East Hampton Town’s double standard on group housing is something that deserves attention.  

Consider the Ross School’s plan to use two identical eight-bedroom houses now under construction in Springs as dormitories for some of its growing and high-paying boarding student population. This has alarmed neighbors, concerned that the single-family character of the streets will suffer undesirable changes. Then consider that the town tries to take a tough line on other group houses, whether occupied by members of the summer shares crowd or Spanish-speaking laborers.

Those living near the buildings under construction or any of the other estimated 25 to 30 Ross houses for boarders scattered around East Hampton and part of eastern Southampton Town are right to ask, “What’s the difference?”

The answer lies in an unconvincing town legal opinion dating back about seven years that the dormitories are exempt from the rule that no more than four unrelated persons can occupy a single-family residence because the students live as a family, with teachers or other adults in the place of parents.

It is very difficult to swallow the claim that small numbers of Ross’s transitory groups of students, two or more to a room, who take all their meals with the rest of their classmates on campus, constitute families. Yes, the Ross dorm houses have resident adult supervision, but the authority rests with the school administration. It is true that boarding schools and colleges have disciplinary and other rights under the doctrine of “in loco parentis,” but to apply that to local zoning regulations, as the town does, is absurd. That no complaints have been registered about existing Ross boarding houses while complaints are frequent about shared summer or work-force houses is irrelevant.

Thinking about it further, share house residents, who from time to time shop, cook, and eat together, would be families, too, by the town’s bad arithmetic. More so, perhaps, any number of immigrant laborers’ houses could well be occupied by people who are related by common ties in their countries of origin, and therefore may have far better claims as families. It all gets ludicrous pretty fast once the town starts bending the rules for one group and not another.

An answer, as has been suggested in a town study of affordable housing, whose recommendations are likely to be adopted soon, is to allow and regulate dormitories. The study’s authors intended this to meet a clear need for safe, legal, seasonal work force housing, but it could also be applied to student accommodations, which are also likely to be seasonal. An obvious, essential requirement would be modern methods of dealing with wastewater, like so-called micro-septic systems, for example. Sited properly away from ecologically sensitive areas, this would be a far better approach for all concerned.

To what degree restaurants and bars are an essential part of hotels, motels, and the like will be considered this evening at East Hampton Town Hall. The town board has been working on a new set of rules intended to tighten the process by which they could be added to existing facilities.

This comes after several years of expansions of once-unassuming places of summer accommodation into what amount to regional headaches. Notably, in Montauk these include the Beach House, Solé East, and Ruschmeyer’s. Each has been a source of noise, traffic, litter, and other complaints from neighbors.

The proposed rules would prohibit the addition of bars and restaurants to hotels and motels that are allowed in residentially zoned areas because they pre-exist zoning, and would require more stringent review for such additions in areas where such facilities conform to zoning.

An important focus would be to relieve crowding on neighboring streets by assuring adequate on-site parking. Setbacks from property lines would be doubled, and the size of any new bars associated with a resort or motel would be limited to less than 10 percent of the entire structure’s floor area. Furthermore, new restaurants and bars on resort or motel premises could not include a “nightclub or any other form of entertainment establishment.” 

The Montauk Chamber of Commerce and East Hampton Business Alliance are rallying the opposition. Margaret Turner, the alliance president, who is also the latest Republican Party entry into the 2015 race for East Hampton Town Board, warned that the law would be restrictive and a hindrance if any hotel or motel owner decided to sell. This is unfortunate; we had hoped the business groups would seek to be good neighbors rather than to protect an unacceptable status quo, which is the result of current lax rules.

The proposal is a good beginning. However, the town should use all the tools at its disposal to make sure that those existing establishments that are already changing the character of East Hampton are brought more in line with the community’s desires for peace, quiet, and civil behavior.

Downtown Montauk business owners and others are beginning to hear about a sewage treatment project for that area that could get started soon. The proposal comes from a study of wastewater commissioned by East Hampton Town, and it is one part of a much more ambitious program that is now coming into focus.

Other places where the town’s consultant has recommended that new systems are warranted include Camp Hero, an area near Three Mile Harbor, and East Hampton Village. The downtown Montauk project is envisioned as the first of a connected solution that could also deal with wastewater from Ditch Plain and the Montauk dock area. Initially, the project could be financed by creating a tax district of eligible properties. The cost for a first phase has been estimated at $26 million — a lot of money, especially when water quality in and around the downtown area has not generally been understood to be at the top of the town’s ecological concerns.

