With a strongly worded letter from the Amagansett Citizens Advisory Committee, the East Hampton Town Board cannot now assume that a plan to make a host of legal problems disappear at Cyril’s Fish House on Napeague — and allow the seasonally overcrowded business to grow — has much, if any, public support. Nonetheless, the board is set to go ahead with a public hearing tonight on an ill-advised scheme to downzone the parcel on which the bar and restaurant sits and an undeveloped lot next door from a residential to business classification. Its only evident backer is Tina Piette, a prominent Amagansett lawyer formerly active with the town Republican Party.

    The town code is unequivocal: Nonconforming businesses like Cyril’s, which predate the adoption of zoning, are allowed to continue as long as they are not expanded. Strict review is supposed to be triggered when anything requiring a building permit is proposed for such properties, though in practice, the town has failed on many occasions to hold owners to that. In the case of Cyril’s, town records show more than a dozen structures added to the site without approval. By one count, as many as 26 zoning variances would be needed only to bring what already has been done there into legal compliance.

    The big problem with Cyril’s is not simply that it has expanded illegally, or that its owners want it to grow even more, it is that the town code does not have adequate provisions to control how it functions in the real world. Of a sunny summer Saturday afternoon, hundreds of patrons mill around its gravel parking lot and within the state highway right-of-way as they try to elbow their way to the bar. Forget about the seats and the seafood menu; this is all about hanging out with friends over a Bailey’s or a cream daiquiri or two.

    By late afternoon, as people leave the beach, vehicles can stretch far down both sides of Montauk Highway. Passing drivers slow and stare in amazement as mostly young patrons work their way along the shoulders. Double and triple-parked taxis make conditions even more dangerous. By early morning, Cyril’s plastic drink cups remain as unsightly reminders of the last evening’s revelry.

    Instead of considering how to reward Cyril’s owners for mocking town laws, the town board should look for ways to curb the numbers of outdoor patrons such establishments can host at any one time. The last time this question came up, however, Councilwoman Theresa Quigley proposed a wildly generous outdoor occupancy calculation that would have made things worse by allowing one guest for every seven square feet of usable space. As many as 1,400 bodies would have been permitted on a quarter-acre lawn, for example.

    The Cyril’s Fish House proposition now before the town is without merit. Why the board even agreed to consider it is, frankly, a mystery.

   As most anyone who has walked on the bay or ocean beaches here in the last week or so will attest, the past few decades’ development of our shoreline has finally, inevitably, run smack up against the almighty, eternal power of Mother Nature. That the challenges presented by the dual threats of intense coastal storms and rising sea level are daunting is an understatement. Dealing with the policy implications and the delicate balance between the public’s right to access the shore, the rights of private-property interests, and the interests of taxpayers will be incredibly difficult.

    As of this writing, details are few regarding a plan being prepared by an ad-hoc, volunteer committee for downtown Montauk. What has been said in public is that the Montauk oceanfront-hotel owners — very understandably desperate, and fighting for survival — want millions from the federal government’s Hurricane Sandy relief bill to build a sea wall, which would then supposedly be kept covered with sand paid for either through a special taxing district or in some form of public-private partnership.

    Making the notion of a Montauk wall appear tempting, however, is an estimated $750 million in post-Sandy money now set aside for the Army Corps of Engineers’ Fire Island to Montauk project. Though the corps has said that widening the beach and increasing the height of dunes may be the way to go, the funding from the relief bill will be spread over an 83-mile stretch — and will not last forever. At any rate, “hard” solutions, such as a wall or dune with a rock core, as may be in the so-far withheld committee plan, are not likely to gain regulatory approval anyway after the required environmental analysis is completed, so the sooner that idea is scrapped the better.

    Now, this wall-and-sand concept might work. But, then again, it might not. It will take better minds than ours — or those of any amateur — to determine if it would be the best choice. Which is why we believe the East Hampton Town Board, which chose the unpaid committee members, should immediately consult the very best academic and independent experts on coastal processes (and studiously avoid any of the snake-oil peddlers who now make a fine living from one scheme of “beach restoration” or another).

    Beyond Montauk, town agencies have, meanwhile, been handing out so-called emergency permits for work on private revetments and bulkheads at a rate that makes thorough environmental review of their impacts impossible.

