East Hampton Town should not seek or accept additional funding from the Federal Aviation Administration until there is agreement on what strings would be attached.

    These conditions, or strings, could be significant. As best we understand it after listening to statements at hundreds of hours of meetings and reading and writing about airport battles for decades, there is a demonstrable, if slight, advantage if the town gets out from under the so-called grant assurances made in earlier deals with the F.A.A.

    After all the talk, it boils down to this: Without grant assurances, the town would have a marginally better chance of success in imposing curfews and other noise-curtailing measures than it would if it continued to take federal money. Take the money, and the town may be committed to negligible control and a more difficult process if it tries to set its own landing and takeoff rules. In either scenario, the law requires any actions the town takes to be “reasonable, non-arbitrary, and not unjustly discriminatory.” And, if a new rule goes into effect as expected, communities that have taken money from the F.A.A. may soon have an even greater hurdle to surmount.

    Pilots en masse appear to support further ties to Washington based on the fear that a future town board could close the airport altogether in the absence of a federal contract to the contrary. Their anxiety has been fanned by special interests, such as the Eastern Region Helicopter Council, which paid for a study that hyped the airport’s contribution to the local economy and further raised the specter of its being shut down. But this narrow view pits neighbors against resident aircraft owners, who are in effect acting as proxies for those who stand to profit from unfettered access — or those very fortunate few who prefer to arrive in their Gulfstreams at whatever hour of the day or night they please.

    Noise-control advocates have been painted unfairly as “airport opponents.” This is a convenient fiction based on the misperception that the Quiet Skies Coalition and others have a secret agenda. Sure, there may be one or two outliers for whom tearing up the tarmac sounds like a good idea, but the majority of residents here and in nearby towns would just like the airport to be less loud and its future growth limited. Unfortunately, by hardening their position, aviation interests may only be increasing the possibility of their own apocalyptic vision as community outrage rises.

    Airport policy cannot be held hostage by those who put profit or personal convenience ahead of the common good. Any measures, no matter how small, that can aid in the fight against noise should be welcomed by all.

   In terms of economic impact and value to residents, the proposed conversion of a 35,000-square-foot building in the East Hampton Town Industrial Park from a film and television studio to long-term storage should rank at the bottom of the list. Few jobs would be created, and they are likely to be low-paying. In community and cultural terms, storage is pretty much a black hole. We believe that the town could do a whole lot better.

     East Hampton Studios and its sound stage was constructed as a media center more than a decade ago. Conceding that the $5 million investment did not turn out to be the boon its founder, Frazer Dougherty, had hoped, a storage facility would be a step backward, even considering the mixed record of success. Since 2007, the facility has been run by Michael Wudyka, who told the town board last month that an unnamed storage company was ready to take over the space. The problem for him — and any new tenant — is that the town owns and leases the land at a low, subsized cost and that it is part of the East Hampton Airport property, over which the Federal Aviation Administration may have a say.

    As the town board considers whether to allow Mr. Wudyka’s longstanding deal to go to the storage firm, many options and competing needs should be examined. Among obvious alternatives would be the building’s use as workshops or garages for contractors, pool companies, and landscapers. Town officials have been puzzling in recent months about what to do about commercial vehicles parked on small residential parcels in Springs and elsewhere; providing a suitable site for them at East Hampton Studios might be viable.

    Thinking somewhat more broadly, the building might be converted for use by food producers and vendors — kind of like East Hampton’s own Hunt’s Point, the giant wholesale complex in the Bronx. East Hampton has a burgeoning local food sector in which residents are making everything from table salt to beer. As a story in this newspaper noted last week, a number of bakers and other local entrepreneurs have had to make do during off-hours in restaurant and church kitchens. Providing a centrally located semi-public alternative might make sense — and help support dozens of jobs.

    Since revenues are less of a concern now that the Town of East Hampton is in better financial shape, another option would be to divide the huge space into artists’ studios. The region was once among the most important on the American modern art scene, but that exalted position has dimmed, thanks in part to the impossible cost of real estate here. Nurturing creativity by providing artists with work space might well be in the community’s best interest.

    Now is the time for town leaders to think big and to ask themselves and the taxpayers — perhaps at a dedicated town meeting — to envision the best possible future for a building that should, and could, be a community asset.

   Misplaced skepticism marred a meeting this week about an East Hampton Town effort to draft a wastewater management plan. Critics suggested, wrongly, that it was a clandestine effort to force scores of property owners to undertake expensive, unnecessary improvements to their septic systems, perhaps even one sold by a business with which a town consultant has a professional relationship. They also questioned whether further protecting the health of the aquifers, which we rely on for drinking water, and of surface waters, such as bays, ponds, and harbors, was something the town even should be considering without asking the public ahead of time.

