It may be a minor matter in the scheme of things, but the continued apparent refusal of the East Hampton Town Ordinance Enforcement Department — and by extension, the town board — to address even simple code violations sends a message, intentionally or not, that as long as what you do is in the interest of making money, the powers-that-be will look the other way.

All in all, at the beginning of the 2014 high season this appears little better than it was in the party-a-go-go Wilkinson years. From the least consequential to the most important, the way regulations are applied was supposed to shift with new leadership in Town Hall. However, if changes are under way, they are coming too slowly. What is puzzling and disappointing is that even the most obvious violations are ignored.

Take the town’s sign law, for example. Illegal, street-side “sandwich boards” have proliferated, as have internally illuminated “open” signs and the like. Even prohibited off-premises commercial come-ons, like one for a business co-owned by a member of the town planning board, are allowed to remain day after day in plain view.

As Julia Prince, a former town councilwoman and, before that, a code enforcement officer, once told us, this kind of violation is the easiest to deal with. Most of the time, business operators are unaware of the rules, and a simple phone call is all it takes to correct the problem. Why this isn’t done is really not known; the answers our reporters have received have been less than illuminating. Maybe it comes down to inadequate staffing on the town’s part — or maybe it is just a lack of will. No one has ever been able to figure it out. On the other hand, if a new consensus is emerging about what should be permitted, regulations should be changed.

On bigger matters, the town’s record of late also has been a disappointment. We wonder how, for example, the Memory Motel in Montauk was able to fence off a portion of its parking lot, add tables, and put in an outdoor bar complete with lights and beer taps. And, elsewhere in Montauk, why does anyone have to put up with thundering live bands or D.J.s at all hours at, among other places,  the Sloppy Tuna, Solé East, and the Montauk Beach House? In whose interests are town officials who allow such things really working? Not residents', by the looks of it.

What about the improper conversion of residences to businesses? And are the mountains of trash at beach garbage cans at the end of the day something we should just accept? Sure, overcrowded houses and excessive rental turnover might be more difficult to handle, but they, too, could be better reined in.

Officials should not need to be reminded that their first duty is to protect the interests of ordinary taxpayers and citizens; everything else should be relegated to the back of the line. Problems with code enforcement are not new, but a little more push on the most visible transgressions would send a long overdue signal that Town Hall is finally getting serious.

The East Hampton Village Police Department has dipped a nightstick, so to speak, into social media, joining Twitter a while back and posting alerts about incoming weather and the like. One recent tweet, as the 140-maximum-character messages are known, got our attention. In its entirely, it read: “Traffic Hint: Mid day or afternoon heading toward Main Street? Avoid Newtown Lane = Gridlock.”

Years ago, if we recall, a plan was drawn up that would have closed Newtown Lane to vehicles from about Main Street to the middle school. This was in a more idealistic age, perhaps, one in which it was thought that people might actually get out of their cars and stroll along a verdant median, enjoying an ice cream cone or reading a newspaper from the comfort of a park bench.

These days, you might practically be able to leaf through your paper while sitting behind the wheel as the weekend line of vehicles creeps up Newtown toward the train station, not that this is advised. Avoidance, as the village police’s Twitter voice says, is just about the only strategy left.

A lot has been heard at East Hampton Town Hall meetings lately about adding to local laws to meet a new, more complicated reality, but not enough attention has been given to the lapses among those who are supposed to see that existing rules are enforced. That appears to be changing. In a hearing this evening, the town board will take public opinion on expanding the roster of those who can, in some cases, issue summonses for violations and stop-work orders.

The problem has been that the Ordinance Enforcement Department, whose chief, Betsy Bambrick, doubles as the town’s lead animal control officer, has proven not to be up to the task or perhaps is just unwilling to do the job for some reason. Under her lax leadership, obvious violations, including some that are simple to deal with, have not been corrected. A shared sense is that, dating back some years, she and her subordinates have responded only to complaints from the public; they do not look for potential violations and, what’s worse, they flat-out ignore even those in front of their noses. Some of this may be the result of do-nothing pressure during the Wilkinson-Quigley years, but, to be fair, complaints about enforcement go back at least to the 1990s.