    And then there are the town trustees, who are said to be looking into whether their authority has been usurped in some cases. It’s a mess, and no one appears to truly be in charge.

     Would condemning the shore-most row of Montauk structures and replacing them with a resilient dune line prove a more effective and beneficial plan for the future of that hamlet than building a wall? Until the experts are heard from, we just don’t know.

   In recent editions The Star has suggested priorities that should be on the respective political parties’ wish lists as they narrow their choices for candidates in East Hampton Town’s November election. Last week we said town leaders must show the ability to deal with preparing for climate change; the week before we talked about civility — particularly in Town Hall, which has devolved into a hissing pit of vendetta-nursing and vituperation. Today we consider the rule of law.

    Close readers can hardly have missed the recurring theme at East Hampton Town Hall, which has drifted into something like quasi-legality with Supervisor Bill Wilkinson and his closest ally, Councilwoman Theresa Quigley, figuring in far too many questionable things. For too long, perhaps, town residents were willing to give their shenanigans a pass since they were, after all, correcting a mess left by prior Town Supervisor Bill McGintee and feckless town board members, who ran up an unconscionable and huge internal debt by improperly shuffling money among town accounts. Now, however, looking to the future, voters must ask more of the parties and the people they put forward for town office, as well as those who will be named to the town’s zoning, planning, and other appointed boards.

     A couple of examples: From the outset, Mr. Wilkinson’s administration appeared to act outside the law in seeking to sell Fort Pond House in Montauk, despite strict state prohibitions on the casual jettisoning of parkland. Later, the town board approved a giant music festival on residential land in Amagansett with only cursory review and the acquiescence of the top town attorney, who counted the property’s owner among his handful of outside clients.

    This week attention was drawn to a lawsuit brought by an Amagansett property who had sought to overturn a town zoning board rejection but who amazingly won by default when the town failed to answer in court. In a November 2010 decision, the judge in the case wrote that East Hampton Town had “no intention to have the controversy on its merits.” No one has explained how or why the town attorney’s office did not respond, though speculation is spreading that it might have been by design.

    More recently, Mr. Wilkinson gave the go-ahead to several shoreline-protection measures that were outside the scope of his authority. He also appointed to an advisory committee a friend and local contractor who was partly responsible for the largest-ever fine by the tidal wetlands division of the State Department of Environmental Conservation. Lately, too, ordinance enforcers have essentially ignored whole sections of the town code, including those on signs, clearing, and outdoor illumination.

    In terms of land-use regulation, the record has been equally disturbing. The East Hampton Town Board has stood by idly as several major projects successfully evaded proper review. Moreover, in two egregious examples, that of the Dunes substance-abuse center in Northwest Woods and the Beach House hotel-cum-nightclub in Montauk, the supervisor was an early backer despite obvious questions about the projects’ compliance with town law. Then there is the issue of the East Hampton Town Comprehensive Plan and the separate Local Waterfront Revitalization Program, both of which have been routinely laughed off in recent years although they were the result of many hundreds of hours of effort and carry the force of law on matters large and small.

    Lest you think this is but history, next Thursday the town board is to consider changing the zoning of Cyril’s Fish House on Napeague from residential to commercial, even though the comprehensive plan flatly calls for restricting development along Montauk Highway there and one of the two parcels is included on the town’s list of properties eligible for open space preservation.

    Changing course in Town Hall must start at the top. The victorious candidates for town board and supervisor will have their work cut out for them. Well before Nov. 5, however, they must tell voters just exactly how they intend to set things right.

   It has been easy to get swept up in the excitement surrounding the selection of a new leader for the Catholic Church. Though Argentina, where the new pope, Pope Francis, comes from, is far away, he seems one of our own, a man of the Americas, the son of immigrants to this hemisphere, as well as an important, if perhaps indirect, voice and role model for a growing number of Spanish-speaking Catholic residents in the United States as a whole, as well as here on the East End.

    At an installation Mass in Vatican City on Tuesday the new pope declared that the church must work to protect the poor, the weak, and the planet. In his homily, he said, “Let us be protectors of creation, protectors of God’s plan inscribed in nature, protectors of one another and of the environment.” His was a message that all of us, whether religious or secular, can support.

