Recent dustups over public land in East Hampton Town have a common thread. In two instances, neighbors worry about what would happen if the public actually showed up. And, while the specifics of the debate about Dolphin Drive on Napeague and the opposition to the upcoming purchase of two house lots overlooking Three Mile Harbor are worth a close look, the underlying sense of dread is also noteworthy.

The summer of 2015 has been marked by frustration about crowds, particularly in Montauk, but elsewhere as well. Quiet spots and activities once the sole province of locals are now widely known thanks to being shared on social media and in sectors of the press eager to let everyone in on the secret. We think of the fashion designer Cynthia Rowley’s crowing in some magazine or other about how much she enjoyed harvesting wild mussels at a particular Montauk beach; maybe it’s not her fault alone, but there are no mussels there anymore.

Everywhere you look these days there are more people than ever before, so it is understandable that some property owners might fear a potential onslaught on their streets. That fear, however, does not make it right for public officials to give in to the “not in my backyard” syndrome.

The town’s pending purchase of two parcels on Squaw Road on Three Mile Harbor is sensible and defensible. Those who argue that it would have been preferable for the lots to be sold on the open market and potentially redeveloped, perhaps with far-larger houses, are missing the point: Neutralizing more waterfront and watershed properties is in the collective community’s best interest.

As to Dolphin Drive, we agree with the neighbors that parking along the east side of the road, ostensibly to allow public access to the town-owned South Flora nature preserve, would be unsightly. However, the town should call the residents on their hyperbole about damaging ecological effects by suggesting that parking be permitted along the developed west side of the road instead. Their surely negative reaction to that idea would help sniff out the likely real motive for their opposition: They simply don’t want to see people who don’t live in the neighborhood there at all.

In the end, it falls to the town to ensure that its lands are managed in ways beneficial to both neighbors and the public at large. And neither side should expect total victory.

Quick: If you live and pay taxes outside one of the incorporated villages in East Hampton Town, name one of your fire commissioners. Can’t do it? You’re not alone.

Another question: How many of you voted in the last fire district election? Not so many? We thought so.

Whichever side a resident might be on regarding two issues that have blown up recently in the Springs Fire District — a cellphone tower and concerns about its ambulance service — one little-known aspect of how it and other fire districts are constituted deserves more attention.

By state law, fire commissioners are elected for five-year terms. The trouble is that only one commissioner comes up for election each year. This means that should residents seek a change of direction, it would take a minimum of three years’ of going to the polls, assuming, as is the pattern, that most commissioners seek re-election. By that time, the issue that caused a groundswell could all but be forgotten. By sequencing votes one commissioner at a time, the law assures stability, but at a cost of meaningful public participation in this arm of government. It is, to be blunt, something that would seem more at home in a foreign politburo than in a country that prides itself on open, free, and fair elections.

The way fire commissioners are chosen is as anti-democratic a process as could be imagined and should be overhauled.

So what, you might ask, does a fire district do, and why should residents care? The answer is that these autonomous governments levy taxes to pay for emergency services and incur debt to finance equipment and build firehouses and the like. In the villages, as hinted above, there are no fire commissioners and the elected trustees play that role. Residents who live outside of a fire district or village get emergency services through a town-negotiated contract. For example, people with property in the Northwest Fire Protection District pay East Hampton Village for fire and ambulance services, though they do not get to vote in village elections.

Most elected bodies in New York State follow a pattern that makes “throwing the bums out,” if you will, possible. For example, three of the five seats on the East Hampton Town Board will be in play on Nov. 3, which means that if enough voters don’t like the job Larry Cantwell, Peter Van Scoyoc, and Sylvia Overby are doing, they could force a change of direction, should they so choose. It’s more or less the same for school and village boards. And imagine: If enough people cared, the entire panel of East Hampton Town Trustees could be pink-slipped in a single day’s election. Even more impressive perhaps is that Americans will select a new president next year and have a chance to remake Congress. Not so with fire commissioners.

Fire commissioners can cruise along effectively insulated from what passes for the normal political process in this country. One-at-a-time elections for fire commissioners were established by legislative design, although what the motivation was seems lost to history. The result is a sure way to perpetuate a board’s status quo and assure only the most minimal voter interest, with turnout only among friends and relatives, if that.

Don’t like the Springs cellphone tower or believe that the district should pay for a paramedic program to supplement its volunteers? Too bad. Your vote would not matter until after the 2017 election at the earliest. This should be changed. We hope that the Legislature, which sets municipal organization law in New York State, is aware of this anomaly and paying attention.