This is not to say that the town code is adequate in all respects. Many of its key quality-of-life provisions are outdated or contradictory or both. Consider one example in the news this week, that of short-term rentals, on which the law is entirely inadequate. On the one hand, East Hampton property owners are forbidden from renting out their houses for fewer than 14 days more than twice in any six-month period. On the other hand, it is perfectly okay with officials for the house right next door to yours to be turned into a de facto bed-and-breakfast, accommodating scores of guests a year so long as it has no more than two guest rooms. None of it makes any sense. And forget about the proliferation of illegal group rentals; the law — and enforcement — has proven nearly hopeless in this regard.

We expect the main outcome of this evening’s hearing will be that the director of public safety, David Betts, is added to those able to issue tickets for alleged violators to appear in court. Mr. Betts came to the post by way of Southampton, where, as the chief investigator in its code enforcement division, he earned a reputation for action. To cite one instance, he aggressively went after a party-house promoter in Southampton while at the same time his East Hampton colleagues failed to prosecute the same person for essentially the same offense in their jurisdiction and instead issued a citation to one of his victims.

Giving Mr. Betts and his eventual successors in East Hampton Town the tools to do the job will go a long way toward signaling that the town means business on local laws. Adding him to the list of enforcers should also send a signal to those who have been letting violators go unpunished that they should step it up or start polishing their résumés.

Pity poor Montauk. First it comes under attack from hordes of people partying on weekends, then it becomes overrun with guests in illegal short-term rentals, and now, parts of the public’s property are being usurped by private businesses.

East Hampton Town officials will be certainly met with howls of outrage when, as we suspect, they take on restaurant owners and others who have in rapidly increasing numbers this summer been placing tables out on the sidewalk for their patrons. Any number of downtown eateries are getting in on the act, expanding their seating capacity to make the most of a short season. One can understand why they  do so, but that does not make it right or fair to the taxpayers whose property they are using. Perhaps these businesses are taking a cue from Gurney’s Inn, also in Montauk, which has set out dozens of chairs and daybeds apparently in the traditional right of way over the beach. If those charged with regulating public properties here see no harm in these instances, they should at least charge fees for the privilege.

Then there are places, like the Memory Motel, which has in effect stolen public property by turning most of its off-street parking lot into an outdoor bar. As a result, more patrons of the popular drinking spot have to put their vehicles elsewhere, and this is hardly the worst of it. By all accounts, chaos rules there late at night as far too many revelers roll off into the darkness. This is similar to what happened at the Montauk Beach House, which added a club and live music venue without providing a single additional off-street parking space.

Now, though apparently within legal bounds, the mysterious owners of the former East Deck Motel have presented the town with plans to expand and become a members-only beach club at Ditch Plain. This, too, will have an impact on the surrounding area and undoubtedly add to the sense of a hamlet out of control, in which the love of money takes precedence.

It is difficult to imagine a more convincing argument for the immediate consolidation of school districts than the president of the Wainscott School Board’s plea that a modest affordable housing development be kept out of that school district. That this was not roundly rejected from the start is disappointing, to say the least.

David Eagan, the board president, cautioned East Hampton Town officials last week that it would be difficult to accommodate the perhaps 40 additional students the housing would bring in and that it could lead to higher taxes and the need to expand the tiny lower-grades schoolhouse. Take it elsewhere, he seemed to say, like Springs or East Hampton. And therein should lay the death knell of the anachronistic smaller South Fork school districts.

The housing plan is worthwhile. A local nonprofit, with county, state, and federal money, would build a 48-apartment complex on about 31 acres of town-owned land off Stephen Hand’s Path. Current residents of East Hampton Town would be eligible for preference as renters. One of the project’s backers estimated that in addition to the 20 students who would be educated at the Wainscott School, the costs for another 20 who would attend middle school and high school elsewhere could well be added to tax bills. Even so, these numbers are small when compared to several neighboring school districts.

