There is some good news on the environment for eastern Long Island and some that’s not so good. Suffolk County Executive Steve Bellone said recently that water quality was now his administration’s top priority. In East Hampton, Democrats listed groundwater and the areas’s bays and harbors among their key platform planks last year. Yet the State of New York, despite a projected budget surplus in the coming fiscal year, appears poised to cut environmental funding.

    According to the New York League of Conservation Voters, a watchdog group, Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s proposed 2014-15 spending plan would actually reduce spending by the Department of Environmental Conservation and keep essentially flat the amount set aside for a $157 million fund that helps pay for habitat and drinking water protections, historic sites, and saving family farms.

    Environmental organizations have said that this fund, which draws on a dedicated real estate transfer tax, should be strengthened, going to as much as $200 million for the coming year. The League of Conservation Voters has noted that the state’s penury on environmental protection is in sharp contrast to generous increases for what it described as technological upgrades.

    For his part, Mr. Bellone has announced that nitrogen pollution amounts to “public water enemy number one.” This is a very welcome point of view from a top official in a region dependent on healthy waterways and whose drinking water comes solely from the ground beneath our feet. Public support is there for doing something about it. As many as 9,700 county residents listened in on a conference call at the end of January during which Mr. Bellone described his concerns.

    Next will come the hard work of figuring out how to make things better. Roughly two-thirds of Suffolk residences are not connected to a municipal sewer system; instead they dispose of liquid waste in often outdated septic systems. Mr. Bellone has said he is going to work to find solutions. East Hampton Town commissioned a study last year to gauge the scale of the problem here and propose ways to protect water supplies and marine ecosystems. Nitrogen abundance has been linked to massive plankton blooms, such as the devastating “brown tides” of the 1980s that nearly wiped out the scallop — and this may be tied to what we all put in the ground every day.

    We expect the present town board will work long and hard on the issue, but money and manpower from the state will be essential to success. Long Island residents should be worried that Albany is not doing enough to protect these critically important resources and demand more support for local initiatives like Mr. Bellone’s and the plans being developed in East Hampton Town. The environment, particularly drinking water and marine areas, should receive equal attention from Mr. Cuomo and the Legislature.

    If there is one piece of advice that is more routinely ignored than any other, it is this: When public officials say residents should stay off the roads because of snow and ice, far too many figure that applies to someone else and head out anyway.

    So far, this winter bears out this observation. Accidents involving not-snow-ready vehicles and inexperienced or even unlicensed drivers have been plenty since the beginning of the year. Risky, too, is maintaining dry-road speeds just because you are behind the wheel of a hulking pickup truck.

    We are lucky on this part of the island that snowfalls tend to be followed quickly by thaws, giving crews time to clear most major thoroughfares. Resources are limited, though, and the out-of-the-way streets can remain snow-packed for what seems a frustrating and ill-explained time. Our advice to those itching to get out during a storm is that this is winter, think twice about that errand that seems so important. If you absolutely have to leave home while the snow is coming down, be sure to do so in a proper vehicle with good tires. But first ask yourself: Can this wait until tomorrow? Most of the time the answer will be yes.

    As opponents of a planned reduction in the local deer population rallied at Hook Mill in East Hampton Village on Saturday, a basic question hovered unasked: Just how their numbers were allowed to grow unchecked and why the government entity most responsible by law and tradition for wildlife management in New York State has been all but absent.

    The Department of Environmental Conservation is the state agency whose mission includes setting hunting seasons and limits and enforcing a range of related regulations. But its involvement in Long Island’s deer problem has been negligible. Its commissioner, Joe Martens, should answer for allowing the situation to reach a perceived crisis level, at least in the downstate region. Taking care of the state’s wildlife is the D.E.C.’s job, after all. Why it hasn’t in this regard must be examined.

    Without state leadership, eastern Long Island’s towns and villages have been forced to go it alone, undertaking patchwork studies and turning to the federal government for help. The East Hampton Town Department of Natural Resources, for example, has only four staff members; no one on the East Hampton Village staff can be considered a wildlife expert.

    Digging deeper, though, the fault for allowing the deer population to grow beyond safe limits cannot be laid entirely at the feet of the D.E.C. bureaucracy. Its portfolio is enormous, including hazardous waste, pollution, marine and freshwater resources, parks and campsites, mining, and hydraulic fracturing, or at least studying fracking’s potential harm. There are more than 1,900 D.E.C. facilities and 4.4 million acres of land under the agency’s control. And this is on a budget of just under $900 million for the current fiscal year — about the same as that allotted by the City of New York for environmental quality in its far-smaller geographic area. It is little surprise then that suburban deer management could have fallen through the cracks.

