A pending public purchase of a roughly 16-acre parcel in Springs and allowing the site to be subdivided and developed, with an eight-acre, private reserved area, are not the same thing at all. Yet that is what some in the hamlet and a committee that advises the East Hampton Town Board appear to believe.

    The land is at 115 Neck Path and has a house roughly in its center. The issue is whether $2.7 million from the town’s community preservation fund should be used to buy it. The owners are willing to sell to the town, but at the same time are seeking approval for a three-lot subdivision.

    The perspective of those who are against the deal is that the subdivision, if approved, would set aside ample open space and that the town’s buying the land would remove it from the tax rolls. It’s kind of a have-your-cake-and-eat-it too idea.

    We think the property must instead become public land in its entirety and the house that is on it now should be removed.

    East Hampton residents have several times shown their support at the ballot box for the community preservation fund. Among its goals are retaining and improving the town’s environment and character, as well as limiting development. Money in the fund comes from a 2-percent tax on a portion of most real estate transactions, and thanks to the newly booming market and several years in which spending lagged, there is plenty of cash in hand and then some. According to the town, East Hampton’s C.P.F. income last year had reached well into pre-Great Recession levels, and there is no sign of a slowdown. The money is there; what will not be there forever is suitable places to spend it.

    The land at 115 Neck Path would appear to satisfy several of the qualifications listed as the town’s C.P.F. program goals. These include woodland preservation, groundwater protection, and adding to greenbelts and trails. As to the point about taxes, development over time costs municipalities more than does leaving land alone. Springs already has the highest residential density of all the town’s hamlets — and adding to that would be counterproductive.

    The acreage is roughly rectangular, extending to the back of the secluded Shaaray Pardes Accabonac Grove Cemetery. It is important to note that it is sandwiched between two town-owned lots, one of which shares a property line with another that reaches to Old Stone Highway. If the deal closes, there would be some 66 acres of open space in all there, extending from Old Stone to Neck Path in an area right smack in the middle of the Accabonac Creek watershed.

    Regarding C.P.F. purchases in general and this property in particular, there is much to be said for maintaining and preserving contiguous woodlands. It is a conservation axiom that fragmented forests are less than optimal habitat for many wild species.

    For the town board to agree with the Springs group that allowing three houses there is the same as saving and restoring the land would be to undermine the preservation fund itself. The deal should go ahead as planned.

    East Hampton Town Supervisor Larry Cantwell expressed the feelings of many residents this week when he sent a strongly worded letter to Gov. Andrew Cuomo objecting to PSEG Long Island’s ongoing project to run new, high-voltage power lines between East Hampton and Amagansett. We applaud his effort and hope that he is joined by others, such as State Senator Kenneth P. LaValle and Assemblyman Fred W. Thiele Jr., in calling for a different approach.

    PSEG Long Island, a subsidiary of a for-profit New Jersey company, Public Service Enterprise Group, has a 10-year, $5 billion arrangement with the Long Island Power Authority to operate the electric system in Nassau and Suffolk Counties subject to state oversight.

    Calling the work a “travesty,” Mr. Cantwell cited the town’s comprehensive plan and inclusion in a statewide scenic areas inventory as ample justification for a halt to the project, in which the utility has been installing tall poles in residential areas. Mr. Cantwell said the new lines should be buried underground and out of sight.

    At a meeting in East Hampton Village earlier this year, PSEG Long Island representatives said that burying the lines would be too expensive, but they did not provide dollar estimates to back up the claim. Whether or not this is true, they made clear that they were not going to do it.

    Elsewhere, the company has angered Montauk residents by embarking on drastic tree-cutting with scant advance notice. One suspects that such aggressive work would save the company money by increasing the length of time between prunings, hence making things look better for investors and shareholders.

    Under the terms of the LIPA deal, PSEG Long Island agreed to a rate freeze through 2015. You don’t have to look too deeply to see that without a way to pass on expenses to its customers, the company is trying to contain costs wherever possible, including by not burying lines despite a community outcry.

    Officials should press Mr. Cuomo, who can wield influence with the New York Department of Public Service if he so chooses, to force the issue. An out-of-state company cannot be allowed to run roughshod over East Hampton’s long history of preservation, and then hide behind vague claims that doing the right thing would cost too much money.