If a school system is too microscopic to handle even the children of a modest work force residence project, something is out of balance. What Wainscott’s board members seem to be saying is that they might welcome the labor of those who live in publicly underwritten houses, but that they had better live elsewhere. One might easily expect the same walls to be thrown up in Sagaponack and Amagansett. The latter school district, in what may be an effort to maintain the exclusivity inherent in its tiny size, has a no-visitors policy that crimps district-shopping by prospective parents.

Speculating, we have long been under the impression that much of the resistance to district consolidation comes from the respective small-school administrators, some of whom stand to lose high-paying jobs in the inevitable shakeout. Scare tactics in the form of studies claiming huge tax increases are trotted out as these leaders begin to see a threat to positions with top compensation packages of around $300,000 a year, when benefits are added.

Larger districts might make for positive change on the school boards, which are made up of well-meaning ordinary citizens who find themselves in thrall to superintendents and their intricate knowledge of the complex functions of running an educational system. So complete is the capitulation that in several districts, notably East Hampton’s, the superintendent sits at the head of the table at board meetings, instead of in the audience.

From the parents’ perspective, small schools are a dream come true. Who wouldn’t want a good education in an idyllic setting for their children that is paid for by someone else? But parents’ wishes do not always make for sound policy. By all accounts, East Hampton Town is in an affordable housing crisis; even less-desirable neighborhoods are priced out of reach of working people as gentrification goes on. There are many causes for this, including the impact of more than a decade of nearly complete town failure to enforce group-housing laws, which has lead to an artificial inflation of prices at the low end of the market.

Let’s amplify that point for a moment: Houses in Springs, for example, are priced beyond the means of local middle-class families in part because illegal multiple rentals allow owners to cover mortgages that would otherwise be unaffordable. This is yet another reason why code enforcement matters, but whether at this point there is any way back is an open question. The result is that there really is little hope for someone starting out or getting by on the area’s modest average salaries to find a decent, year-round rental, and almost no way toward homeownership without breaking the law along the way.

Wainscott’s position is understandable, but must not be the end of the discussion. A neutral analysis could resolve the question about higher taxes, but its not-in-my-backyard stance should be ignored. A regional school district that could spread the tax burden around would be the best course. Of course, a change in state law about how schools raise money might help shift some of the cost off the backs of property owners and more equitably onto this area’s considerable summertime sales and hotel tax income. Then, too, townwide property reassessment might reveal large untapped reserves among long-undervalued parcels.

Education, housing, and taxes are massive and interrelated issues. Progress on these fronts is not going to be made by Wainscott’s thumbing its nose at the rest of the community.

For residents concerned about the speed and ability of emergency medical care, the news that the East End Ambulance Coalition has proposed a significant improvement should be welcome. Some resistance has emerged, however, to its idea for a regional first-responder program, something that appears necessary and overdue.

The program would provide coverage in the four East Hampton fire districts as well as Bridgehampton’s and Sag Harbor’s. For many years the ambulance squads in these districts were all volunteer and a system of mutual aid among them was able to meet demands. This area’s aging, growing, and demographically changing population, coupled with ever-greater numbers of seasonal visitors, have strained these ambulance companies. They have struggled with training and recruitment and some have brought on paid paramedics.

As good as these always-ready paid personnel may be, new concerns are becoming apparent. As things stand, the paramedics are forbidden to cross district lines for any but the most serious and likely fatal calls. This jeopardizes the entire mutual aid system in two ways. First, some volunteer companies do not have advanced life support-qualified, or A.L.S., members. If an A.L.S. volunteer in a neighboring district is already at an emergency and cannot respond to a call for aid, there may be no one with adequate skills available — even though a paramedic might be sitting idle in another district. Second, maintaining A.L.S. readiness takes scores of hours of training and near-constant recertification; unfortunately, the presence of a single paid paramedic might be a subtle disincentive for those who would otherwise step up to serve or are conflicted about the commitment because of family or professional demands, or both. The proposed regional responder program could fill the gaps in coverage and get assistance to patients more rapidly. 