    In laying out this week the state budget for the coming year, Gov. Andrew Cuomo did not propose any significant increases for the D.E.C. This is unfortunate, as New York’s reputation as an environmental leader has slipped in recent decades as the challenges have risen. In reaction to the governor’s State of the State address earlier this month, the New York League of Conservation Voters complained about what it saw as a missed opportunity, given anticipated state surpluses.

    Albany must regain its leadership role on conservation and sensible, science-driven wildlife management, including for deer. If increasing funding to the D.E.C. is what it will take, all sides should be in support.

    East Hampton Town Supervisor Larry Cantwell has begun working with a number of other officials on revising the town’s gatherings law, with an eye toward controlling the burgeoning nightlife scene in Montauk. Meanwhile, a committee asked to study taxicab operations, including rabid price-gouging, has been revitalized. The work is long overdue, and but part of what it will take to make the easternmost hamlet a little less of a no-holds-barred party destination for summer 2014.

    Town Hall faces a considerable obstacle in the form of precedents allowed by the previous administration’s approval of huge outdoor events and the questionable conversion of several old-time motels into swank and far-larger social hubs. Among these was the over-the-top analysis supported by the then-town attorney’s office that the former Ronjo Motel in Montauk’s downtown could not only have a bar, but could operate with hundreds of people on the premises at all hours, far more than its handful of guestrooms could accommodate.

    Now it is rumored that the new owner of at least one other Montauk motel may hope to go the nightclub route, and there are surely others watching closely to see just how far they too could push matters. East Hampton Town should push back — hard. Now is the time for officials and residents alike to shift the balance away from the handful of business owners who put making a buck ahead of community.

    One key area the town board should look into is new rules about outdoor occupancy. Places like Montauk’s Sloppy Tuna, Surf Lodge, Ruschmeyer’s, and the Montauk Beach House, and Cyril’s Fish House on Napeague, are, under current rules, essentially allowed to pack as many people as they can onto their properties. This has prompted season after season of noise complaints from neighbors and litter and congestion problems. Setting limits consistent with each business’s ability to provide off-street parking would be a good starting place.

    As to the beaches, officials should give serious consideration to banning alcohol consumption where and when lifeguards are present. And they should prohibit unenclosed bonfires within several hundred feet of road ends and along the entire downtown Montauk beach. There are simply too many people here in season, making too much noise and leaving too much of a mess behind. The sooner Town Hall updates the code to accommodate the new reality the better off we all will be.

    Forget about the ice, the snow, the wind, and all that this winter. No: The real problem with winter 2014 is the potholes.

    Montauk Highway, which bears the bulk of this area’s traffic, is the worst of it. Deep pits lie in wait for tires and rims. Many offer a telltale clue: striped lines a layer down suggesting that the last time the road was paved something wasn’t done quite right.

    You can tell the locals from the visitors by the apparently odd way they steer, going half onto the shoulder or slowing for no apparent reason in advance of an unavoidable patch. These days, a swerving vehicle in front of you does not mean the driver has downed a few too many Budweisers.

    Last we heard from the state, help is on the way sometime this spring. A Department of Transportation resurfacing effort is supposed to begin in the next few months. Between now and then, though, expect a whole lot more of the Montauk Highway swerve. Our advice? Slow down, never tailgate, keep your eyes open and those tires at the proper inflation. It’s likely to get a whole lot worse before it gets better.

    Members of the Wainscott Citizens Advisory Committee were proud last week as they unveiled large new signs at the eastern and western ends of the hamlet. For the life of us, we cannot figure out why adding to the already jumbled roadside clutter along Montauk Highway is desirable, but, if that’s what they want to do, so be it.

    While we are on the subject of signs, however, there is one practice that bears stopping in its tracks — slapping the town supervisor’s name on everything from the billboard-like placard at the airport road to the sign at the Abraham’s Path youth park.

    Try as we might, we cannot remember just when this began. Time was, you had to really accomplish something — or depart for the great beyond — before your name went up. These days, the sign painters get busy at the turn of each administration to put up the supervisor’s name wherever they can.

    What is misleading about East Hampton Town supervisors’ names on signs is that the job really does not come with much more authority than that of the other members of the town board. The supervisor gets to write the annual budget, but he enjoys precisely the same number of votes when it comes to its approval — one. And, to be honest, more often than not disaster has been the result when town supervisors have gone it alone.

    As the confident Larry Cantwell takes over, along with a new board majority, we hope he and the others will resist the siren song of such pointless self-aggrandizement. Good reputations will build themselves.

    Online petitions and a well-funded legal challenge aside, South Fork local officials who are moving toward large-scale killing of deer, politely called culling, have a difficult time ahead. Leadership is never easy when policy gets mixed up in emotion, and wildlife management is one of the most emotional aspects of government. Few other issues draw as much attention and heat from the public, making the job of deciding how to proceed fraught with tension from the start. But rational, dispassionate policy-making must be foremost in such instances. The key for officials is studying precedents in other communities and what science says.

