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.

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.

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.

We hesitate to trot into the woods, so to speak, on the issue of deer, a subject that generates strong and conflicting emotions. Nevertheless, comment must be made about a pending change in state law that would allow weekend hunting here for deer in January.

Few reasonable people here disagree with the observation that there are far more deer than there used to be within East Hampton Town and Village limits. Each fall, dozens of vehicles and deer come into expensive, and for the deer, often-fatal contact on the roads. Meanwhile, residents and visitors suffer from a host of tick-borne diseases, the rise of which has, at least in part, been linked to the growth of the deer population.

Where once you could garden and raise fruit trees on open lots, our charming East End now resembles a gulag, with high wire fences lining roads and house lots, all intended to keep the four-footed marauders at bay.

Among the steps officials have considered to control the deer is the expansion of recreational hunting in January to include Saturday and Sunday, and to allow bow hunters as close as 150 feet from houses and other structures. While the bow-hunting change does not seem dangerous — though the sport is said to result in more injured deer — weekend firearms hunting is something that does not sit right.

For a place in which Saturdays and Sundays are pretty much the whole outdoor enchilada in winter, making the woods effectively off-limits for most people, even for part of the year, is unwise. Consider for a moment the various community organizations that organize guided trail walks more or less year-round.

Though hunting is a long established tradition here, it cannot provide the reduction of the deer population that is warranted. The so-called four-poster insecticide stations intended to kill ticks do not resolve all the problems that too many deer create, and proposed sterilization is an unproven method that would be very expensive.

Given the emotional nature of the debate, it is not surprising that officials would tiptoe around the matter. The day will come, however, when they have to admit that these half-measures have not worked and in the end recognize that a carefully managed effort by professional sharpshooters is necessary if meaningful and humane reduction of the deer population is to be realized. The sooner, the better.

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.

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.

That the state of protections for the environment is broken is obvious from a recent notice from the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation on the proposed Army Corps of Engineers project to bolster the downtown Montauk oceanfront.

The precarious concern for the natural world becomes clear in a single line, in which the D.E.C. declares that the 3,100-foot-long sandbag seawall will not have a significant effect. This came in the form of a “negative declaration” under the State Environmental Quality Review Act, once the gold standard of serious analysis. Comments on a state permit, which is necessary for the work to proceed, will be accepted in writing at the D.E.C.’s Stony Brook office until Dec. 19.

The numbers are staggering. Approximately 14,200 five-and-a-half-foot-long permeable fabric bags are to be used. They are to be filled with 51,000 cubic yards of material from an unspecified inland sand mine and covered with 20,000 yards of actual beach sand stockpiled during the excavation for the seawall itself. You might call it icing on the sandbag cake. In addition, a new beach berm is to be built 50 feet seaward of what is today the water’s edge. What the berm will be constructed of remains unclear. And what happens when the bags inevitably are exposed in a storm and are torn apart, spilling their less-desirable contents, no one will say.

This is a giant project, one that will by definition affect nearby properties, sea life, and birds, as well as beachgoers. To say it is not significant is a dangerous mistake, abetted, one can assume, by the fact that federal, and not local, money will pay for the work. Underscoring our belief that this type of work absolutely does have an environmental cost, a Suffolk Supreme Court justice recently ruled that the Village of East Hampton was wrong when it declared a similar, if much, much smaller, erosion-response project at Georgica Beach to have been without significant impact. This irony is worth keeping in mind when the day comes that the Montauk fix turns into a disaster.

To be sure, doing nothing about the increasingly threatened first row of motels and residences in downtown Montauk would have an environmental effect as a cascade of demolished buildings eventually plunged into the ocean. But the claim by the D.E.C., Army Corps, and others that so massive an attempt to protect them will have no impact is not credible.

What emerges is a disturbing picture of several overlapping bureaucracies seeking to save structures without fully studying the consequences. We are sorry that the East Hampton Town Board has been unable to muster the foresight, and courage, to insist that such study be undertaken, but perhaps that would have been too much to expect under the pressure to do something. We wonder what it will take to get the state back in the environmental protection business when it comes to coastal projects.

A homeowner sees her house threatened by erosion, and public officials do what they can to help. Not the newest story, but the most recent example of this narrative comes with an interesting twist.

As it turns out, a rapidly shrinking lot on Shore Road at Lazy Point belongs to the East Hampton Town Trustees, while the house on it belongs to someone who leases the site for a modest fee. This arrangement, while unusual elsewhere in town, is the norm at Lazy Point, where an occasional near-million-dollar purchase takes place on what is actually leased public land.

At a recent meeting the trustees all but committed to helping Susan Knobel save her house by allowing her to move it to a vacant parcel nearby. This is a feel-good story, for sure, but it is doubtful that it is sound policy or even legal.

It seems almost impossible to believe that the trustees could give valuable assets, in this case land leases, to individuals of their choosing. Public agencies, a class to which the trustees certainly belong, must follow certain proscribed procedures when handling real estate and any other disbursements. For a transaction like this to be fair, it would have to be open to public, competitive bidding, as we understand it. For example, East Hampton Village officials not too long ago realized this in connection with the Sea Spray Cottages and instituted a system for prospective tenants in keeping with state rules.

Further, at a time when the trustees should be concerned about water pollution and moving lease-holders away from fragile areas, they appear ready to give Ms. Knobel another waterfront lot. This, as one trustee pointed out, makes little sense. Are there other trustee plots in less endangered areas? It didn’t come up. Heck, there are plenty of other taxpayers and business owners facing severe erosion in East Hampton Town; you do not see other government agencies falling all over themselves to provide them with new sites.

Though there have been previous instances of a trustee lessee swapping one lot for another, that does not make this plan right — or in the community’s best interest. In their rush to do good for a neighbor, the trustees might be violating the law and are certainly moving in the wrong direction on habitat protection and coastal retreat.

Whether they see it or not, the trustees have before them now a not-insignificant opportunity to lead by example. Erosion exacerbated by sea level rise brought on by human-driven climate change is a fact of life for East Hampton and much of the rest of the globe, and the truestees should be, as stewards of the beaches and of most town waterways, at the forefront of a reasoned response. What is called for now is their dispassionate decision-making that responds to real-world conditions, not personal sympathies and gauzy notions of tradition. Responding to a shifting shoreline does not mean swapping one threatened site for one that will likely be in danger in the not-too-distant future.

An immediate reconsideration is warranted.