A new tax district, encompassing areas from Bridgehampton to Montauk, would be created to pay for  the program. The coalition has estimated that an initial annual budget of about $2.5 million would be enough to provide a 24-hour team of first responders able to go to any call that arises. Volunteers would continue to be essential, handling emergencies, driving ambulances, and doing other tasks.

Some jurisdictions, the Springs Fire Department, for example, and East Hampton Village, which controls its fire and ambulance services, appear cool to the idea. These positions are indefensible considering that in more than a few instances patients have waited far too long for qualified medical help to arrive.

Like the East Hampton  Town and Village Police Departments, which provide professional service and do not hesitate to cross district lines when the need arises, the time appears to have come to give serious consideration to a regional first-responder system. In fact, police are often first on the scene at ambulance calls and have privately expressed frustration at the delays. If the districts continue to balk, officials in East Hampton and Southampton Towns need to step in and use whatever leverage they can to seek this much-needed modernization, even creating fire-responder services in their Police Departments if that is what it takes.

Community comes first, as one of the backers of the regional plan recently said. Providing the best and fastest care possible should be the top priority.

Pressure is mounting for meetings of the East Hampton Town Trustees to be aired on LTV, the town’s public access cable channel. This is a reasonable suggestion and should be explored.

The trustees are the only one of East Hampton’s important boards whose meetings are not televised and available for replay on demand on the LTV website. Town board meetings are shown live and archived online, as are other proceedings, including those of the planning, zoning, and architectural review boards. The sessions of the East Hampton Village Board and Z.B.A. are live as well and available for replay, as are those of the East Hampton School Board. But not the trustees, who gather twice a month. This should change.

To be fair, interest in watching trustees’ sessions started to rise only during a recent debate over a town board attempt to ban alcohol at Amagansett’s Indian Wells and Atlantic Avenue Beaches. Some residents who favored the ban were annoyed at the trustees’ opposition and seemed to think more people would share their outrage if they could see the panel’s future deliberations for themselves. But other trustee matters also merit broader public attention. The trustees have an important function in local government and greater public knowledge of their affairs would help dispel the sense that they operate in a vacuum.

Technical issues and cost might stand in the way of the immediate airing of trustee meetings, but this should not be the end of the matter. The Lamb Building, where the trustees gather, is not yet wired for videotaping, unlike other official town and village venues. The trustees could consider meeting in Town Hall, but the zoning board is already there at the same time on Tuesdays. As an interim measure, it might suffice if LTV could assign a single camera operator to tape trustee sessions. That way, even if live broadcasts were not immediately possible, the online version could be made available.

Seeing trustee meetings will go only part of the way toward getting them more in step with the town’s other agencies. Unfortunately, the trustees are elected in one massive, difficult-to-comprehend slate. Unlike all the other boards, which have staggered terms, all nine trustee seats come up simultaneously. Take it from us: It is extremely difficult to interview and assess the qualities of 18 trustee candidates from the two major political parties, and we are paid to do it. Because it is almost impossible for ordinary voters to make reasoned decisions among so many people, the contest becomes one of name recognition.

The trustees are also at a disadvantage because, unlike the boards that meet in Town Hall, they have a tiny staff and few resources to call on. Had the trustees been in the flow of government and the public eye, some of the tension that greeted the alcohol ban discussion might have been avoided. Promoting greater awareness among residents of the valuable work the trustees do, and how they do it, is a fine place to start.

In a landmark decision, the United States National Marine Fisheries Service has listed the scalloped hammerhead shark as an endangered species, making it the first shark protected under the Endangered Species Act. This is only one of the top ocean predators left vulnerable because of fishing and other human activities. Many additional species of shark are considered at risk of extinction, thanks largely to a continuing demand for their fins for soup.