    Mr. Cuomo, are you listening?

    America’s top-grossing 7-Eleven is in Montauk, and, according to the franchisee, the location served as many as 4,000 customers a day last summer. Now, a property owner and a different operator would like to bring at least some of that wild success to Amagansett — and there is really nothing in the East Hampton Town Code to stop it.

    Recognizing this and sensing public dissatisfaction, officials went deep into the records to find a way to stall, if not stop, the new convenience store from opening without review of the consequences. This may be all the town can do at this point, but whatever the outcome in Amagansett, officials must quickly overhaul an aspect of local law that is in need of modification lest this or other kinds of highly intensive uses spring up elsewhere.

    The key will be to revise the town code to permit realistic use of commercial properties, first and foremost, an assessment of and specific cap on the number of patrons allowed indoors and out. Applications for such enterprises should trigger stringent site plan review. In the existing code, even if a proposal involves an increase in the number of people who enter in a given 24-hour period — no matter if that figure goes from 100 to 1,000 — no additional scrutiny is needed as long as the zoning is right. This must change.

    A dizzying range of hybrid businesses has sprung up here in recent years as more and more money pours in. What is increasingly clear is that current regulations are not necessarily able to keep up. Increasingly, lawyers and land planners have exploited vagueness and apparent loopholes in the code to win much of what their clients want. This has often come, particularly in summer, at the price of increased traffic, litter, and congestion. With a new administration in Town Hall that has repeatedly expressed sympathy for residents’ interests and community concerns, the prospect for meaningful change is good.

    In the case of the proposed Amagansett 7-Eleven, far more vehicle traffic over the course of a 24-hour period would be generated than under the existing building’s brief incarnation as a 160-seat restaurant — and this on an already busy stretch of Montauk Highway. However, as far as the zoning code is concerned, the two are essentially equal and legal in the property’s central business zoning.

    By no means, however, is the problem limited to 7-Elevens and the like. Consider other examples, such as several Montauk motels and restaurants, including Ruschmeyer’s, the Shepard’s Neck Inn, the Surf Lodge, and the Beach House, which have morphed into something else, with many more patrons crossing their thresholds every day than had been there in earlier guises. Better-written, less-ambiguous, and more strictly applied town laws might have made the difference and prevented now frequent quality-of-life complaints. There is still time to rein them in, especially if they are pre-existing businesses on residentially zoned sites.

    To adequately deal with growth, regulations must be rewritten to include close study of how and to what extent properties are actually going to be used. Development pressure has rapidly outpaced the East Hampton laws meant to constrain and manage it. The sooner the rules are made to reflect this new reality, the better.

    With a wink and a nod, East Hampton Town officials went out of their way to lavish praise and give quick approval for a project that radically altered a portion of the Montauk oceanfront landscape. Now, the suspiciously anonymous owner of the former East Deck Motel at Ditch Plain is dangling an expensive thank-you in the form of tons of fill that would be used at his or her cost to build a protective berm at a public parking lot nearby. Officials should think twice.

    Before accepting a gift with a value that could run into the hundreds of thousands of dollars, the East Hampton Town Board should know whom they are dealing with. And, if they already can put a face to the project, they must let the public in on what they know. More troubling is the likelihood that the donation might be a quid pro quo in which officials continue to look with over-deserved favor on the changes at the property that are rumored to be coming up soon for their review.

    Something puzzling is afoot on the Ditch Plain shore, and the town cannot responsibly proceed without knowing who the players are and what they have in mind.

    It is quite the wonder why two members of the last East Hampton Town Board were so vehemently opposed to an independent study of the unused Springs-Fireplace Road wastewater treatment plant now that a report on what should happen there has been released. As it turns out, their pet project to privatize the site would not only have cost the town a great deal of money, but would have contributed to groundwater contamination rather than alleviated it.

    Former East Hampton Town Supervisor Bill Wilkinson and Councilwoman Theresa Quigley had tried and failed to push through a deal in which the town would have paid for expensive repairs plus a monthly fee in an unusual lease-to-buy handoff of the plant to a private firm. To make the figures work, the company would have accepted out-of-town sewage in addition to local waste.