Congratulations are due the East Hampton Town Board for unanimously voting last week to ban parking on a significant portion of Edgemere Street, where patrons of the Surf Lodge bar and restaurant (and lately, full-on concert venue) have made the road treacherous. The no-parking zone will encompass about a half mile of Edgemere Street, from well north of the club to South Elwell Street; parking will remain available closer to the Long Island Rail Road station, at about where Flamingo Avenue begins. In effect, the board told the Surf Lodge to deal with its customers’ cars. The move is but a start, and the board must turn next to other problem spots, most, but not all, in Montauk.

A good number of drivers have described near-misses to the west, at Cyril’s Fish House on Montauk Highway, for example. Westbound traffic slows to a stop there as patrons, taxi drivers, and the restaurant’s staff stir their own breed of chaos. Some assistance from the New York State Department of Transportation is sorely needed there — and quickly — before a fatal accident proves fears correct.

Another problem site made the news this week when a lawsuit was filed against the town by Sloppy Tuna, another hot spot in Montauk, challenging what it says was an arbitrary change in its maximum occupancy. That will work its way through the legal process, but a side note concerning the often-crowded bar and restaurant deserves attention.

 Former East Hampton Town Police Chief Ed Ecker Jr. now seems to work for a consulting firm hired by Drew Doscher, Sloppy Tuns’s owner. No disrespect intended, but we suspect Mr. Ecker was hired as much for who he is as for his expertise. On July 22, Mr. Ecker sat down with two former subordinates, the current chief, Michael D. Sarlo, and Lt. Thomas Grenci, the Montauk precinct commander, to discuss Sloppy Tuna. Whether one likes the place or is unhappy about the throngs it attracts, there seems to be something not quite right about a well-connected former town official acting on behalf of a business taking the town to court. One might hope Sloppy Tuna would try to tone it down so that residents would find being there more to their liking. But that is probably too much to ask when there are large heaps of money to be made catering to the party crowd.

Owners of these bars and restaurants will all say they are complying with what authorities ask and are being unfairly targeted. It will be a tough fight to bring them into line, but the town board, through the Edgemere parking ban and other efforts, is demonstrating that it has the will to take it on — even if it means standing up to old friends like Mr. Ecker.

Reading last week’s story about the Amagansett Citizens Advisory Committee, we were struck by a brief mention of that hamlet’s train station and the vehicle congestion during high-season weekend arrival and departure times. Things are not much better at East Hampton’s Long Island Rail Road stop and a whole lot worse at the Bridgehampton site, where the chaos even on a recent August weekday morning was truly beyond belief. But traffic problems may be the least of the railroad’s worries as a federal agency has begun to look at onboard safety on Hamptons-bound trains.

Underscoring concerns about the Montauk branch nearing a breaking point, the Federal Railroad Administration this week met with the L.I.R.R.’s operations head to discuss overcrowding. A railroad spokesman said that the question of passengers sitting on luggage in the aisles on the Cannonball, a Friday express from New York City, was added to the agenda of a previously scheduled meeting. The feds are concerned that too many passengers and all their weekend baggage might hinder an evacuation between cars in the event of an emergency.

Notably, the spokesman said, the L.I.R.R. does not have a maximum per-car occupancy limit nor was it able to say how many people exactly pile onto each train. The L.I.R.R. has not tallied up the use of its various stations more than once or twice a decade. Think of it: Thousands of riders, but the railroad cannot say how many. It’s laughable, to be generous; dangerously incompetent otherwise.

There is, of course, the distinct possibility that someone in the bowels of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority does know exactly how many tickets were issued in a given period to, say, Montauk, but if so, he or she is not telling the press office. On the other hand, maybe not. What can be inferred is that the policy makers and the people who create the schedules are doing so in an information vacuum — and that goes as well for the people who design our hamlet and village train stations and are in charge of their surrounding traffic patterns, and more important, onboard safety.

Anyone who has been in one of these vehicle scrums or a packed Friday train car can attest to the problem. What is astounding is that no one in a position to do something about it is keeping track even in the most minimal fashion — accurate passenger counts. At this point, moving the Amagansett L.I.R.R. station to another site, as suggested, might be a good idea, but until there are real numbers about its use, advocating for it can only be speculation. However, it is more than obvious that the railroad must move swiftly to improve weekender service on the Montauk branch.

One of the reasons many people go to East Hampton Village’s ocean beaches is precisely because they are not — underscore not — like those maintained by the Town of East Hampton, where a degree of slovenliness and barely maintained, cement-bunker-like facilities are unfortunately the norm. Now, village officials have been looking at allowing food vendors at Georgica and Two Mile Hollow. This is a terrible idea and should go no further.

For the most part, the village runs a really tight ship where the ocean beaches are concerned and recently pledged additional early morning trash pickups to make sure the sand and surrounding parking areas are spick-and-span at whatever time of day beachgoers arrive. The village was a leader in banning fires built right on the sand, requiring that they be contained in metal wash basins or the like, and the result has been a return to pristine conditions, where, until the ban, black flecks of charcoal had marred the white sand.