In the waters off eastern Long Island, there is little commercial fishing specifically for sharks. Instead, they are harried by sportfishermen, often during tournaments in which money and bragging rights are at stake. It is surprising that there is just one catch-and-release tournament here, the $10,000 Shark’s Eye competition, which debuted last summer at the Montauk Marine Basin and will be held again this weekend.

By all accounts, the tournament was a success. Sharks were caught, tagged with tracking devices, and then released. No weigh-in system was used; instead, each shark caught was photographed and allotted a set amount of points based on its species. To make sure all competitors played fair, a member from a rival team was on board at all times.

Last year’s winner, Richie Nessel, said the Shark’s Eye was the “most fun” he had ever had in a tournament. It provided education and entertainment for students at the Montauk School as well, who named a 200-pound blue shark Beamer. His movements were tracked at Ocearch.org, so it is known that he traveled over 9,000 miles since the tournament last July. As of this week, his satellite tag was somewhere off Costa Rica.

The Shark’s Eye tournament and others like it also provide valuable scientific data. Tracking systems allow scientists to gather information about sharks’ health as well as travels. Furthermore, they promote public interest in sharks. If people become interested enough in a shark like Beamer to track his progress, perhaps they will care enough to avoid turning him into soup. Six other sharks are expected to be tagged during this weekend’s tournament.

Conservationists would welcome the expansion of catch-and-release tournaments, and we believe more of them would not reduce enthusiasm. The model exists, it isn’t difficult to copy, and it has proven successful. Montauk is known worldwide as a fishing community and has the ability to influence the fishing world. There is no better place for ocean conservation to take hold. Better, more progressive tournaments could help make that happen.

The chief executive officer of the Starbucks corporation and the East Hampton Village Zoning Board of Appeals together have a world-class stall job under way, though the Z.B.A. appears to be inching toward putting a stop to it. This display of backbone, however cartilaginous, is overdue — though we will believe it when we see it.

Howard Schultz, with his wife, Sherri, had formally asked the zoning board back in April for permission to retain a garage that mysteriously became a good-size guesthouse on their Gracie Lane property. The village zoning chairman, citing a family responsibility involving one of the Schultzes’ lawyers, presented a request last week for a delay of two more months before the board’s deliberations might begin. Conveniently, this would push the eventual moment of reckoning past Labor Day, when, one can assume, the Schultzes would no longer regularly frequent their East Hampton spread or need to house their visitors, extended family, staff, or whomever, in the much debated structure.

The thing about this particular request is that the Schultzes are not seeking to build something new. On the contrary, they have been asking to keep unchanged a garage that had been improperly expanded. Though legally entitled to a garage of only 650 square feet with a single apartment for a caretaker, the building now has 1,000 square feet of floor area, with four bedrooms and three and a half bathrooms. According to their lawyers, when the Schultzes bought the property they were assured by the brokers that everything was legal. Nevertheless, when they applied to the Z.B.A. for permission to expand their house two years ago, they agreed to return the garage to its original size. They did not do so.

Every day that the zoning board has given over to the lawyers’ maneuvering and artful delays is one in which the couple continues to have the use of the wrongly altered structure. By failing to call a halt to the dodge last week when the matter was, at least on paper, to reach conclusion, the board essentially agreed to a fifth extension of time.

The principal lawyer for the couple, Leonard Ackerman of East Hampton, is supposed to appear at the next meeting, on Friday, July 25, or otherwise make the case for adjourning deliberations until the middle of September. Another postponement is hard to swallow, however, given that at various times the Schultzes have been represented by a coterie of attorneys, including a moonlighting Fred W. Thiele Jr., who just happens to also be a state assemblyman.

By contrast, extensions of time on matters before the East Hampton Town Zoning Board of Appeals are extremely rare. At Town Hall, applicants and their attorneys make their cases in hearings, the gavel comes down, and decisions are forthcoming in 60 days or less, as state law requires. Once in a while, the record might be kept open for one side or the other to respond to a late document, but only long enough for that purpose rather than for indefinite months on end as in the village in this and many other matters. It is a fair model, one that requires all involved to be well prepared, and it offers swift solutions, benefiting both applicants and the community.