    At the time, other board members cautioned that the whole wastewater picture needed to be reviewed before a decision was made. They stopped the proposed deal, and Mr. Wilkinson, who was ready to sign it at a February 2012 meeting, was livid.

    Now, the authors of the report say the best bet would be for the town to permanently close the plant, which has been operating as a money-losing transfer station, and put the savings of up to $50,000 a month toward more ecologically and financially sound projects. This is good advice, and confirms observations made by the town budget advisory committee, environmentalists, and others that the supervisor and Ms. Quigley should have better understood what was a stake before attempting to rush into a disasterous contract.

    The report contains several options for the road ahead, but the one that appears to have the most support is shutting the plant altogether. Rebuilding it could run $5 million or more, and annual operating costs could exceed $1 million. Instead, the report says, money might be directed to the doing something about the unknown number of under-performing individual septic systems in town.

    Prior efforts at providing incentives for upgrading residential cesspools, for example, have been under-funded and of limited effectiveness. Incentives are well worth considering, as upgrades would both save money and help protect drinking water and the environment. 

    The East Hampton School Board announced last week that it is likely to seek voter approval to exceed the state cap on tax increases for 2014-15. The move is not entirely unexpected, and appears justified, at least for the coming year. But this should not be the end of the discussion about taxpayer support of public education.

    Thanks to holding expenses in check for several successive years, the district has been able to meet the so-called 2-percent cap, but there is very little left now to cut from the budget in East Hampton — or in other large South Fork districts that have met the cap. Students already seem to have been negatively affected. Going further would mean seriously undermining educational quality.

    As we have noted before, the pressure comes from the top, specifically from New York Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo’s often-stated interest in property-tax relief. As Mr. Cuomo sees it, the state has too many small taxing entities, which results in too much money coming from state residents’ pockets. The governor believes that trimming school spending through shared services is the best way to meet the challenge.

    On eastern Long Island, where the schools take in the largest portion of the money raised by taxes, the governor’s ideas for reform appear to have plenty to recommend them. Each of the often small districts seems top-heavy with administrators pulling in six-figure salaries and ample benefits. While some resistance is to be expected from those who might see their fiefdoms reduced, a new, hard look at consolidation, particularly at the top of the pay scale, should be taken.

    Voters, we suspect, will be supportive of districts that seek to go above the tax cap this year, and perhaps for one or two more cycles. Beyond that, however, patience as well as wallets will begin to get thin. Looking toward the long term, seeking ways to reduce the administrative costs of education by consolidation is something that must be considered.

    Perhaps the single most important story in any recent Star was the one that appeared on the front page of last Thursday’s edition about the desperate need for adequate mental health services for school-age children.

    Think about what that means for a moment. What pediatricians, teachers, school nurses, administrators, and others are saying is that there are more kids at risk here than there are practitioners able to help them. This must change — and fast.

    School officials here would be the first to admit that there is a crisis under way. With few other choices for care, the East Hampton School District has referred 20 students with apparent suicidal thoughts to Stony Brook University Hospital in the last year and a half alone. Three South Fork students have killed themselves since 2009, and countless other forms of harmful behavior are reported, including substance abuse, eating disorders, and self-mutilation among students as young as 12.

    The problem also extends beyond the school’s reach. Medical professionals and those in related fields have been talking for some time about how to respond. As with nearly everything, however, money has been lacking. State Assemblyman Fred W. Thiele Jr. is helping the East Hampton High School principal, Adam Fine, with a new approach that might provide funding for better and more abundant mental health services for the region’s youth. The energy and flexibility of private-sector groups should be tapped as well.

    This is a matter of the highest priority, and those working toward solutions are to be supported and commended. The kids need us; we must do everything and anything we can to help.

    By now local school boards are deep into the annual budget-writing season, and once again we hear that tax increases must be kept below the 2-percent cap. We believe the time has come, however, for boards to deal head-on with the state-imposed curb by bringing spending plans that would result in exceeding the cap to voters, if necessary, or by taking serious steps toward reducing costs by consolidating districts.