People pay for the privilege of spreading their towels and opening their beach chairs on the village’s white sands; $375 nonresident parking permits sell out in the blink of an eye when they become available each spring. Food vending, with all the paper waste and sticky drizzle it can produce, threatens the beaches’ desirability. Consider, too, that for parents of small children, food-free beaches can be a blessing: no whining about buying ice cream or other treats usually reserved for after dinner. For the hungry, there is always Main Beach, which has the charming, old-fashioned Chowder Bowl for all the fried food and sweets one might want.

One of the reasons cited at a recent village board meeting for allowing food vending at Two Mile Hollow in particular is that the parking lot there is often less than full. If getting more people to use this particular beach is the goal, there are other options, ones that would not increase litter and trash. One notion might be selling some nonresident permits valid only at Two Mile Hollow. Another might be granting taxpayers from the fire protection districts that contract with the village for emergency services a limited number of free parking passes on a lottery basis. Or the village could leave well enough alone — which is probably the best course, at least for now.

It is surprising that the big story of the summer of 2015 was not a celebrity drunken-driving arrest or a devastating fire but instead the summer itself. East Hampton Town — and Montauk in particular — hit some kind of tipping point by the Fourth of July, and residents had had enough. They packed a July 14 town board meeting, demanding action on a host of complaints, including nightlife, litter, traffic, and taxis. It was enough to drive the fight about noise from the East Hampton Airport or whether the town had intentionally banned the car service Uber out of the news for weeks on end.

The season’s quality-of-life apocalypse reached The New York Times, which asked a top reporter, who had just come off producing a widely celebrated story on the 50-year assault on the federal Voting Right Act, to take a look. Jim Rutenberg likened the changes here to a through-the-looking-glass manifest destiny as a “new horde of speculators” rushed east to cash in — or spend wildly in a determined show of wealth. Things got so bad that the local Republicans, until only recently the party that could be counted on to look the other way when business interests were at play, began to call for a hard line.

As July gave way to August, the atmosphere began to shift. More intense enforcement by officials resulted in a storm of citations for a range of offenses. Among them was a clampdown on hotel fitness classes organized without proper town approvals. Then, it was garbage that drew attention, notably at the beaches and reaching a crescendo on the first morning of this month when early visitors to the Navy Road beach in Montauk were horrified at the remains of a bacchanal staged by a restaurant and nightspot’s staff. Beer, food, and wine lay strewn across several tables. If ever there was a single symbol of the disrespect with which some people treat this place this was it. The restaurant’s public relations team sprang into action, though by then outrage was widespread.

Trash at the beaches, trash on the beaches, and trashy behavior everywhere might well be the epitaph for the summer just past. Who’s to say what 2016 will bring.

Go ahead, make a left. Make two, if you want. It’s September! Tumbleweed Tuesday, some call it, the day after Labor Day when we East Hamptoners get our town back. It is a day for celebration, as they did in Montauk with a live band and cookout on the downtown green. But when you think about it, there is a rather depressing notion at its core — that for the preceding three months locals have too often felt like strangers in their own hometown.

This year more than most, East Hampton has suffered the sour fruit of its own popularity. Sure, certain businesses were booming, notably Montauk’s bars and restaurants and places that sold carry-out beer, but others, like a furnishings shop in Sag Harbor whose owner we spoke with the other day, have been looking forward to this month eagerly. Short-term renters and the day-trippers who mobbed that village and the various hamlets this year do not spend money on her duvet covers, hand-sewn pillowcases, and the like; residents and second-home owners who emerge about now actually do. It is a sea change, she said.

We hope local officials will think long and hard about how to make the weeks of the high season more like this one, when peace returns. With important town elections coming up in Southampton and East Hampton, moving the clock back to a more civilized time is something each candidate should be pressed about. Tumbleweed Tuesday should be a model for how we like the rest of the year, not a passing reward for putting up with a summer’s worth of nuisances.

As the 2015 high season comes to a close, East Hampton Town officials should begin working on to-do lists in an effort to make next summer a better one. To succeed will be a monumental undertaking and it is not likely to be completed in the span of just several months, but elected leaders, law enforcement officials, and town staff must make every effort to control growth. Given the unprecedented population surge, dialing things back a little might not be such a bad thing. The question is where to start.

Simultaneously with worrying about the coming Nov. 6 election, town officials will be working on the next year’s budget. This is where the battle will be won or lost in trying to win back East Hampton for those of us who live here, those who spend substantial amounts of time here, and those for whom this place no longer feels like home.

Elected officials now live in fear of Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo’s government-starving 2-percent tax cap. And, this being an election year, it would be a surprise if any of the political parties’ candidates advocated exceeding the cap in 2016. Keep in mind that the Cuomo cap means there is less ability to spend every year because the tax rate lags behind inflation. So if there is to be no increased revenue from taxes, the big problem is figuring out where the money will come from to do what needs to be done, be it for more staff or taking the fight to court.