    As the head of a church that counts some 1.2 billion people as members, Pope Francis is in a unique position. His vast bully pulpit can be a force for great good in the world, and Catholics can be rightly proud of the direction their cardinals have chosen.

   East Hampton Town Supervisor Bill Wilkinson famously once said, “We are the most transparent.” His point, of course, was that Town Hall during his tenure, in his view, has been going above and beyond the open-government mandate. Perhaps in one sense, if not the one intended, what he said was perfectly true: However loud the clamor and din in local politics, it has always been easy to discern the ideology-before-constituents philosophy behind much of what Mr. Wilkinson does. His motives and beliefs have never been obscured.

    But we certainly hope the next town board, when they are sworn in come January, will try rather harder to make East Hampton Town leadership (across party lines) more upfront about what they are actually doing, and that they will honestly dedicate themselves to compliance with the state Freedom of Information Law.

    For the past several weeks, we have been writing about some of the yardsticks by which the respective East Hampton nominating committees might evaluate prospective candidates. As the tops of the tickets appear to be solidifying, voters will want to keep tabs on where the hopefuls stand on the big-ticket items: sea-level rise, the rule of law, civility, and the principle of allowing town employees to do their jobs free of political interference. Then, as suggested above, comes the issue of open government: Will a candidate ensure that policy-making is done in the public view, and that the wishes of taxpayers and residents are taken into better consideration?

    Consider these areas of concern, from the past few years, relating to open government: Freedom of Information requests unanswered; a code enforcement department that refuses to share details about its day-to-day performance; last-minute circulation of board agendas; hasty and ill-thought-out mass-gathering approvals, and precipitous, highly charged “walk-on” resolutions at town meetings.

    As for listening-to-the-public problems, consider: the elimination of leaf pickup, the putative sale of Fort Pond House in Montauk, the lunatic notion of down-zoning the seasonally out-of-control bar crowd at Cyril’s Fish House on Napeague, and the airport decision, which affects thousands of residents across four townships.

    Government in the United States, particularly at the town and village level, is a cooperative and collaborative undertaking between elected leaders and those they lead. Have you attended an East Hampton Town Board meeting (or watched one on LTV) in recent years? They are, in our opinion, a prime example of how not to cooperate and collaborate. November’s office-seekers need to do more than simply mouth the phrases “open government,” “commitment to transparency,” and “respect for constituents.”

   At East Hampton Town Hall these days, when you think you have seen it all, someone down there on Pantigo Road goes and does something really unexpected. This time it involves a dead whale, heavy equipment, and who pays the bill.

    When a 58-foot-long dead finback washed up on the Napeague beach on Jan. 13, it was a minor sensation. Crowds came for a look; the Riverhead Foundation red-jackets swooped in to give the leviathan a final exam. Then, Town Hall decided to have the fetid mass of bone and blubber cut up and carted away. Problem is, the $7,500 bill ended up being handed to the East Hampton Town Trustees, even though the trustees, a separate elected body, had apparently not been consulted about disposing the whale. The trustees were predictably surprised and upset.

    This comes at a moment when the trustees have brought suit against the town zoning board, seeking to reverse approval of a Lazy Point sea wall, which was backed by one of East Hampton Town Supervisor Bill Wilkinson’s closest political cronies. Could sending the bill to the trustees be payback? Ya think?

   Another oddball case reached the East Hampton Town Zoning Board of Appeals this week. (Ever notice how the most controversial ones tend to be scheduled for the depths of February?) The question put before the board Tuesday was whether the Dunes, a high-priced, inpatient drug and alcohol rehabilitation center in a residential neighborhood in Northwest Woods, can continue to operate legally as a semi-public facility without a town permit. The town’s top building inspector says it cannot; the Dunes’s lawyers say the question is irrelevant. And in this controversy, we get a glimpse, once again, of just how dysfunctional the town’s land-use oversight has become.