    The first point is hardly worth addressing, except to say that dark, conspiratorial phantoms are simply that, and the conflict of interest issue has been addressed. As to the second, it is unfortunate to have to remind the critics of a little document called the East Hampton Town Comprehensive Plan.

    We tend to forget now, but work on the plan took years and involved contributions from many, many residents and outside experts. Following that, it was the subject of extensive public hearings, and a few scattered outbursts of litigation, before becoming both law and a statement about how, collectively, we envisioned the future of our town.

    Unfortunately, even a carefully constructed plan, like this, is only as good as the people who are supposed to enforce it, and it was shunted to the dustbin by the imperious East Hampton Town supervisor, Bill Wilkinson, who said he viewed it as little more than a “snapshot” in time. To invert a famous phrase, “Avant moi, le deluge!” has seemed to be the mantra at the Town Hall executive suite for four long years as far as work of preceding administrations is concerned.

    Reading this week through the comprehensive plan, which was completed in 2005, one notices again and again references to water quality. These include encouraging statements like “The harbors and bays are among the cleanest in the state,” and top recommendations such as “Take forceful measures to protect and restore the environment, particularly groundwater.” There was no mystery then, as now, that this subject was — and is — extremely important.

    Awareness of the inherent value of water quality has been known for decades here. A seminal federal study of the South Fork’s groundwater was completed in 1982. Five years later, New York State created nine groundwater protection areas on Long Island, two of which were within East Hampton Town. And, looking back at the earliest days of zoning here, water concerns were among the basic, and clearly legitimate, reasons for limiting development.

    A degree of urgency arises when one considers that several East Hampton waterways are seasonally closed to shellfishing or have been declared “impaired” by state authorities. This underscores the worrisome fact that we simply do not know if protection measures in the town code now are sufficient and will be adequate to cope with increased growth.

    It is the same story with drinking water, especially from private wells. What data planners can use to gauge present and future needs is outdated and should be re-evaluated. The experts now working on the town’s new plan are taking all this into consideration and have excellent credentials to produce a meaningful report.

     Opposition to the new town effort to identify and manage impacts to groundwater is largely political and should be viewed that way. Residents are fortunate that there is a majority on the East Hampton Town Board willing to duck the barbs and baseless fears to move forward with this detailed review.

   Sagaponack Village wants a police department of its own, or at least its village board and a number of residents do, though debate is ongoing. The arguments in favor of a force of the village’s own are compelling.

    Money is the first consideration. The amount paid for police services this year to the Town of Southampton, of which the hamlet is a part, was a substantial $2.3 million. For that sum, Sagaponack should be getting much more in the way of year-round patrols and enforcement of traffic laws. Supporting this view, the Village of Sag Harbor actually budgeted less for its own 10-member department in the 2013-14 fiscal year than Sagaponack. This comparison makes it seem that Sagaponack residents are being ripped off — or at least helping to subsidize police activities in other parts of town.

    Beyond the cost, the most persuasive reason for a Sagaponack department is the police’s important public-safety role. Police are first responders, even before emergency medical technicians are mobilized. In the vast majority of the 911 calls that result in an ambulance being dispatched, an officer is the first on the scene, which is why most patrol cars are outfitted with oxygen and automatic emergency defibrillators. When every second counts, as in a heart attack or extreme injury, getting well-trained personnel to where they are needed as soon as possible can make the difference between life and death. An aging population makes rapid medical aid frequently required, and police are an important part of that equation.

    Crime and road-type mayhem, it must be said, is minimal in Sagaponack. This is due, we suspect, to the prevalence of security alarms in the area’s often-palatial houses and to the village’s small resident population. Vandals and burglars are not likely to live here. Nor are weekend hedge-funders likely to take to a life of prosaic transgression. Drunken drivers may be fewer than in other places, aside from on Route 27. However, getting village residents their money’s worth in terms of a police presence — as well as assuring the fastest possible emergency responses — are goals well worth pursuing.

   Having spent nearly $1 million to design, install, and maintain a culvert linking Gardiner’s Bay and Accabonac Harbor, East Hampton Town has allowed it to fill with sand, essentially rendering a giant investment of public money useless. The Gerard Drive project was long envisioned as a way to improve water quality in the harbor by providing it with a second tidal opening. To remain functional, however, the culvert needed the sand, which otherwise would accumulate and shut it off, regularly removed.