    Some history is necessary to understand the precarious place our schools are in thanks to the cap. In 2011, then-new Gov. Andrew Cuomo and state legislative leaders forced through a measure to provide tax relief to suburban homeowners. They had a point: New York had, and continues to have, some of the highest property tax rates in the country, although taxes on the South Fork are generally far less than in other parts of Suffolk.

    The rules now hold the increase in the amount brought in by property taxes for any local government in the state to 2 percent year-over-year or to the rate of increase in the consumer price index, whichever is less, although the cap is subject to some carve-outs. Schools and municipalities can increase property taxes beyond the cap provided that they do so with 60-percent approval. This would be relatively easy for a five-member town board, for example, in which taxpayers have no direct say on budgets, but it is tough for school districts, which must present their spending plans to the voters every spring. Very few have attempted to exceed the cap, as it has turned out.

    At the time the cap became law, education groups decried what they said would be negative effects on some programs and classroom quality. These fears now appear to be coming to pass. To some degree, districts stole time as the inflation rate remained flat during the Great Recession. Now, however, with costs of all sorts rising, notably salaries and utilities, pressure is increasing to find even more cuts to stay within the cap.

    The effects of the 2-percent cudgel already can be seen, both on educational quality and in terms of Mr. Cuomo’s presidential ambitions, in which he is hoping to avoid the label of a tax-and-spend Democrat. In his 2014 State of the State address, Mr. Cuomo repeated the tax-cutting theme, pointing out that there are more than 2,000 separate taxing entities in the state and calling for spending reductions.

    Locally, there are several examples of how the tax cap is crimping programs and harming kids. This year, the cap is set at a miserly 1.46 percent because the increase in the consumer price index is lower than 2 percent. In Springs, the board is deciding whether to skip a needed purchase of computers for students. At East Hampton High School, there have been cuts in art, home, and career classes. Middle school classes in East Hampton are packed, with as many as 30 students to a room in some cases — more than can be adequately taught, according to some teachers. And at the John Marshall Elementary School, kindergarten field trips and programs for advanced students have been eliminated, along with some take-home projects and Spanish instruction. This is not sustainable.

    The quality of education provided to this community’s children will only suffer as the years go on unless something is done. Further cuts to classroom activities, essential equipment, and extracurricular programs would gravely weaken the educational system itself. We believe school district voters would support well-presented programs even if they mean a tax increase that exceeds the onerous state limit.

    But if South Fork school boards cannot muster the courage to ask voters whether to exceed the cap, they must look for an alternative, and it appears that the only other option is pursuing an inevitable course toward consolidation.

    One of the sacrosanct principles of East Hampton Town zoning is that no one gets more than one house per property. That is unless one happens to have a large parcel of land and an even larger bank account.

    At an April 1 town zoning board hearing, representatives of Jeff T. Blau, who runs the multinational real estate firm Related Companies, sought to overturn the one-lot, one-house tradition on a Wainscott parcel he bought two years ago for $18.5 million. After voting to grant the request unanimously on Tuesday, the Z.B.A. runs the risk of dealing a major blow to the town’s zoning code.

    Town law carefully sets out limits on what can and cannot be done on residential properties, and with good reason. Banned uses include slaughterhouses and wrecking yards, and, material to this discussion, more than one single-family house per parcel. The one-house rule should apply fairly and evenly across the economic spectrum, and you can assume that even your run-of-the-mill millionaire would have been laughed out of Town Hall had he or she pursued a similar scheme.

    Mr. Blau’s successful request was simple at its core: He plans to build a second house on a parcel where only one is permitted. Rejection should also have been simple. However, during the Z.B.A. hearing, his lawyer offered a smokescreen of reasons why the board should give in, including that the plan would save a Topping family farmhouse already there. But because the original house is not visible from the adjacent Five Rod Highway, a narrow town trustee road, and because no promise to allow visitor access to it is being made, saving it as is serves only the most minimal public purpose.

    Mr. Blau will now build a new, far larger house there and several additional structures, including the renovated Topping house, but he did not want to subdivide the property for reasons that were not convincing. It appears that the reason his request reached the zoning board in the first place was a go-ahead some time ago from then-town attorney John Jilnicki, whose opinion was not put in writing - something that ought to be explained.