    First, what the town code allows:

    The Dunes, which opened in 2010, occupies residentially zoned land, on which only single-family houses are approved as a matter of course. More intensive uses of residential property are permissible only after exhaustive review, and they are subject to strict limits. As set out in the regulations, single-family houses are to be lived in by their owners or rented to others (although not groups) not more than two times in a calendar year. Home offices and limited “home occupations” are okay, too, as are the rentals of one or two guest rooms or an apartment — provided the property owner lives there too. Semi-public facilities can occupy residential sites as well, but only if they are approved by either the town zoning or planning boards or both and obtain a permit. Semi-public buildings are defined in the code as ­churches, old-age homes, museums, schools, clinics, and hospitals, among similar things. 

    Next, what the Dunes says it does, according to press reports and its own Web site and releases:

    It is an upscale addiction-recovery center occupying some 7,300 square feet of space, providing meals prepared by an on-site chef, and sleeping accommodations for up to 16 patients at a time. It boasts a 3-to-1 “staff-to-client” ratio, and it offers psychiatry, spiritual counseling, art therapy, acupuncture, and legal advice, along with in-house housekeepers, laundry personnel, and drivers. Clients can be whisked from regional airports by private car to the center, where they are admitted and given a battery of physical and psychological exams, according to the Dunes’s Web site. Stays can run from 30 days up to three months at a cost said to run about $45,000 a month, according to a Bloomberg Business Week story in which the  founder was quoted. A course of treatment of 90 days has been described as the preference of the center’s directors. The property owners, as best we can tell, rent the site to the rehab’s operators and live elsewhere.

    Complicating things is a federal discrimination lawsuit, now temporarily on hold, brought by the Dunes against the town over the building inspector’s reversal of an earlier determination, which gave it the green light. The building inspector has claimed that the facility’s initial application for a building permit made false statements about its scope and nature of operations by stating that its clients would live there together as a family for no fewer than 11 months a year. Adding to the bizarre aspects of all this, the Dunes had written support early on, when gaining its state license to operate as a substance abuse clinic, from East Hampton Town Supervisor Bill Wilkinson, John Jilnicki, the town attorney, and East Hampton Town Police Chief Eddie Ecker.

    Separately, a group of neighbors has organized against the Dunes, protesting the clinic’s noise, traffic, landscaping, and even “loud outdoor therapy sessions.” The opponents point out on their Web site that this kind of unauthorized business could appear anywhere in the Town of East Hampton without revitalized zoning enforcement. They are right, of course. The fact that the rehabilitation center has continued to operate undermines the credibility of the town’s land-use rules.

    It will be surprising if the zoning board does not uphold the building inspector’s ruling that further review is needed. But in this town, these days, anything is possible.

   An announcement Monday by Suffolk Legislator Jay Schneiderman that he will not be a candidate for East Hampton Town supervisor comes as something of a disappointment. Knowing the headaches of the job all too well from his two terms in the post before winning a county seat, Mr. Schneiderman may well have been shrewd to opt out of a bid for the Republican nomination. This apparently leaves the local G.O.P. without an obvious choice since the incumbent supervisor, Bill Wilkinson, has not been screened by the committee and, in any event, appears unelectable, having only narrowly regained the post last year — by 15 votes — and then proceeded to continue his scorched-earth policies as if he had all the mandate in the world.

    It is likely that Mr. Schneiderman would have given the presumptive Democratic committee choice, Larry Cantwell, a meaningful challenge. Mr. Cantwell, a former town councilman and 30-year East Hampton Village administrator, has a far longer record of public service than Mr. Schneiderman. But Mr. Schneiderman, whose Town Hall years were distinguished by the absence of controversy, has no doubt gained experience and savvy in his six terms as a legislator. The exchange of ideas in a campaign between the men is likely to have been civil and at a level of credibility not seen recently.

    Either candidate, if victorious in November, would likely have been able to right the badly listing ship that is East Hampton Town government. A further example of how dysfunctional things have become emerged this week when the Suffolk Planning Commission cautioned those backing a harebrained scheme to change from residential to business the Cyril’s Fish House property and an adjacent vacant parcel on Napeague. The commission bluntly said that the shift would be illegal “spot zoning.” Making things worse, the vacant parcel is on the town’s preservation want-list and has a protected environmental classification. This echoes an ongoing controversy in which the town improperly dug a drainage pit on property in open defiance of the fact that the development rights had been bought by the county years ago. If nothing else, the outcome of a contest between Mr. Cantwell and Mr. Schneiderman would have been one in which steady competency was assured and these kind of debacles averted

    Faced with no obvious fall-back person, the town Republican committee would do well to take its time before settling on a candidate. As we have said in previous editorials, the challenges facing the next generation of men and women in Town Hall may be the greatest ever arrayed. These include coping with rising sea level, assuring groundwater and environmental protections, controlling development, managing growth, and reducing political influence on appointed boards. Oh, and don’t forget the public nuisance that East Hampton Airport continues to be.