    For the first time this year, the town did not have the culvert cleared. The explanation was that there had been a conflict over testing with the State Department of Environmental Conservation and that the town’s director of natural resources sought water-quality samples from the harbor without the culvert’s presumed flushing effect. This would give the town a baseline from which to compare whether maintaining the culvert, at a cost of roughly $15,000 a year, was worthwhile.

    The decision to skip sand removal this year may have been defensible from a scientific point of view, but it was poor policy. Having sunk so much public money into the project over the years, from taxes and state grants, residents were entitled to a working culvert — or at least an open discussion of its merits and eventual fate.

    Accabonac Harbor remains one of East Hampton’s marine ecosystem jewels. Consensus appears to hold that the culvert will help keep it that way. It should be restored to full performance as soon as practical.

   Southampton Town officials are confronting a riddle about how to protect 14 Bridgehampton farm acres owned by the Peconic Land Trust. Ronald Lauder gave the property to a precursor of the land trust years ago. Unfortunately, the deal did not include restrictions on what the trust eventually could do with the property, and it even can be sold for house lots. Now the trust has asked Southampton to buy the development rights on the land, using money from the community preservation fund transfer tax, and it has threatened to put the farmland on the market if the town doesn’t come through.

    The public-relations problem for both parties comes from a misperception that the land is already preserved. Technically, it has not been, but the sense still is that the preservation fund should not be tapped unnecessarily. The trust says it would use the money to save more land, perhaps as much as 100 acres of additional farmland. Opponents say not so fast: The fund was not created to help underwrite the activities of private organizations. To them, the proposal looks a lot like extortion.

    Southampton officials should call the Peconic Land Trust’s bluff. We hate to say it, given the land trust’s positive record, but if the group wants to go ahead and put itself out of business as a preservation organization, town officials should respond, “Be our guest.” Public reaction to the trust’s selling off farmland for development would be swift and severe — and diminish the confidence of future donors. We hope that the trust would not take that almost-certainly fatal step.

    With the Town of Southampton as a partner, the land trust can continue to help broker deals to conserve farmland it believes needs saving. Engaging in risky and adversarial brinkmanship is the wrong approach.

    Plans for downtown Montauk’s ocean shoreline are to be presented at East Hampton Town Hall today, and all concerned, particularly owners of properties to the west, should pay close attention.

    The Army Corps of Engineers is expected to present at least three options. In order of least to most disruptive, they are a sand-only beach replenishment proposal, an 11-foot-high stone seawall to be buried initially with sand, and a series of groins, also known as jetties, spanning more than a half mile. Money for the project would come from federal millions earmarked for Long Island in Hurricane Sandy relief. Work could begin as soon as next fall.

    Nowhere in the material that we have seen does the Army Corps offer the option that nearly all coastal experts recommend — a managed retreat from the shore. And this is a shame. Time and again, Army Corps projects have failed to adequately protect the broad public interest. Now its armor-first mentality threatens long-term destruction of the ocean beaches.

    The risk is real that federal funding will dwindle away over time, leaving local taxpayers responsible for the full cost of maintaining the expensive sand replenishment required under any of the Corps’ Montauk options. Consider that funding for work in the nearly 50-year-long Fire Island to Montauk Reformulation Study only came as an add-on to Congress’s post-Sandy handouts. One expects such largess to be available only once every couple of decades, leaving someone else on the hook for repetitive annual costs, in all likelihood. Backers of a special taxation district for Montauk sand replenishment know this, which is why, in one early iteration of their effort, they sought to impose a new tax on every property in the hamlet.

    Local support for anything the Corps promotes must be contingent on a full understanding of the costs involved, not in year 1, but for 10, 20, 30, or more years. Equally important will be for the Town of East Hampton to hire a team of independent experts to review all of the options before reaching a conclusion.

    In the rush for a solution, irreparable harm could be done to our most cherished public asset, the beaches. And, equally bad, future generations could be left paying for today’s mistakes. If ever there was a time to slow down and get it right, it is now.

    Today’s meeting is at 11 a.m. in Town Hall. All concerned about East Hampton’s future should be there.

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An earlier version of this editorial said that the work could begin in December. An Army Corps public information spokesman said Thursday that the most-likely start date would be no earlier than the fall.

   One of the unfortunate aspects of a very strange time for the East Hampton Town Board is that the public — as well as the two minority party members — rarely know in advance what subjects will be discussed at meetings.

