Officials in the East End towns and villages are taking a new look at water pollution and suggesting that a regional approach might be the solution. They have proposed seeking as much as $100 million from the state for rebates on private septic systems or tax credits, acknowledging that environmental damage from failed or inadequate systems is a problem that spans municipal borders.

There have been other efforts too, and they are welcome. Suffolk County has initiated a test of new and improved nitrogen-removal units for home effluent. East Hampton Town is deep into a wastewater study of its own. The Town of Southampton has been an early leader, helping secure $2 million for a Stony Brook University program to develop new, effective wastewater systems.

The main problem with household and commercial wastewater, as well as fertilizer runoff, is its elevated nitrogen and phosphorus content. Both are essential elements, but when levels are too high, the environmental consequences are significant. They can cause harmful algae blooms, like those linked to shellfish collapses in the Peconic Estuary, and bacteria that can cause illness in humans.

Nitrogen is also seen as a leading cause of so-called dead zones, coastal areas where oxygen levels are so low that almost nothing can survive. This is known as hypoxia, and it has been identified as a culprit in the nearly complete loss of the essential eelgrass habitat in most East End bays and harbors. Perhaps less well understood, but of potentially massive impact, are changes in the oceans’ nitrogen cycle, which have the potential to alter the marine environment on a global scale. We are, in short, killing the seas with every flush.

Enhanced treatment of wastewater is seen as the solution. But improved septic systems can be prohibitively expensive for homeowners, and competing demands for funding are a constant for the operators of municipal sewage treatment plants. A recent study in East Hampton Town alone found at least 1,700 individual septic systems in need of correction and that number is likely to climb when examination of additional watershed properties is completed. The cost to retrofit a single private system to curb nitrogen and phosphorus could be as much as $40,000, according to the study’s author.

One idea for dealing with wastewater pollution has been to take money from the community preservation fund. As we have argued before, this should be a last resort. History has shown that when public officials begin to dip into dedicated funds, they will seek to raid them again and again for all manner of purposes. Think of former East Hampton Town Supervisor Bill McGintee’s bleeding of the C.P.F. to secretly balance the town’s budget, and Suffolk Executive Steve Bellone’s refusal to repay money owed to the county’s drinking water protection program.

The 2-percent C.P.F. tax on real estate transactions should remain out of bounds, and alternate funding found. Tapping the preservation fund for septic system rebates, which could have the unintended effect of increasing residential density by reducing groundwater contamination on individual sites, would be a net loss for the region. On the flip side, using C.P.F. money to buy land and prevent development in important watersheds, as East Hampton has done around Lake Montauk, for example, is the right approach.

Because East Hampton’s wastewater consultant also sells name-brand septic upgrade equipment, we have to wonder about his advice against hoping for money from state or federal sources to fight water pollution. On the contrary, while East End town and village officials should seek to fund interim work at home, we believe a collective effort to obtain state and federal funding is warranted.

East Hampton Town will soon undertake an in-depth study of this region’s precarious Atlantic Coast and how it can better manage risk to property and environment protection. But the real question is whether, when the work is done, it will lead to meaningful change.

It is not like these questions are new; the United States Army Corps of Engineers has been trying to figure out what to do about eastern Long Island for more than 50 years, and the town itself completed a decade-long process that led to the adoption in 1999 of a Local Waterfront Revitalization Program (although it took another seven years to be approved by state and federal agencies). But no one has ever really answered the hard questions brought forward by sea level rise, and Hurricanes Irene and Sandy only increased the sense of urgency.

It is clear that existing regulations are not adequate. Following Sandy, town officials gave highly questionable “emergency” permission for erosion-response projects, some for prohibited permanent, or “hard,” structures. The looming Army Corps fortification of downtown Montauk comes right up to the line between what is permissible and what is not, and it binds the town and county to costly annual maintenance at a dollar figure that cannot accurately be anticipated, as well as unknown millions more for the project’s eventual removal.

