is difficult to see this as evidence of anything except a quid pro quo. However, Mr. Knobel, who is seeking the supervisor’s post, argued that the largess was only because the helicopter companies and others see him as having an “open mind.” We doubt voters are as credulous as Mr. Knobel might wish.

It is regrettable that the once-proud East Hampton Republican Party has come to this, taking money from outsiders who would put their corporate well-being ahead of the wishes of thousands of East Hampton residents for peace and quiet.

The Republican candidates may say what they will about all the other town issues and their qualifications for office, but by being financed almost entirely by airport-related donors, they have shown themselves sorely lacking in judgment and unfit for leadership. On the airport issue alone, Mr. Knobel, Ms. Turner, and Ms. Mulhern-Larsen are not likely to see wide support.

There is still time before Election Day for them to give back the tainted money and work to repair the damage, but not much. Voters should be watching closely in the campaign’s final days.

During a Tuesday debate among East Hampton Town Board candidates sponsored by the League of Women Voters, there was much talk about how to solve a range of problems, such as water degradation, traffic, noise, and crowding, and yet the discussion consistently sidestepped the core issue: population.

This was true of the panelists other than Tom Knobel, perhaps, the Republican candidate for supervisor, who said he wished things were the way they were back in 1979. But then he, too, made a passionate argument against using public money for so-called density reduction achieved by buying vacant building lots. Others, Democrats and Republicans alike, steered clear of whether steps should be taken to drive the total population down.

As best anyone knows the numbers, they are frightening and deserve attention. About 2,000 to 2,200 undeveloped and buildable parcels remain within East Hampton Town. As put in a county study of South Fork housing, you can figure about 4.2 people per house here, meaning that if all of the lots were built, the town would see an ultimate semipermanent population bump of more than 8,000. Of course, that is not even half of the story. The summer population is where the real trouble starts: the thousands of people in multiple-occupancy arrangements, the party houses, and day-trippers.

Every person who is here at a given point in time matters, and it is a failure of government not to plan accordingly and take them all into account. According to the best numbers available, five years ago the peak figure for East Hampton residents and overnight visitors was about 100,000. It is important to note that this number reflects only people sleeping here; an estimate of day-trippers and of the area’s highly mobile work force was not included.

Obviously, aggressive measures at all levels to reduce the available building lots must take place. At the same time, officials must be willing to use whatever levers they have to tamp down the flood. This includes seeking legal remedies to combat illegal rentals. Another step would be to address so-called attractive nuisances, such as free access to beaches, where young day-trippers and others congregate to drink alcohol, and the nightclubs and motels-cum-nightclubs that draw unreasonably large crowds. The town must also take a hard look at large summer events, such as festivals and benefits, and consider whether these too should be reduced.

Sometimes too many is just too much, and a safe, sane, and environmentally sustainable future for East Hampton Town will require an end to the more-is-better philosophy. When hundreds gathered at the Montauk Firehouse in July to demand relief, they were not asking for the status quo but for bold steps. If the East Hampton Town Board really wants to get serious about the challenges — as it appears most of the seated members and candidates do — understanding and then driving down the peak population number is of the utmost necessity. Unfortunately, the candidates for town board appear unwilling to accept this reality.

Farmers and their advocates have for some time lamented a trend here in which publicly preserved land is lost from crop production. Though readers might not know it, many pass examples every day — places where development rights were sold years ago to the town or county with the expectation that the site remain agricultural. In the present-day reality of big-bucks South Fork real estate, however, many of these properties have been converted to lawns or, in some cases, horse riding facilities.

It would have been difficult at the time for planners and preservationists to have foreseen what happened; they assumed that simply blocking residential development would ensure that farming would survive in a given spot. Now, as a result, there has been discussion of whether government should go back to property owners with financial offers to secure more rights. This could be a tough sell with taxpayers, who might well ask why they are being tapped a second time when the land is already preserved. This calls for greater outreach.

One thing we have noticed is that the trails and birding people are running laps around the food producers in the public relations game. On any given weekend, for example, you could choose from a number of free guided hikes, or go see seals, learn about birds or trees or sea life, or hear about history.

Despite the fact that most of us eat three times a day, every day, it is easier to interact with the region’s wild lands than its farms. If there is going to be a renewed effort to make sure farming continues here, greater interaction between food producers and consumers must be part of the equation — and we’re talking about more than a quick conversation at a Saturday market.

To toss out a few ideas, it has seemed to us that even such simple steps as signs along roadsides explaining what crops are in the ground would help. So, too, would more opportunities for people to physically interact with farmland, perhaps on trails that skirt the corner of a field or places where one could stop to take in the view. There are fund-raising open houses and open gardens, so why not a similar open farms day? As it turns out, several of the community-supported agriculture operations here welcome visitors, but that is not generally known.