    The problems are well understood. A spike in deer populations in the eastern United States has come at the same time as sharp increases in the type and number of disease-carrying ticks. Deer cause huge and nearly unmeasurable damage to landscaping and crops. Those struck by vehicles often meet terrible, painful deaths, which are heart-wrenching for us. Deer have radically altered the forest understory in many places, leading to habitat loss for other native species, such as songbirds and small mammals, and threatening biodiversity.

    Deer are not the only large animals for which aggressive control measures are being taken. Black bears as nearby as suburban New Jersey have adapted to life close to people and are being targeted by wildlife managers. Time magazine featured a cover story this month about what it called America’s “pest problem.” Expanded hunting and professional harvests have been pursued from Florida to California. Closer to home, Block Island officials recently voted to hire sharpshooters to reduce the deer herd from 800 to 100 individuals, according to low estimates. The target there is to maintain the deer population at 10 to 15 per square mile.

    No one knows for sure precisely how many deer there are on the South Fork, and their distribution is not in even numbers across the island. The Town of East Hampton’s two surveys came in with widely disparate numbers — 877 in a March aerial study and 3,293 in a 2006 roadside count. Estimates of the density in East Hampton Town are all over the map, but could be as high as 100 per square mile. Though a clearer total should be known before a long-term program is undertaken, by all appearances there are just too many deer. There are few residents who have not at one time or another struck a deer on the road or had someone in the family touched by tick-borne illness. And now there is a rising count of people with a serious and life-threatening allergy to red meat caused by the bite of the lone star tick.

    Those opposed to hunting claim there is no valid link between deer and ticks, but scientific studies say otherwise. Large, warm-blooded hosts such as deer have been clearly implicated in this regard — one must not overlook that it is the deer tick that carries Lyme disease as well as babesiosis, ehrlichia, and borrelia. True, the rodents that larval ticks first feed on are believed to be the reservoirs for the illness-causing spirochetes, but it is undisputable that concentrations of all tick varieties have soared along with the deer’s numbers.

    A public health crisis is under way, with deer clearly implicated. Research has demonstrated that maintaining deer at 8 to 12 per square mile essentially eliminates ticks and the diseases in humans. Deer birth control has not proven to be an adequate alternative to hunting. Nor does applying pesticides at feeding stations solve the problems of habitat devastation and deer-vehicle collisions. It is also not acceptable for residents to have to avoid the woods and wild places for fear of ticks in other than the coldest months.

    Those passionately opposed to the planned killing appear to overlook the fact that the present environment is one in which nature’s balance has been overturned by centuries of human presence. In the case of deer and other highly adaptable wildlife, there still is no substitute for lethal management.

    Although the so-called 555 luxury housing project aimed at over-50 buyers in Amagansett is said to be dead, town board hearings on the creation of a new zoning classification for senior citizens, and on applying that zone to the roughly 25-acre 555 site, may well continue in the new year. The developers have not gone away and could be expected to consider alternate plans.

    In its initial version, Putnam Bridge, a Connecticut firm, hoped to build 89 units that could have produced as much as $100 million or more in sales. On Dec. 4, however, the Suffolk Planning Commission shot down the two zoning proposals, which had been crafted by the developers, by a stunning 11-to-2 margin. A town board vote to override the commission would require four of the five-member panel. As such, approval of the original plan appears extremely unlikely. This leaves what could happen on the property an open question.

    The 555 site, which for the most part has agricultural designation, comprises three parcels. Putnam Bridge bought it from the Principi family in 2012 for just over $10 million. The central portion is the largest, with 11.8 acres, and is most significant. Since cleared of scrubby vegetation some years ago, this part of the property has become a de facto Amagansett village green, hosting a number of events, most notably the annual Wounded Warrior Rock the Farm benefit and Soldier Ride. Because of this history, the project deserves a different kind of scrutiny by town officials.

    Ideally, the town might propose and the developers agree to a three-part solution. A truly affordable set of residences for those with low and moderate incomes could be approved for a portion of the easternmost lot, along Bunker Hill Road. This would comply with the comprehensive plan and allow greater residential density than its underlying zoning would otherwise permit. The western parcel, which has not been used for much to date, might be set aside for a limited number of market-rate apartments or a town house complex.

    Given the central section’s agricultural designation and its proximity to the Long Island Rail Road tracks, its value for high-end residences is limited anyway.

    It appears that the Principi family believed there were limited uses to which the central lot could be put and accepted only $1.7 million for it in 2012. That kind of sum might put its acquisition within the realm of affordability for the community preservation fund and allow it to continue to be used for benefits or perhaps recreational events.