Meanwhile, private construction in danger zones continues, which will only add to the expense when the bills come in for future publicly funded rescue efforts. Though there are some bright spots, such as a planned buyout of low-lying properties on Lazy Point in Amagansett, the overriding status quo can fairly be said to show that our collective head is still buried in the sand.

Ideally, the $500,000 study about to get under way will address the future of the coastal portons of East Hampton Town and provide clear arguments for retreat, where it is called for. We have been down this road before, however, notably when the town took over from the state after adopting its own coastal hazard policy. The rub will be if the current town board and those that follow will be able to heed the study’s advice.

History suggests that nothing short of a total disaster will really change how those who live here think about our relationship with the coast, but this new initiative provides a glimmer of hope.

It was disheartening last week to learn of the Sag Harbor School Board’s decision to end video recordings for local public television broadcast and on-demand viewing of the public comment portion of its meetings.

According to an account in The Sag Harbor Express, the board, by a 4-to-3 vote, opted to allow recording only of matters on the board’s agenda, cutting off the cameras when anyone in the audience stands up to speak on matters of their concern. The reason offered was that someone might say something that, if replayed, could get the board in legal hot water. That, of course, is utter nonsense: Elected boards have an almost zero chance of losing a lawsuit for anything said during a meeting regardless of how off-base it may be. We can’t help but wonder what might be next — failing to keep accurate records of what the public has to say or banning reporters?

If there is any doubt about the motivation behind this it is dispelled by proponents of the change, who said the district’s attorney had advised them to stop recording meetings altogether. From that, one can conclude that the real reason some members of the school board want to cut off public access to information is to reduce the chances that something controversial or embarrassing gets noticed or repeated.

The liability issue is a smokescreen to disguise the fact that at least a majority of the board would like to do the public’s business without the public watching. This is a dreadful idea that should not be allowed to spread.

A battle in Sagaponack about what should and should not be allowed on reserved farmland has pitted a developer against village officials. Although on first look it appears a very localized matter, it points to a greater and evolving problem.

Years ago, when the East End towns and Suffolk County first began buying up building rights on good-quality agricultural land or seeking to get these properties into reserves through the subdivision process, the belief was that by putting some money into the right hands and enacting strict limits, farming would be assured in perpetuity. What the well-meaning officials did not foresee was the continuing boom in real estate prices and the desire of the well-to-do for expansive lawns or for polo grounds or horse stables, which are generally permissible on these reserves.

In the Sagaponack example, as reported in The Southampton Press, a developer planning three houses had an irrigation system installed at considerable expense on an adjacent 10.5-acre plot in an agricultural easement, which apparently would have precluded its use as a lawn. Unfortunately nothing in the easement, or many like it elsewhere, requires that the land be actually used for crop production. So today we see parcels that were once considered saved are now little more than an amenity for someone’s weekend palace.

Groups, especially the Peconic Land Trust, have been pointing this out for some time. The trust has begun to actively recommended that when governments acquire rights to productive land, they pay enough to obtain assurances that it will always be available for real farming. Looking back at previous land deals and easements similar to the disputed one in Sagaponack, the trust says money could be used selectively to offer additional payments to landowners for expanded rights with food production the ultimate goal.

Like much of the country, the East End is experiencing a welcome renaissance in farming, with jobs being created, and good, healthy, local food ending up on residents’ tables. More can be done to see that prime and productive land remains under the plow, and officials should be eager to see that it always does.

Week in, week out, State Assemblyman Fred W. Thiele Jr.’s office labors on with a gasoline price survey. With the Long Island average price for regular unleaded of $2.88 a gallon now, Mr. Thiele’s most recent report noted that the average price on the South Fork on Friday west of Amagansett was 11 cents higher. In Amagansett and Montauk, however, gas was a mind-boggling $3.39, or 51 cents more. As if to rub salt in our wounds, North Fork stations were well below the regional average, at about $2.69. All of this was, Mr. Thiele said, further and ongoing evidence of consumer-unfriendly zone pricing by fuel distributors.