    Nor did Mr. Blau want to add his new, larger house on to the farmhouse, as would be his right. In return for being allowed to have two houses, Mr. Blau has offered easements, or perpetual protection, of portions of the property, but these fail to address the key question of an additional house on the site and imply the unblinking acceptance by the Z.B.A. of an improper quid pro quo.

    The town’s Planning Department, in its analysis of the application, did not appear to agree with Mr. Blau’s representatives that subdividing the land would be impossible. Indeed, the department dismissed this argument as moot, to use its word. It issued what can be read as a neutral opinion on the two-house question, and it urged the Z.B.A. to look closely at whether the request met the standards for granting variances. We believe they did not look closely enough.

    Mr. Blau cannot have reasonably claimed that being held to a single house on one lot would have been a genuine hardship. Any alleged difficulties from his situation should have been considered self-created and grounds for denial. New York State law requires that applications for variances must be rejected when they fail to meet these tests and a reasonable alternative - in this case, a legal, if difficult to obtain, subdivision - is available. East Hampton Town officials need to proceed extremely cautiously when it comes to granting such variances.

    Expect a wave now of similar requests from other wealthy property owners eager to build their own dream Hamptons compounds. Unfortunately, the zoning board heaped praise and its okay on an application that was improperly handed to it in the first place. We hope that in the future the members uphold tradition and reject more unjustified assaults on one of the town’s most basic zoning rules.

    That East Hampton is divided into two camps these days — those who want to live here and those who simply want to make a buck — is worthy of particular concern as summer approaches. Finding a balance between them is what makes the job of those in Town Hall and the village’s Beecher House so tough. It is up to them to make decisions about the direction of the community and to keep in check those of a more, shall we say, extractive mind-set.

    Montauk has become the front line in this fight. As the hamlet has grown more popular, so too have the pressures on officials to find that elusive balance. Recent history and the scale of wealth among some here make that even more difficult. In an astonishing passage in a recent New York Times profile of Michael Walrath, the 38-year-old tech millionaire and owner of the Montauk Surf Lodge, he was described as having “befriended” then-East Hampton Town Supervisor Bill Wilkinson and, by implication, was able to use that relationship to resolve the bar and restaurant’s numerous code violations with a $100,000 settlement in town court.

    The article went on to describe how Mr. Walrath “reduced capacity” at the Surf Lodge from 1,500 customers on some nights to 500. By any measure, 500 people is still too many by more than half for the Surf Lodge’s sensitive site on the edge of Fort Pond in a residential area. Of course, the Surf Lodge is hardly the only gathering place that’s gotten too big.

    Plenty of residents have wondered how the Montauk Beach House was allowed to expand, becoming a club and music venue hosting hundreds of people without providing more than a scrap of off-street parking. Ruschmeyer’s Inn is another hopping nightspot, while Solé East’s bands and D.J.s provide an unwelcome nighttime beat in the old Shepherd’s Neck neighborhood.

    Cyril’s Fish House on Napeague has been allowed to operate a bar with hundreds of patrons spilling onto the state Montauk Highway right-of-way. Only a short distance from Town Hall, vehicles of summer patrons at Bostwick’s Chowder House regularly overflow into no-parking zones. Meanwhile, an avoidable turf war between the East Hampton Town Trustees and the town board may prevent a solution for Indian Wells Beach in Amagansett, which has taken on a Florida spring-break atmosphere on high-season weekends to the dismay of regulars. We’re probably forgetting a few, too.

    None of these enterprises adequately compensates the community for the disturbances they cause. The jobs they create are generally seasonal and much of the money flows out of town as quickly as it flows in. They also create long-term risks to real estate values and rental rates. Officials are definitely trying to improve things. In East Hampton Village, serious consideration is being given to new rules on mechanized noise. The town board is taking a hard look at large, outdoor parties and other events.

    Going into summer 2014, the yardstick with which to measure policy is to ask: Who benefits and who pays?

    Officials must keep in mind that East Hampton is not dominated by the resort and nightlife sections of its economy. Residents, renters, and second-home owners keep this place going. Operations that flout local laws and diminish the attractiveness of this area for those who really pay the bills should be strongly discouraged.