    Putnam Bridge could develop the eastern and western parcels as allowed under current zoning and still make a profit. It would not be in the tens of millions as envisioned, but they should have understood that a luxury, 89-unit proposal was near to impossible going into it.

    A plan for the property along the lines of what we have proposed here could well be a win for all involved — including the community.

    The good news in a recent New York Times Science section story about sea level rise is that Montauk’s tide records lag behind those in places along the eastern United States coastline that are becoming inundated the fastest. The bad news is that the advantage is not by much. According to the numbers, the waters have come up about a foot every 100 years and are coming faster, with the greatest increases in the mid-Atlantic states. This means that the landward migration of the shoreline will continue unabated here, and even get faster. Property owners and local officials who ignore this are simply kidding themselves.

    In December, the Eastern Long Island Chapter of the Surfrider Foundation, an environmental group, issued a statement supporting major changes along the Montauk oceanfront. It called for one of the Army Corps of Engineers options: rebuilding protective dunes after removing several motels and residences that are now in harm’s way. This echoed a view expressed on this page earlier in 2013 to the effect that think-big solutions were the best choice.

    Pumping sand in front of exposed properties at this late stage would be a temporary solution at best and a waste of both money and precious time before a better one is at hand. Rather than outright property condemnation, however, town and federal officials should consider more creative redevelopment of the seaward edge of downtown Montauk, perhaps granting motel owners air rights over existing retail parcels or the use of nearby lots that are vacant or underutilized.

    Meanwhile, away from the most obvious at-risk spots, shoreline restoration projects continue. These, too, must be re-evaluated and incentives found to coax property owners into long-term decisions. East Hampton Town needs to rethink fast how it interacts with the waters that surround us. The sea will not wait while policymakers wonder what to do.

    Even after they are gone from office, the previous administration in East Hampton Town Hall continues to cause problems and in at least one case — an expected jump in fees for waste disposal — it appears to be by design. But former Supervisor Bill Wilkinson et al. do not deserve all the blame for the new board’s haste to increase fees. Before doing so, it must take a close look at what appears to be a bloated Sanitation Department.

    In a meeting this month, town board members were alerted to a roughly $300,000 hole in the sanitation fund, which was left in place by their predecessors. The 2014 town budget, approved in November, included more income from permit-cost hikes at the town’s two transfer stations, but the former board neglected to vote in increases in the cost of permits. Instead, it has fallen to Supervisor Larry Cantwell and the Democratic majority on the new board to approve sure-to-be-unpopular increases or come up with the money otherwise if it cannot make equivalent cuts.

    What’s unfortunate about this is that the sanitation fund is more or less a closed box — the deficit left by the previous administration must be filled from within because there is little room in the budget, constrained as it is by the state’s 2-percent tax-levy cap. Mr. Cantwell has said improved recycling rates may help, but that effect would be limited and take time to be realized.

    Under the newest proposal, the cost for most residents would rise 15 percent, to $115 for a household’s first permit. Those without permits would see the $10 per-trip fee doubled. Commercial haulers would see their costs go up as well, but by less-sharp margins. Though these increases may seem minor to some of those pulling in near-six-figure salaries in Town Hall, they would have a disproportionate impact on the many so-called self-haulers, a group probably least able to easily absorb the expense.

     An alternative, particularly for those who take only modest amounts of household waste to the transfer stations as well as for short-term or seasonal visitors, may be seen in Southampton Town. There, residents are required to buy specific green-tinted garbage bags for their garbage. The drop-off cost is included in the price, and recyclables are accepted without cost. In East Hampton on the other hand, residents must buy permits even if they take only glass, cardboard, and aluminum to the dump.

    One immediate advantage of the Southampton model is that because residents have to buy the bags, they almost instantly become frugal about their waste, producing less, compressing what they absolutely have to throw away into the smallest possible volume, and recycling more. It is a far more progressive and cost-efficient method than East Hampton’s.

    While East Hampton officials are at it, they also should take a close look at how Southampton runs its waste-disposal efforts. Excluding debt costs for both towns, East Hampton spends more than $1 million more a year on disposal even though Southampton has more than twice the population. Furthermore, Southampton Town has four transfer stations to East Hampton’s two, and two of Southampton’s four are open seven days a week; both of East Hampton’s are closed on Wednesdays.

    As for the number of employees, the disparity is glaring: Despite a larger operation, Southampton has fewer, 13 to East Hampton’s 19, and none makes more than $100,000 a year in combined salary and benefits as do two in East Hampton. Want more? The East Hampton Sanitation Department’s annual electric bill is more than twice Southampton’s. Why? Who knows, but this is among the myriad questions town officials should ask well before they rush to stick it to residents in the form of higher fees.