The goal of the townwide wastewater study is a good one; impaired water quality is a threat to human health and the environment. However, in the past, sewage treatment facilities, particularly on Long Island, have been the source of endless frustration, inadequate disclosure, and even corruption. In addition, whether wastewater improvements could have the unintended effect of increasing residential and commercial density must be considered.

Critics have warned that a new sewer push in Suffolk is actually an effort by developers to squeeze more out of Long Island’s fragile landscape. Karl Grossman, who has watched county affairs closely for decades, recently wrote: “With sewers, constraints on development based on how much cesspools can handle disappear.” This should be a very big red flag.

From a purely ecological perspective, we wonder about the rationale for beginning with downtown Montauk in the first place. One might think that parts of Accabonac Harbor or Lake Montauk, other than around the heavily commercialized dock area — which have seen state-ordered shellfishing bans — would be higher priorities for protection. And there seems to be low regard in the study for smaller steps, though common in some other places, like incentives for individual septic system upgrades. From what we have seen so far, the consultant’s work has the markings of a giant make-work effort based on poorly explained assumptions that are some distance from East Hampton’s commonly held environmental priorities.

Before East Hampton Town moves forward with any major parts of this or other wastewater proposals, officials — and the public — will need to know exactly what the effects would be on building density and resultant demands for public services as well as what the ecological benefits will be. Doing the right thing as far as water quality is concerned must not look past a full appreciation of other values this community shares.

The remarkable thing about the online blowup last week over Uber “ride sharing” service’s decision to stop operating in East Hampton Town is that both Uber and local officials are trying to solve the same problem.

Before you laugh, take a moment to consider that Uber’s phenomenal growth and success have been built on providing an alternative to taxi service, which can be spotty, inadequate, chaotic, overpriced, and unsafe. Town officials, after hearing all manner of complaints from about three years ago on, sought to do something about spotty, inadequate, chaotic, overpriced, and unsafe taxi rides, which were assumed to be the fault of out-of-the-area drivers.

East Hampton’s solution eventually was to require licenses and background checks for drivers and cab companies, as well as a local physical address in order for them to operate. It was the latter requirement that prompted Uber to pull the plug on Friday; neither it nor many of its drivers are based in East Hampton. The town board had assumed that the new requirements would help cut down on complaints if not eliminate them entirely, as well as reports of cabbies sleeping in their cars during the day while taking up parking spaces that would otherwise be used by shoppers.

The defensibility of the town’s residency requirement is uncertain. We can think of no other example of a business blocked from operating here because it is based elsewhere. Contractors such as plumbers, builders, and electricians from UpIsland work in East Hampton every day, subject to town licensing laws. It is almost impossible to imagine a scenario in which the town would — or could — ban them, even if local tradespeople begged for it, the way some local taxi operators asked for help from the town.

A regional solution has been delayed as Suffolk officials try to implement a new law that would require all taxi drivers to have a county-issued license. This seems a step in the right direction. But whether, when the regulation becomes fully functional, Uber would consider its drivers subject to it is questionable; operating in 58 countries and with a market value estimated at $50 billion, it could well choose to fight instead.

Beyond all this, Uber and its competitors have clearly found a market for their services in East Hampton. An Uber spokesman interviewed in a television news report this week said that his company had provided service to 15,000 riders here last year. Town officials should acknowledge that some residents and visitors may want to use these services and for whatever reason avoid traditional cabs. An accommodation, one that does not improperly infringe on the rights of businesses no matter how unfamiliar, should be found.

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This has been changed to reflect a clarification provided by Uber regarding the number of riders using its service in the Town of East Hampton in 2014.

We found ourselves stewing last week about a worsening situation on the Napeague stretch of Montauk Highway as three of four restaurants there, the Lobster Roll, the Clam Bar, and Cyril’s Fish House, grow ever more popular. During Memorial Day weekend, parked vehicles narrowed the roadway, creating unsafe passage for motorists and dangers for pedestrians.

As usual, the tie-ups were the worst at Cyril’s. The stop-and-go traffic extended about a half-mile to the east after staff there illegally cordoned off the road shoulder with more than 100 feet of orange cones to make room for taxicabs. Stuck waiting to get through the chaos, we wondered, if not this, just what would it take for officials to impose some semblance of control?

But it’s not just about what happens on Napeague. Successive generations of East Hampton Town officials have proven unable to tamp down the mayhem from Montauk Point to Wainscott as the summertime crowds descend. As one letter-writer put it last week, over Memorial Day weekend “. . . you may have witnessed a town out of control.” All this raises the question of whether our local government, as configured today, can meet the real-world demands of a 21st-century resort community. As Ken Walles, the author of the aforementioned letter, said, “Town officials need to be strictly held accountable and should not allow the continued misuse of our cherished resource.” And that is being polite.