    Going back several years now, agendas for town board meetings, which are supposed to come from the office of the supervisor, have not been available until a scant few hours before their starting times. Oddly, however, annotated versions of upcoming meeting agendas have been circulated by Councilwoman Theresa Quigley from her private e-mail account rather than an official one.

    The agenda gap extends to other town entities, but not all; some manage to alert the public to what they are up to well in advance. The zoning board of appeals, whose procedures are set in detail by town and state law, does so, providing detailed explanations of meetings and hearings. In fact, the Z.B.A. is an example of how it could and should be done. On the other hand, the architectural review board and, surprising perhaps, the planning board make it difficult for laypersons to figure out what is coming up.

    East Hampton Town Clerk Fred Overton, who is running for a seat on the town board, knows about the agenda problem first-hand. His office is responsible for posting notices, notably on townclerk.com, an online portal designed for this purpose. This week, for example, the agenda of Tuesday’s town board work session appeared only at the last minute and one for tonight’s meeting was not available at press time yesterday morning. It would be good to hear how Mr. Overton and the other candidates for town office think these procedures can be improved.

    Public participation in government is based on knowledge. East Hampton can only benefit from making access to the process open — and easy.

    The Army Corps of Engineers’ options for downtown Montauk and its beaches are just not good enough and will only pass the problem on to future leaders and generations. Moreover, the prospect of a multimillion-dollar undertaking using money approved by Congress for Hurricane Sandy relief gives rise to questions about the ethical, perhaps even legal, basis on which the plans are based.

    Even though the Army Corps is under the impression that East Hampton has reached agreement on how to proceed, it is critical to understand that there is no consensus here about what to do. The town board has not voted, nor has there been much official discussion. If there is to be public participation in decision-making, residents must demand loudly to be heard. And be heard they must. Simply hoping elected officials will come to their senses is not enough. The only sensible path is to slow down and call in the most qualified independent planning and coastal-process experts. There is no indication that town officials are considering this, which makes public pressure downtown Montauk’s only hope.

    The fault is not necessarily with the Army Corps; it does what it was set up to do, that is, build walls — and sometimes not all that well. Rather it is a long-term failure of vision and guts. This is made worse by local officials’ being sold on a wrong-headed direction by those who stand to benefit economically. What is needed is not advice from those who know how to move sand around, but top-level community planners able to re-envision the area so that it will be both commercially viable and resilient to the sea for a generation or more.

    Downtown Montauk’s problems have their origin in the ur-developer Carl Fisher’s ill-fated decision to site the commercial center of the hamlet where it should not have been. The hotels and shops are on a low, narrow isthmus between the ocean and Fort Pond. Indeed, a motorist on the Montauk Highway today can look toward the Atlantic and see breaking waves at tire level. It was a dumb place to put a commercial center in the first place and the choice seems all the more foolish now, knowing what we do about the shore.

    Montauk’s predicament is also not really the result of Hurricane Sandy, Hurricane Irene, or any of the recent years’ northeasters. In fact, the landward migration of the shoreline has gone on more or less unimpeded for decades. Nonetheless, Montauk restoration would share in the money Congress appropriated for hurricane relief. It is troubling to reflect on this at a time when other areas suffered far more serious losses during Sandy, leaving many people broke, still without homes, or inadequately compensated by flood insurance.

    What should have been an important basis for the proposed work — an economic assessment prepared at Town Supervisor Bill Wilkinson’s behest — is an amateurish, overstated hodgepodge without meaningful citations to back up its claims. And, worse, the supervisor has refused to make it available to those who have asked. From a copy we have seen, it appears the report was written by the First Coastal Corporation, which specializes in beach engineering projects and, as such, is hardly a disinterested party.

    Other attempts at backroom dealing have poisoned much support for the process. As it turned out, Mr. Wilkinson agreed only begrudgingly to allow residents to attend a recent presentation by the Army Corps, preferring, by his own admission, to be briefed privately.

    East Hampton Town cannot evade the question of whether it is appropriate for United States taxpayers’ money granted for Sandy relief to be used on what is essentially a false premise. At the very least, East Hampton owes it both to Congress and the American people to make sure that the millions in aid is spent responsibly. It would be deeply embarrassing, even immoral, if, 10 or 20 years from now, the town again had its hand out, essentially conceding that it failed the first time around.

    To be clear: Unless the public is ready to pay for expensive and unending sand-pumping from offshore sources, seawalls will inevitably result in the loss of the beach. By definition, seawalls are only installed in areas subject to beach loss; no one would bother otherwise. And without sand replenishment, there will be no beach. Take a look, for example, at the illegally expanded rock edifice defending the Montauk Shores Condominium just east of Ditch Plain. The result has been the loss of free passage along the shore — something that is supposed to be assured by the state’s public trust doctrine.