    Only the best qualified people should be considered by the respective nominating committees. This very special place we call home deserves no less.

   Whether it is a petition in Montauk, pleading with the school board to increase the tax levy to keep class sizes small, or a parent uprising in East Hampton over the ouster of the elementary school principal, democracy in the districts is in good evidence this season, at least in the sense that the aggrieved have exercised their right to speak their minds. Not so among some school board members, who apparently think the position gives them the right, if not the obligation, to conduct important business in secret.

    In the matter of Gina Kraus, the well-liked principal of the John M. Marshall Elementary School, the East Hampton School Board president, George Aman, has repeatedly said  he cannot discuss the reasons behind a pending decision not to grant her tenure. His board, which is not alone in appearing to routinely stretch the state’s open government rules, may be stifled by a misperception that it is forbidden to say anything at all about Ms. Kraus or why she is apparently being returned to a teaching role. “It’s not that we are ignoring or not listening. It’s that we’re publicly forbidden to deal with these issues,” Mr. Aman said. But this, in short, is simply not true.

    According the New York State Committee on Open Government, records that are relevant to the performance of a public officer or employee (which Ms. Kraus certainly is) should be available. By this logic, factual details about Ms. Kraus pertaining to why she should not get tenure or remain on as principal must be disclosed. Put another way, records that shed light on her official duties are a matter of public interest and would not be an invasion of her privacy if shared. Under state law, a discussion of Ms. Kraus’s qualifications and performance can take place in an executive session portion of an otherwise open meeting, but the records and the facts on which the conversation may be based themselves are public.

    At a recent school board meeting, the East Hampton High School library was filled to overflowing with Ms. Kraus’s supporters. But, before they had a chance to speak, Mr. Aman and Richard Burns, the district superintendent, laid the ground rules: The audience could speak, but school officials would have nothing to say in response. Unfortunately, this left an untoward vacuum of the board’s and Mr. Burns’s making.

    There may be perfectly valid reasons for Ms. Kraus’s apparent demotion, but until the school board and the superintendent offer some clue about their thinking, suspicion and bitterness will linger.

   A milestone on the Congressional scene came to our attention recently: Loosely speaking, you can say the Democratic Caucus in the House of Representatives is majority minority. Of the 200 House Democrats, 147 were either African-Americans, Latinos, Asians, women, or gay. A Latino man, Rep. Xavier Becerra of California, heads the House Democratic Caucus.

    The 113th Congress is also the most diverse ever over all, with 81 black or Latino members, of which 74 are Democrats. There are 98 women in Congress, again, mostly Democrats, and 7 openly gay members, all Democrats. On the Republican side, much has been made of a few stars, notably Florida Senator Marco Rubio, the son of Cuban immigrants. But, counting numbers, Republicans are far whiter and more male than the Democrats, and they have work to do if they want to more closely reflect the composition of the country. But then again, so does Congress.

    Though the population of the United States is now more than a third minority, only 15 percent of the men and women in the two chambers identify themselves as other than non-Hispanic whites. Despite gains, women remain underrepresented, with only about 18 percent of the total in both Houses, even though they constituted about 51 percent of the national population in the 2010 Census.

    Locally, as Councilwoman Theresa Quigley pointed out in a February meeting of the East Hampton Town Board, there are few Latinos on any of the town’s appointed or elected boards. She put forward a Latino man and an African-American woman for positions on the licensing review board, but politics interfered and the nominations foundered. Whether these particular candidates were right for the posts we cannot say, but the general idea of getting more minority representation in Town Hall is an important one.

    As a whole, though, Americans can be proud of the progress in the House of Representatives and the example it sets for the rest of the nation.