So the issue is to decide just what effective government for the Town of East Hampton would be. Elements would obviously include more police on the streets as well as ordinance enforcement officers, but it would also have to include a shift in attitude among officials away from what appears to be too much deference to money-making ventures. Those who sit in Town Hall must remember just whom they were elected to represent — and whom they were not.

Such a change in control would come with a cost, of course, but we believe that public support for shifting budget priorities — and perhaps even higher taxes — could be attained if a quieter, saner community was the guaranteed reward.

East Hampton was at one time derisively called the Land of No. It is well past time for some of that get-tough spirit to return

After a successful start buying watershed properties around Lake Montauk, the East Hampton Town Board is targeting land around Accabonac Harbor. Using money from the community preservation fund, the board and Department of Land Acquisition and Management have embarked on an ongoing effort to acquire and prevent development of a number of privately owned parcels in Springs that drain toward the harbor.

The importance of this initiative is underscored by a massive fish kill recently in parts of Peconic Bay, which has been attributed to runoff and other man-made causes. Concerns about water quality at Accabonac are not new; its southern reaches are off-limits to shellfishing in all but the winter months.

One aspect of recent town land buys, that some parcels have houses on them, has prompted some argument against acquisition. It is important to remember that in ecologically sensitive areas removing habitable structures is entirely in keeping with the goals of the community preservation fund law. And yes, the extra expense is justifiable and legal as long as the houses are removed.

To the town board, we say, buy them now while you still can.

A federal probe into Albany corruption has reached yet closer to Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo. A report this week from the International Business Times says that his administration has confirmed it is being investigated over ties between the state and Mr. Cuomo’s top campaign donor. This is the first time the ongoing examination into state graft has reached the governor’s office. Up to now, all the action has been at the State Legislature, with several elected officials under indictment, including former Assembly speaker Sheldon Silver, Dean Skelos, the former Senate majority leader, and Mr. Skelos’s son.

Mr. Cuomo has not been implicated in wrongdoing. However, his office refused the publication’s Freedom of Information Law request for documents related to transactions between Glenwood Management and the state, citing — improperly, as we see it — a blanket exemption for documents involved in a law enforcement investigation. In doing so, Mr. Cuomo’s aides said that the administration was indeed a target of United States Attorney Preet Bharara, which had been suspected.

As has been Mr. Cuomo’s tendency toward dubious interpretations of the law, he is wrong on this as well. The right to withhold public records in a case like this was intended to allow police and other official investigators latitude to do their work; it was not intended to stymie the work of the news media or block interested citizens from knowing about the function of their governments. Notably, Robert Freeman, who runs the New York State Committee on Open Government, called the Cuomo position “ridiculous and contrary to the intent of the Freedom of Information Law.”

This is not surprising, coming from a governor who infamously shut down the Moreland Commission anticorruption effort, declaring that because he had set it up, he had the right to pull the plug. Maybe Mr. Cuomo believes all this, but New Yorkers should not.

It’s about the money. That was the clear takeaway from the reaction at a May 15 hearing on additional limits on large-lot house sizes proposed by the East Hampton Village Board. In one of the more heated board meetings we have seen of late, representatives of property owners, as well as a few owners themselves, objected in the strongest terms to possible rules changes that would tighten the formulas governing how large a house can be on lots of an acre or more.

The reductions would be substantial. For example, under the village code right now a new house on a 2.5-acre property can be as large as 11,000 square feet; if the board were to approve the changes only an 8,400-square-foot house would be allowed. All other things being equal, an 11,000-square-foot house is going to sell for a whole lot more than an 8,400-square-foot one, hence the howling.

The East Hampton Village Board, which showed signs of capitulating amid the onslaught, ominously keeping the record open for additional comments, should hang tough. Protecting the village’s charm and character must come first; accommodating billionaires and real estate investors must be of somewhat lower priority. That the proposal has earned the support of the Ladies Village Improvement Society, concerned as ever about our sense of place, is notable. Its view should not be discounted hastily.

But there is more. One of the most ludicrous statements to come from the phalanx of opponents at the hearing was from a paid consultant who said that large houses do not necessarily have an impact. This is patently false; the bigger the property, the bigger the demands for staff, maintenance, resources such as water, and the greater its ecological footprint in terms of waste and emissions. Consider the massive “trade parade” traffic jams, largely created by workers building, renovating, or simply tending the Hamptons’ large houses. Think, too, of the housing crisis now coming into sharp focus. There is certainly a relationship between the needs of those who cater to the rich and the difficulty mom-and-pop businesses have paying employees enough to live in the area. There is a significant problem here and it can only be exacerbated by ever-greater residential construction.