Okay, so the prices of a lot of things are more expensive out here than they need to be, like deli sandwiches, but you can’t make a gallon of gasoline at home the same way you can pack a lunch. That’s why this matters. Gas, like heating oil and electricity, is an essential component of modern life whether we like it or not. It would be nice if gas station owners skipped the bull about higher delivery costs and other malarkey and stopped taking advantage of an all-but-captive market. Those lucky enough to have reason to head to Hampton Bays, for example, can fuel up at a significant savings of as much as $8 to fill a 20-gallon tank.

Back in June, the Assembly passed a bill that Mr. Thiele sponsored following a recommendation from Attorney General Eric T. Schneiderman that would outlaw zone pricing. The bill now sits with the Senate Rules Committee, apparently bottled up because of opposition from major oil companies.

It is imperative that the Senate leadership allow a vote. The rule might not solve all the issues that cause higher gas prices here, but it would send a message that someone was watching.

Without all that much fanfare and amid only perfunctory industry push-back the town boards in East Hampton and Southampton have just set in motion the rapid phase-out of thin plastic shopping bags of the sort used at supermarkets and convenience stores. Though some of these bags are made of compounds that can be readily recycled locally, many end up in the trash almost as soon as they are emptied of their contents.

News accounts put the current value of waste plastic bags at less than $5 a ton, a price at which it is not worth it to deal with these notoriously hard-to-handle items. As such, they are a poster child for waste and rightly the target of bans, like the one that has been in place since 2011 in East Hampton Village, and followed voluntarily elsewhere, notably at Cirillo’s I.G.A. market in Amagansett.

Bag manufacturers, when confronting the bag-ban movement, have repeatedly asserted that it takes as much if not more energy and natural resources to make alternatives, such as paper bags. Independent reactions to this claim vary. But even if it were true, it would be beside the point. Single-use bags are a significant contributor to litter, can harm wildlife, are the second most prevalent form of floating debris in the world’s oceans after cigarette butts, and help swell landfills when disposed on shore. On the plus side, where they are banned it seems that the number of people who take their own reusable shopping bags with them to the markets increase notably — something that we have observed here and that is borne out in studies elsewhere. It is in this regard that bag bans may have the most value.

More than just plastic bags, it seems that we Americans need to look again at our willingness to tolerate the degree of solid waste we produce. Our cultural acceptance of disposable and excessive packaging is what is really at fault, not any single example of what we throw away. It is the reflexive reaction of store clerks who put a sandwich that is about to be eaten into yet another bag. It is the giant shippers such as Amazon that allow small items to leave its warehouses swimming in far-too-big cardboard boxes. It is our unwillingness to walk a short distance to do ordinary errands. It is our failure to build adequate bike lanes on our roads. It is our obsession with too-big houses and oversized cars and the unnecessary energy they consume. If banning plastic bags can get us to think about the rest of it, so much the better.

A proposed revision to the East Hampton Town Code regarding large vehicles parked on house lots should be set aside to allow officials time to address the real issue: the entrenched and growing commercial use of residentially zoned property.

The parking draft is intended to provide some sense of order to what has become unsightly disorder in some parts of town as work trucks, large trailers, and other vehicles are left, mostly overnight, within view of neighbors. The new law would allow some, prohibit others, and exempt some offending vehicles that already are kept at owners’ residences. The proposal is well intentioned but misses the mark.

On one hand the town board appears ready to get tough on one form of money-making, noisy helicopters going in and out of East Hampton Airport. Yet at the same time, the town and to a less frequent extent the Village of East Hampton have ignored their codes about what can and cannot go on on residential lots. This may be because it is far easier to enforce parking rules than to ask business owners to find other locations for their operations.

Commercial uses on sites zoned for houses alone have popped up from one end of town to the other. Some operations include loud machines and road-destroying trucks while others have been allowed to expand without anyone in Town Hall lifting a finger until public complaints reach the point where they cannot be ignored. This is unfair to the thousands of law-abiding folks who ask little more than the quiet enjoyment of their houses and backyards, be they year-rounders or part-timers.