There are undoubtedly plenty of ways to bridge the gap between producers and plates. They should be explored, particularly if the pool of public generosity is to be drawn from once again.

Among a field of 18 candidates for East Hampton Town trustee, the average voter could be forgiven for voting a straight party line or on name recognition alone. Given all the issues facing the town’s shorelines and waterways, however, the trustee board should be the best that it can be — and this means doing a little homework before making choices.

First, our endorsements in alphabetical order: Tyler Armstrong, Joe Bloecker, Francis Bock, Brian Byrnes, Rick Drew, Jim Grimes, Sean McCaffrey, Diane McNally, and Bill Taylor. Here are their qualifications:

Mr. Armstrong has quickly proven himself an intelligent, thoughtful candidate. He appears capable and would replace the departing Trustee Stephanie Forsberg in ably representing a younger generation of East Hampton residents.

Mr. Bock, who has previously been a town trustee and was its clerk at one time, has a practical levelheadedness and thinks long and hard about the issues. He has been outspoken about the need to work with, not against, the often-derided New York State Department of Environmental Conservation, because, face it, that agency has considerable regulatory overlap with the trustees.

Mr. Byrnes’s strengths include a deep commitment to residents’ welfare, whether at the senior citizens housing projects he manages or as a member of the town’s disability advisory board. He is energetic and all heart.

A former town trustee who stepped down to run unsuccessfully for assessor, Mr. Bloecker has salt-of-the-earth common sense. His dedication is unquestionable. Unlike some of the current trustees, whose poor attendance records are indefensible, you would expect to see him at every single trustee meeting.

Mr. Grimes runs a native plant and landscaping business in Montauk and that experience could prove valuable, particularly as the trustees think about watershed protection, invasive species, and wetland restoration in the face of sea level rise.

Following in the footsteps of his father, the late Trustee Jim McCaffrey, Mr. McCaffrey brings a Wainscott landscaping family’s perspective to the issues. He is unflappable and a consistent voice for preserving public access to trustee lands.

Ms. McNally has valuable institutional knowledge that would be a shame to lose. As the trustees’ clerk, she has run fair and open meetings, though she should have done more about moving more crowded sessions to a larger venue when the need arose. Her failure to speak out about the too-frequent absences among some trustees calls into question whether she should continue to serve as clerk, however.

Mr. Drew has impressed us with his deep knowledge of trustee matters and ample background in commercial and recreational pursuits on the water. He has an interest in government efficiency, which is something the kick-it-down-the-road trustees could really use right now.

One of Mr. Taylor’s strengths is knowing how to work with other levels of government, including the D.E.C. and Town Hall. Given the complex and interrelated nature of many of the environmental matters the trustees must deal with on a limited budget, his ability to be a bridge to other agencies is a must-have.

There you have it, nine in all, a balanced board able to take on the challenges of a new and ever-more-complicated age.

The Springs School is crowded. There is no doubt about that. A committee charged with finding solutions, however, stopped short of calling for a major construction project.

This may have been a mistake that will cost the kids, at least in the short term. Springs is in a bind, and it comes down to money. Its school-age population is proportionately massive and property taxes there are often described as the highest in East Hampton Town. A persistent refusal on the part of town officials to undertake townwide property reappraisal, which is likely to be of help, may be leaving millions of tax dollars untapped in underassessed miles of high-value Springs waterfront. And a decade of weak housing enforcement dating back to Jay Schneiderman’s time as supervisor has made the hamlet a poster child for overcrowding.

Springs is also pressed by its neighboring school districts. Waiting for cooperation from Amagansett and East Hampton, as has been suggested, is far from a sure thing. East Hampton has its own large classes and space needs, and Amagansett, which maintains a climate of exclusivity, isn’t likely to take meaningful steps to aid children just over the hamlet line, even though many Springs parents work keeping up the houses in its wealthy areas. It is not surprising that the Springs School facilities committee stopped short of calling for a bond to pay for major renovations and expansion. There is a fear that district voters might say no. But this does not make the need go away. Facing it, the committee has recommended adding modular classrooms and other measures intended to provide more room.

However, we believe that nothing short of a major construction effort is needed — and a concerted effort to sell the plan to voters. In the end, Springs will continue to be forced to tap its own resources in assuring an adequate school to meet all its students’ needs.

County Executive Steve Bellone has, by our count, made two significant forays into East Hampton Town in the past year and a half. This is far too few, but it is more than have been made by James O’Connor, his opponent in the Nov. 3 election. Both should have made the South Fork a bigger part of their campaigns.

