Kathleen Cunningham’s appointment to the East Hampton Town Planning Board last week was notable in one respect that has drawn little notice. By replacing a male board member who moved away, she became the third woman on the seven-member panel. This makes the planning board the exception to the rule in East Hampton Town, where among the boards whose composition is determined by town board vote, men occupy more than three-quarters of the seats. And among all the boards, the vast majority are white and non-Latino.

According to rosters posted on the town’s website, there are 47 men on the various appointed boards and 15 women. Women do not hold the majority of any of them, and they are sharply outnumbered nearly everywhere except on the ethics committee. On both the architectural review board and the zoning board of appeals there is one woman and four men. And on the combined airport committees men exceed women 18 to 3.

Elected boards are different. The five-member town board, chosen by voters in staggered elections, includes two women. The board of assessors is made up of two women and one man. And while a woman, Diane McNally, is the presiding officer of the East Hampton Town Trustees, it drifts back toward the general trend with six men and three women.

It is hard to do more than speculate about why the unequal distribution of the sexes in government is the norm; perhaps it has more to do with the general culture than anything else. The United States Congress, which is about 80-percent male, is worse than East Hampton Town in this regard. With women making up slightly more than half the population, they should be better represented among all the country’s elected and appointed bodies, as should people of color and of a broader range of ethnicities.

Offshore wind power, which until quite recently seemed to be coming to the Northeast, hit a stumbling block in the past few months. First, in mid-December, the Long Island Power Authority rejected a plan for turbines in the waters about 30 miles east of Montauk. Then, early this month, the utilities that would have bought power from a proposed $2.5 billion project being readied for Nantucket Sound by a firm called Cape Wind backed away, citing missed deadlines by the developer.

LIPA’s board decision has a potentially direct impact on East Hampton Town, which has vowed to get 100 percent of its electricity from renewable sources by 2020. More broadly, the projects were seen as bellwethers for an improved long-term energy strategy for the region — and the country. In wind’s place, LIPA has said it will develop solar generation plants, but at most, it said, these will produce about half of the 280 megawatts of clean energy it had once set as a goal.

Some powerful people funded by fossil fuel interests, such as David Koch, have celebrated the apparent end of Cape Wind’s Nantucket Sound effort. They say this represents a break for ratepayers and a triumph of the free market. Looked at from another perspective it seems that those who tied up the project in the courts can claim the real victory.

In the 12 years since its Nantucket Sound proposal, Cape Wind has been buffeted by more than two dozen lawsuits. These were so frequent that a fed-up federal judge wrote in May that the opponents were engaged in “a vexatious abuse of the democratic process” by continuing to seek to overturn decisions by the Massachusetts governor, Legislature, public agencies, and other courts.

Coal-burning electric plants remain the largest source of greenhouse gas emissions in the United States. Utilities operate with government oversight to one degree or another, and officials are going to have to force them to adapt to alternatives that may be more costly but are essential, including wind.

A progressive energy future will require leadership and incentives from Washington in the form of tax credits to allow alternatives to compete with cheaper, heavily subsidized oil and coal.

The bottom line is that wind is a clean source that can provide a large part of the country’s needed electrical generation, and it must be allowed to do so.

News last month that the Springs School Board was beginning to work toward an overdue building project came as no surprise. Nor was the estimated cost of expansion of the district’s buildings, as much as $20 million depending on the options selected, surprising.

The district has been struggling for years to educate far more students than its classrooms can handle — and doing a truly commendable job. The school’s year-in, year-out student opera, which will be seen at the John Drew Theater next week, is but one example of a vibrant, can-do institution. Parent buy-in is terrific as well, with outstanding fund-raising efforts and classroom visits by artists among their contributions.

The problem is hardly one of Springs’s own making. By dint of ill-thought early zoning and East Hampton Town’s decade-plus failure to control group houses, parts of the hamlet add up to an overburdened bedroom community for people who work in the trades. But at the same time it is home to a great number of retired people, as well as weekenders and others whose awareness of the school and its needs may extend only as far as their tax bills.

Making things more difficult, the Springs School District has suffered financially because town officials have delayed, and delayed again, a state mandate for a full property reassessment. This appears to have resulted in the district being essentially cut off from the deeper sources of potential funding that would otherwise be found among the taxpayers who own houses along the hamlet’s miles of now highly desired waterfront. There is tons of value there, money that could help pay for the expansion, teachers, and other educational costs, but it is all but untouchable until someone in Town Hall steps up.

Failing that, any number of Springs taxpayers, already feeling put upon, can be expected to howl about paying for school expansion. Consider the recent brouhaha over Town Hall’s rocky effort at regulating large commercial vehicles parking overnight in residential neighborhoods. Why should Springs bear the brunt, people opposed to the trucks ask. This question may well be heard again, with regard to the Springs School’s student population, as plans begin to solidify for its next big undertaking.

Meanwhile, the Wainscott School Board continues its reprehensible opposition to a modest affordable housing project that could bring in a handful of new students. And in East Hampton, a school board member recently intimated that the district was somehow less than absolutely obligated to cover the full cost of educating children from an existing low-income complex.

Solving the disparities between hamlets and school districts must come from above, in the form of state guidance toward consolidation and the East Hampton Town Board grabbing the bully pulpit. A super-district made up of all of the town’s tax base would spread the financial burden of the Springs expansion, as well as future costs in Springs and elsewhere, more equitably.

In the absence of a regional authority, narrow interests can be dominant (witness Wainscott). Providing a good public education in adequate surroundings is an obligation that we all share as Americans. The cost of seeing that we live up to that obligation must similarly be a collective responsibility in as equitable a way as possible.

The East Hampton Village Board should go forward with the revision of its 10-year-old outdoor lighting rules despite an 11th-plus-hour ruffle. Excessive nighttime illumination is both an annoyance and an affront to a community that is proud of its ambience. The aspect of the proposal that some would like eliminated is the regulation of wasteful and unnecessary landscape lighting.

Of all the inane practices, pointing spotlights up into one’s trees strikes us as among the silliest, but it is also a serious matter. Electrical power generation is a major source of the greenhouse gas emissions that contribute to global warming.

It would be a substantial contradiction for a village that took an early and progressive stand against waste by banning thin, single-use plastic shopping bags to encourage this practice. Either the health of the planet matters or it does not. A homeowner’s ability to gaze up into his or her trees while sitting on a patio or walking in or out of a house is not worth throwing out a perfectly reasonable code change.

The village board is to return to the issue next Thursday, continuing a hearing on an update to the lighting code which was reviewed by the village design review board, among others. It seeks to reduce the spilling of light beyond property lines, as well as reduce the glare that can make finding one’s way at night difficult.

The board should approve the changes and tell those who prefer the amber-hazed hues of suburban nocturnal gloom to a sky full of stars that the nights here should remain dark.

Those trees? We’ll look at them in the morning.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.