This is a moment when town board members have an opportunity to consider in whose interest they should act. The answer is that the board must consider the community as a whole, and certainly not those who try to profit from improper activities, or worse, from new rules that would protect what should not have been allowed in the first place.

As we have said in the past, the town and village should focus on illegal uses of residential properties, be they landscapers’ staging areas, contractors’ workshops, or too-busy Airbnb rentals. Sorting out what kind of vehicle should park where is, at best, secondary as long as what is taking place meets the letter of the law.

Yes, government should be sympathetic to the needs of working people and commercial enterprises, but that cannot come at the expense of other residents and attractive neighborhoods.

The end of the year brings a plea from charities and nonprofits for donations, and as people really think about giving, it is worth remembering the organizations that do good but may not always be at the top of the list.

Statistics suggest many Americans could do more — and make a big difference for very little out of pocket. According to an analysis of Internal Revenue Service data, the amount of money given by people whose annual incomes were more than $200,000 has declined while donations from low and middle-income people grew dramatically in recent years. Experts say that as little as a 1-percent increase by high-earners would pay huge dividends for the nation’s neediest causes, as much as doubling the total.

For 2014 tax purposes, donations must be postmarked or sent electronically before midnight on the last day of the year. Nonprofits say there is an uptick in giving in December, but we should remember that the need — and the opportunity to help — does not expire when the ball drops in Times Square.

East Hampton Town Supervisor Larry Cantwell and the Town Hall legal team are on the right track in looking at how to amend town law to head off further conversions of hotels and motels into hybrids that include nightclubs and accommodations. According to the town, there are some 70 hotels here whose owners might someday seek to expand into the lucrative bar trade, which could create traffic, crowds, noise, litter, and, in some cases, water pollution problems, which have already been the result.

In one sense, a new law should not be needed since the rules already in place would seem to have precluded changes of the scale seen, for example, when Montauk’s 30-something-room Ronjo Motel morphed into the 300-plus person Montauk Beach House and pool club. The thing is, without very specific, hardline prohibitions, almost anything is possible, depending on who is setting the tone on Pantigo Road. Details on the changes are yet to be finalized, but, in concept, it is an idea well worth supporting.

Looking back at the year just ended provides insight into what might be called the to-do list for local officials, as well as an indication of successes worth celebrating.

East Hampton Town government has in just 12 months experienced a dramatic turnaround. The accomplishments are both procedural, such as ending the anti-open government practice of last-minute “walk-on” resolutions by the town board, and practical, such as the closing of the money-losing Springs-Fireplace Road sewage processing site. Other big steps have been the beginning of buyouts of flood-prone and watershed properties, halting a massive luxury condominium project planned for Amagansett, passing new limits on commercial gatherings, and continuing sound budget practices.

There is much more to be done, however. On the 2015 agenda are such high-priority concerns as sea level rise, groundwater protection, affordable housing, airport noise, and mental health services for the young and the poor. Nuts-and-bolts needs include better regulation of taxis and so-called ride-sharing services (such as Uber and Lyft), road repairs and bike lanes, closing a deal to preserve the East Deck property in Montauk, resolving the PSEG utility pole debacle, assuring access to farmland for farmers, and dealing with deer, “formula” stores, and the commercial use of residential properties.

Taking the bully pulpit, the town board needs to do more to speed school consolidation, restore the use of the state-mandated environmental quality review procedure known as SEQRA, and broker a deal among the various agencies for a better first-responder system for emergency medical calls.

The town board also needs to do more where there has been little progress. This includes cultivating better diversity among the members of appointed boards, clamping down on illegal rentals and excessive vacation-house turnover, saving Wainscott from its current and too-permissive highway business zoning, and doing something about the appalling charcoal messes left even deep into the fall months by beach bonfires.

The East Hampton Town Board has much to be proud of in 2014. We raise a toast to its members, and wish them continued energy and the best of luck in the year to come.