An approach that could find broad support here is taking on the problem spots directly. That might mean increasing fines for quality-of-life penalties, and particularly commercial violations, as far as possible.

One idea that also should be considered is installing parking meters on the downtown Montauk streets used by beachgoers. We can think of no other ocean beach on Long Island that offers free all-day parking for visitors — and you can believe this is well-known among daytrippers. The cost for a vehicle to enter Jones Beach in Nassau County is $10; charging even half that for a day at Montauk would be useful. Look, we’re not saying the town should charge an up-to-$8 per person fee just to walk on the sand the way such places as Long Beach Island do in New Jersey, but given the problems in the hamlet in recent summers, not seeking income for improved services and police patrols would be a missed opportunity.

Those looking ahead on behalf of the public should not forget that many businesses here plan for summer’s onslaught and respond accordingly. That is something local government has heretofore found impossible. Being better prepared for next year should be among the highest off-season priorities.

Long Island Sound is a federally designated no-discharge zone, but apparently no one told the right people at the Environmental Protection Agency and Army Corps of Engineers. The corps, which is rapidly readying a lunatic plan to destroy the Montauk downtown oceanfront in order to save it, and the E.P.A. are ready to continue dumping dredged material in the Sound, as close to eastern Long Island as off New London.

An unusual coalition has sprung up to demand alternatives to placing toxin-laden silt from Connecticut rivers into this highly important waterway. Those calling for a better solution include New York State Senator Kenneth P. LaValle, Assemblyman Steve Englebright, Brookhaven officials, Suffolk Legislator Al Krupski, and Kevin McAllister, a well-known activist. They want the corps to find other places for the spoils and to segregate those that are toxic from the rest, which they say should be placed in upland sites, not in the water. They and others have pointed out that this is exactly what New York and Connecticut pledged to do in 2005 with a promised phase-out of at-sea dumping.

Several hearings have been held on the plan to continue using the Sound’s dump sites, and written comment will be taken by the Army Corps until the end of next week. However, we get the sense that, as with downtown Montauk, the corps in particular is taking the easy way out. Obviously, what is needed is for the region’s representatives in Washington to get involved, and fast. Senators Kirsten Gillibrand and Charles Schumer of New York and Connecticut’s Richard Blumenthal and Chris Murphy, as well as Representative Lee Zeldin, have all signed on to measures designed to protect and restore Long Island Sound. They each should take an immediate, personal role in bringing an end to the use of it as a garbage dump.

Water quality has been in the news this summer, thanks in part to Suffolk Executive Steve Bellone’s seizing on it in his re-election bid. Locally, there have been closures of Georgica and Hook Ponds after potentially harmful bacteria were found. At the state level, there is a bid to allow up to a fifth of future income to be skimmed off the community preservation fund for water improvement projects.

 And, looking farther back, a consultant’s study of wastewater requirements in the Town of East Hampton produced a back-of-the-napkin proposal for a sewage treatment system for a part of Montauk that is not generally known to have a water problem. There is a lot going on, but just how much reflects actual need and how much is being played for politics or is really a cloaked giveaway to developers remains murky.

As with the Army Corps of Engineers’ looming remake of the downtown Montauk oceanfront, there is no assurance that officials can be trusted to make the right — or even the legal — decision. Massive water quality initiatives would stand an equal if not greater chance of getting it wrong. Sewage treatment plants, which some in power seem ready to throw millions at, have a poor record on Long Island, and state and county oversight has lagged. Consider that in Nassau County officials want to spend more than half a billion dollars to extend a nitrogen-spewing outfall pipe from a sewage plant two miles into the Atlantic rather than try to improve the plant’s efficiency.

What is clear is that environmental organizations and truly independent experts must be brought in before big money is committed. And, in the meantime, small steps might well produce important results in the near term, as long as they are properly conceived and rigorously vetted.

Take, for example, the elevated bacteria levels frequently found at Fresh Pond, Amagansett, in samples taken by the Concerned Citizens of Montauk. The highest enterococcus concentration is consistently from a tidal creek that feeds the pond, raising suspicion about the creek’s proximity to a town restroom. A modest project to correct this might provide immediate environmental benefit if a link was found. Strengthening Suffolk County’s limits on the use of fertilizers would be important as well, perhaps expanding the law to a year-round ban for those high in nitrogen.

Another start would be for the county to adopt tough new discharge limits and numerical measures in keeping with those of the federal Environmental Protection Agency. As critics have said, without standards there is no way to assure that water projects are meeting their goals. Initiatives begun in the absence of a way to gauge results could flush good money down the drain