Concerns about the absence of timely and efficient review are not idle or without importance. By allowing matters to drag on, the village zoning board is effectively cutting the public out of the process. Few residents have the means or stamina to attend every continuation of such protracted hearings. Interest becomes diluted; attention wanes. This drastically reduces the potential role of neighbors and other parties and makes government an insiders’ game that only the pros can win.

What is infuriating about this is that it all comes down to money. If a middle-class homeowner or even a run-of-the-mill millionaire promised to reduce the size of a clearly illegal structure but neglected to do so, one would expect no leniency. There is a double standard at work here.

Credit Mr. and Ms. Schultz’s hubris with finally forcing the issue and bringing the zoning board to the point where some of its members appear to be moving toward what they should have said months ago: No.

    In terms of the long haul, the United States Army Corps of Engineers’ meager offer of a temporary fix for Montauk’s threatened downtown oceanfront could be a blessing in disguise.

    As some observers have pointed out for years, Montauk’s commercial center is not economically important enough to compete with cities like New York and Miami for an adequate share of federal erosion mitigation money. Instead, the oceanfront there is likely to continue picking up the funding scraps, forcing local officials, business leaders, and residents to begin, finally, to admit to the inescapable reality that the town is on its own and will not see Washington rushing in to save the day.

    Representatives of the Army Corps were in East Hampton Town Hall with state officials and others last week to describe the federal offer: a $6 million sandbagging project intended to bolster at-risk structures along a 3,100-foot section of the beach. To put that sum in perspective, Senator Charles E. Schumer is backing a call for $21 million from the Federal Emergency Management Agency for generators at a single hospital in West Islip. From the numbers, it is pretty easy to see how Montauk ranks.

    Beyond the Army Corps’ immediate plan, it dangled the possibility of additional funding when the Fire Island to Montauk Point Reformulation Study finally moves out of the planning stage — if ever. As we see it, waiting on such a vague promise would be foolish. Instead, given the assumption that vast piles of federal cash are not going to be forthcoming, East Hampton Town officials must begin to speak frankly about the dwindling options.

    One thing is clear: Montauk’s first row of hotels and residences along the beach from South Emery Street to about South Essex Street — on about 10 privately owned parcels in all — would not withstand a direct hit by a hurricane that was even moderately powerful. As dramatic as 2012’s Sandy was, its winds did not reach hurricane speeds on eastern Long Island, and its stormwater surge was considerably below others recorded on the South Fork historically.

    Making matters even more ominous, almost no natural, protective dune remains in downtown Montauk. This means that over-washes from even routine storms could reach several blocks of the commercial district. A so-called 100-year storm along the lines of the 1938 Hurricane would liquefy the first row of structures, turning their remaining fragments into battering rams that would then lay waste to the rest of downtown as they rode in on  raging water. To get a sense of how bad it could be, consider that in the aftermath of ’38, high windrows of splinted walls and roofs, furniture, cars, and the occasional human body were found piled up along the shore of Shinnecock Bay. The houses along Dune Road from which it all had come were entirely swept away.

    Readers and policy-makers should picture, too, that when downtown Montauk was laid out in the 1920s by the developer Carl Fisher, a road, South Edgewater Avenue, was plotted in front of the now-threatened motels and condos, between them and the sea. Although the road still appears on official maps, where it was to have been is now underwater. If this does not illustrate that the structures there are simply in the wrong place and that time has caught up with them, we cannot say what does.

    It appears that the town now should concede a localized defeat. No one, neither the Army Corps, nor the Town of East Hampton, nor oceanfront property owners, will be able to hold back the Atlantic Ocean. A separate tax district like the one created in Southampton to fund a $25 million sand-pumping project is one possibility. However, in the long term, it probably would be more cost-effective to offer buyouts to the 10 affected property owners or come up with a creative scheme of publicly-aided relocation.

    The bottom line is that the town must preserve the beaches for all its residents and visitors. That means rethinking what structures must be saved and at what cost. The process should begin now.