An interesting parallel can be found on Martha’s Vineyard. The Massachusetts island has had to cope with many of the same issues East Hampton and its neighbors are now experiencing. There, the Martha’s Vineyard Commission, a powerful planning agency covering the island’s six townships, operates on a basic understanding that some projects are so big that they can have a regional impact. Most often, the commission studies subdivision proposals and the like, but from time to time it has ruled on large single-house residential projects as well. If big projects can be said to have a cumulative effect there, why not here?

East Hampton Village officials should not believe the hype. As for threats of litigation, it should be remembered that special interest lawsuits are often inevitable when officials stand up for the common good. Well-crafted limits on residential projects have a long history here, will prevail in court, and should be fully supported.

After years of frustration, open-government advocates in New York State may have reason for optimism. A bill before the Legislature co-sponsored by Assemblyman Fred W. Thiele Jr. could revolutionize the way the Open Meetings and Freedom of Information Laws are enforced. As things stand now, officials do not face any risk if they do not comply with the laws, and the public and news media have no recourse but to bring expensive lawsuits when information or access is denied. Changes are overdue.

Traditionally, the state’s rules on what the public can know are based on an assumption of openness. However, this has always been open to interpretation, and, since the laws were essentially toothless, with no penalties for noncompliance, the courts were the only alternative. The proposed Integrity in Government Act would change that by giving enforcement powers to the existing New York Committee on Open Government.

It would work like this: The committee would be able to mediate complaints about questionable closed-door meetings and officials’ refusals to provide documents. If that process failed to produce results, the committee could compel the release of records. And, what is most important, the act would for the first time allow fines of up to $1,000 for officials who break the Open Meetings Law by holding improper “executive sessions” or violate Freedom of Information Law requirements by withholding documents or failing to respond in a timely manner.

The chance of being fined, not to overlook publicly embarrassed, for violations of these laws would remind officials, first and foremost, that they are public servants and that the public’s right to know is paramount

On the eve of Memorial Day weekend, when for many of us on the East End distractions and frustrations abound, we would do well to think of those for whom the holiday was intended — the many servicemen and women lost in the country’s armed conflicts. But it should also be a time for thoughts closer to home — of community, culture, and the environment, and what we can do by way of support.

Many service organizations here have dedicated members, but those who are perhaps the most critical, who can touch people at all stages of life, are our emergency medical providers. These are the unsung heroes of our community, who undertake hundreds or more hours of training, then leave jobs or warm beds at a moment’s notice when duty calls. Paid paramedics have been added to the roster of most local fire departments to help meet the ever-increasing number of calls and deal with the worst cases, yet the ordinary volunteers form the backbone of the ambulance companies and associations. Helping them help us can take several forms, including donating to fund-raisers and keeping alert while on the roads to their flashing dash lights and pulling our vehicles over to allow them to pass. More recruits are always welcomed. Just ask.

Helping ambulance squads can mean also being smarter about calls. Too often, volunteers say, people call 911 for minor injuries or when someone else is available to take a patient to the hospital. Measures of a true emergency include threats to life or limb, a sense that a patient’s condition could worsen, and if moving a patient without skilled assistance might cause harm. Lists of symptoms to watch for can be found online, and they include loss of breath or consciousness; sudden dizziness, severe headache, weakness, or change in vision; neck or back injuries, and severe bleeding. When in doubt, call 911, advocates say, but thinking first if a situation is a true emergency is important, especially if another call comes in about a victim in worse shape.

On a lighter note, summer here means that all our cultural institutions open their doors. These include charming, little known places, for example, the Eastville Historical Society’s Heritage House, and the heavy hitters, such as the Parrish Art Museum and Guild Hall. Visiting at least one will enrich your season, provide some surprises, and help give the organizations a dose of support.

As to the world around us, the South Fork would surely lose its luster without its soft sand beaches, woodlands, and protected creeks and harbors. Finding time for a walk or two amid the frenzy of friends, barbecues, benefits, and what have you can provide a sense of calm and respite that will last long after the outing is done and the season changes. Consider joining one of the several environmental groups, museums, or trail-hiking clubs. Their modest fees help fund efforts to keep nature at the top of public officials’ minds.

We live in a wonderful place; we really do. As the madness of yet another season-starter looms, think about all the East End has to offer and how you can give back — and get far more in return.