    If there ever was a moment to think big, this is it. Montauk’s long-term solution could well include a combination of approaches, including one that has not been mentioned so far. This would be for the town to creatively use the power of eminent domain to remove the first row of downtown Montauk’s residences and outdated hotels, and to give their owners the right to rebuild inland, in particular on the second block in from the beach.

    Consider that much of this area contains vacant or underutilized lots; one even has been given over to a municipal rest room. But wait, you say, what about the businesses already there? There is an answer for that, too. The owners of these retail properties could return to their original locations in new, modern spaces on the ground floors of the rebuilt hotel and residential complexes, all of which would be built to the highest hurricane-proofing standards and environmentally sustainable design.

    In the place of the former first row of developed properties, the Army Corps could build a high, protective dune, to be crossed at reasonable distances by walkways from an elevated boardwalk linking the new commercial downtown to a wide, gorgeous beach. It would be, in fact, somewhat like what Fisher had envisioned in his 1920s master plan, only this time taking the ocean’s ongoing threat into account.

    Conceding that this is a back-of-the-napkin concept, we nonetheless believe that such a radical project would buy not just 10 or 20 years’ protection at an ongoing and unknowable cost, but perhaps 50 or 75 years or more at an initially high, but limited cost. It would, frankly, be better for all parties concerned, not the least of whom would be tomorrow’s taxpayers, who would not have to pay to forever dump sand on top of today’s mistakes.

    It could happen this way or it might take another direction, but it is up to residents to make sure that everyone understands the stakes. What needs to happen is a very focused and guided public identification of costs, impact on property owners and the environment, and long-term maintenance expenses followed by a clear, systematic articulation of the community’s agreed-upon goals — and only then a decision. Thinking small will produce no answers.

    Ian Calder-Piedmonte called it like it is at a recent meeting of the East Hampton Town Planning Board, of which he is a member, when it considered yet again a massive Amagansett housing complex. In response to an apparent, and repeated, threat by the project’s Connecticut-based developer to put up affordable workforce housing there, Mr. Calder Piedmonte said, “I’m not so sure that we should be afraid of affordable housing.”

    The site in question is a 23-plus-acre group of parcels just east of the Amagansett I.G.A. Its new owner envisions a 79-unit village of sorts, with restrictions so that only people of a certain age could buy in. Prices would range from apartments at $550,000 to more than a $1 million apiece for two-story, stand-alone houses. A big impediment stands in the way, however.

    Nowhere in the East Hampton Town Code is there accommodation for such a plan. Moreover, the town comprehensive plan, adopted into law in 2005, specifically forbids this level of intensive development for the property. In order to proceed, the project’s backers would have to get the town board to establish an entirely new zoning category. Doing so with a single proposal in mind would be illegal spot-zoning.

    While existing land-use categories can, and sometimes should, be amended due to changing conditions in a community, doing so in opposition to the framework laid down in a comprehensive plan is expressly prohibited. Given this, it is, frankly, ridiculous that town officials, including planning board members, have wasted any time on the 555 Montauk Highway II application at all. Several planning board members told the developer just that during the Sept. 11 meeting at which Mr. Calder-Piedmonte spoke. Their message was that the discussion was moot until the town board weighs in. But the buck cannot stop there.

    If nothing else, the idea of a new, high-end housing zone exclusively for wealthy older residents should be debated by the five candidates for East Hampton Town Board. It is too great a question to entrust the embittered, lame-duck Wilkinson majority with, we are afraid. Weakening the comprehensive plan to allow for greater residential density along the town’s sole major roadway is serious business and requires maximum public involvement. Nov. 5’s voting could be seen as a referendum on the concept if concerns about its legality could even be resolved by then and the question became a campaign issue.

    Perhaps the developer’s hidden agenda in asking for pie-in-the-sky and an extreme favor from the town board is to build public pressure for the land’s purchase using money from the community preservation fund. Otherwise, unless he thought the fix was in, why would he seek something both prohibited under current zoning and at odds with the comprehensive plan?

    If there is one thing almost everyone here agrees on, it is that East Hampton needs more decent housing for its working people to live in and raise their families. What it does not need is more luxury development. Town officials should call the developer’s bluff. The worst that could happen is that there would be affordable housing there, and, as Mr. Calder-Piedmonte essentially said, how bad would that be?