Mr. O’Connor has made fiscal reform the centerpiece of his campaign. Suffolk has faced a budget deficit for some time. This is not particularly of Mr. Bellone’s making, but his budgets have been in part based on wildly optimistic sales tax projections — guesses that have fallen short by nearly $52 million in 2015-16 alone. As a result, the county has given serious consideration to raiding a reserve sewer fund to make up the difference. Mr. O’Connor’s answers have been uninspiring. He has recommended a finance board to oversee cuts, but has not outlined what the tough steps might be.

Mr. Bellone has had four years to deal with the financial distress, and Mr. O’Connor has rightly said the situation is getting worse not better. He has not, however, made a sufficient case that he would be the better alternative. Mr. Bellone earns our endorsement, but with the caveats that he had better put East Hampton on his day planner more often and get Suffolk on a sound budgetary footing without resorting to one-shot revenue bumps, imaginary sales tax estimates, and bare-faced accounting tricks.

Yet another wastewater plan arrives, and again we find ourselves scratching our heads. This time a Massachusetts consultant has produced a set of recommendations for East Hampton Village intended to improve Hook and Town Ponds. These include sewage treatment projects for 87 watershed properties around Egypt Lane and North Main Street, an in-ground filter near the Nature Trail, and perhaps most visually notable, the creation of a million-dollar wetland on the grassy triangle near where Main Street, Woods Lane, and Ocean Avenue come together.

In all, the project might take three years to complete and cost $7.3 million. Money might come from additional taxes on some or all village properties or, as the consultant not so surprisingly urged, from tapping the community preservation fund. “A huge opportunity for community preservation,” was how Pio Lombardo of Lombardo Consultants put the prospect. But it could also represent a huge gravy train for his business, which, as its website boasts, can supply “turnkey services of designing, building, owning/financing, and operating wastewater and water facilities.”

Our skepticism about Mr. Lombardo’s work should not be interpreted as opposition to water improvements over all, or to wetlands for that matter. Far from it. What we do find fault with is his apparent predilection for a project in relatively rich East Hampton Village and another, in downtown Montauk, where a similar funding strategy was discussed.

In Montauk, as with the Hook and Town Ponds proposals, the environmental benefits of these massive undertakings are clear, but not necessarily of the highest necessity. Nowhere in either plan was there a sense that drinking water supplies would be protected or that important shellfishing areas restored. The town’s baymen might think that Georgica Pond’s crab and white perch fisheries should be considered a priority. A clam digger might say the south end of Accabonac Harbor or the perpetually befouled portions of Lake Montauk deserve help. Springs residents might ask about what comes out of their wells. And unlike Hook Pond, Georgica is an active recreational waterway.

Close watchers of government have seen this kind of thing before: A consultant waves around sheaves of apparently scientific reports and expects elected officials to just go along. Not so fast, we say. East Hampton Village and the town as a whole cannot expect to tackle the many water problems simultaneously. Instead of the work’s following the money, the environmental community and public health experts should take the lead, establishing the goals and setting priorities, then asking Mr. Lombardo or someone else to come up with a serious plan to meet them.

There is nothing wrong with East Hampton Village opting some day to save Town Pond. There just may be far more important problems to solve first.

The courtesy left — when a driver suddenly stops to let a driver in an oncoming lane cross over to make a turn — is either a last vestige of public decency on the roads or a risk to others. We believe it is the latter. In effect, the practice adds up to one driver’s making a decision for another, a bad idea that is inherently dangerous.

We were again put in mind of this last week when we read in these pages about a bicyclist who was hurt on Sept. 13 when he collided with a car on Pantigo Road. According to police, an East Meadow resident who was headed east paused to allow a visitor from Martha’s Vineyard who was headed west to turn toward the CVS Pharmacy parking lot on Gay Lane. Thomas Kim of Brooklyn, who was pedaling east on a bicycle, slammed into the side of the sedan making the left, which blocked his path. He was flown by Suffolk police helicopter to Stony Brook University Hospital for treatment.

This accident was hardly the first caused by good intentions gone awry. There have been recent similar incidents that we know of in Montauk, Amagansett, and Bridgehampton — some that also required hospital visits for injuries. A friend remains in a brace now months after an accident caused when the driver in front of his truck jammed on the brakes to avoid a group of ducks.

The courtesy left is contagious and seems to have become more prevalent. Also risky is something seen frequently on East Hampton’s Main Street, when drivers with the right of way allow jaywalkers to cross, only to have them stroll into the path of another vehicle in the next lane.

Equal to being aware of hazards, drivers should strive to make the movements of their vehicles easily understood, steady, and predictable. As much as we should celebrate the impulse to be chivalrous,  caution and the commonly understood rules of the road should always take precedence.