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.

   Just over 10 years ago this week, we wrote on this page that the Bush administration’s push toward an invasion of Iraq might do more to harm the cause of world peace than advance it. History has borne out the fears of many (if far too few in national positions of authority or in control of major media) that the war was unjustified, unwise, and a waste of untold lives. And now, as the Obama White House continues its infatuation with unmanned drones, killing not just terrorists but United States citizens and unarmed noncombatants, it is worth remembering that violence begets more violence.

    In the Feb. 13, 2003, issue of this newspaper we wrote: “If the objective is to assert power in the oil-rich region and remake the Arab world in our image, then invasion may be necessary. Given that the link between Iraq and Al Qaeda presented by [Colin] Powell was speculative, terrorism cannot be a justification for putting our troops at risk, increasing the threat to other Mideast countries, and killing Iraqi civilians . . . it now seems nearly impossible that war, with its attendant carnage and regional destabilization, will be avoided.”

    We, and those who shared this view, were right in the end. The Iraq war has been decried as the worst foreign policy decision in U.S. history. One thing we were wrong about, however, was a hope that the war might be over quickly. Our last major troop deployments in Iraq ended in late 2011, but the havoc caused continues on. Whether we as a nation learned anything at all remains impossible to gauge.

   “Just hang in there, kiddo” was the parting shot from Supervisor Bill Wilkinson to wrap up a sharp-toned exchange with Councilman Peter Van Scoyoc at last Thursday’s East Hampton Town Board meeting. Unfortunately, this kind of puerile jab is all too frequent among the town’s elected leaders.

    Much of the blame must be placed with the acerbic Mr. Wilkinson, who sets the tone as the board’s titular head. But he is far from alone in pointless, time-wasting ire. His ally on the board, Councilwoman Theresa Quigley, is no stranger to pointed barbs and facile dismissals, and the pair find eager sparring partners in Councilwoman Sylvia Overby and Councilman Van Scoyoc. To his credit, Councilman Dominick Stanzione appears to have supped from a different cup, rarely joining the fray — even in the face of direct affronts from Mr. Wilkinson or members of the public.

    True to form, on Tuesday, the bickering got out of hand. “I feel as if I’m in high school,” Councilwoman Overby said, to which Councilwoman Quigley responded, “I feel as if I’m in grammar school because that’s your level of intellect.”

    This may be good theater for town board watchers, but all the agita has real-world consequences. Absent basic courtesy among elected officials of the sort we were all supposedly taught as children, the town as a whole has suffered. Prospects for progress on even the most mundane issues is minimized. It is fair to say that if the board cannot resolve routine matters in a peaceable and effective way, there is little hope for resolution on truly difficult problems like East Hampton Airport, erosion, climate change, and water quality.

    As the local political committees narrow down their choices for the important town posts in play in the November election, they must put civility at the top of their list of qualifications. Much, if not all, of the rest will flow from the next town board’s willingness to work together.

   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?

   In the last several weeks, The Star has begun offering a laundry list of some of the qualifications candidates for East Hampton Town office must have to merit serious consideration in the November election. Our previous calls were for bringing civility back to Town Hall, demonstrating the vision to take on climate change, and, in general, restoring the rule of law.

    Here is another: The candidates and the parties that back them must demonstrate willingness to allow town employees to do their jobs free of political interference. To do this, the next town board will have to do some rethinking.

    Ideally, local governments in New York State are supposed to be set up with an elected board and a separate staff. The board sets policy by passing laws and appropriating money; the staff carries out its work as described in local laws. In the Town of East Hampton in recent years, however, the line has become blurred. One top town department official said recently that she had “five bosses,” meaning the five-person town board rather than the 20,000-something town residents.

    There are stories of board members marching into the Building Department to tell the inspectors how to rule on one application or another. Then there was the time when Supervisor Bill Wilkinson and Councilwoman Theresa Quigsley plunked themselves down in the front row at a planning board meeting and then got into a tiff with several of its members over procedure. The message in that instance, and in many others, was clear: Do things our way.

    Curing the ills in East Hampton Town Hall will take confident leadership. Key among necessary reforms will be cultivating an independent town attorney’s office whose staff has the clear mission of providing the best legal advice to all town departments. Instead, since the resignation of Laura Molinari, in 2008 during the early days of the McGintee administration financial scandal, the attorney’s office has drifted. It seemed to be scrambling to provide cover for the supervisor and his dwindling supporters’ questionable pet projects.

    A strong legal department made up of staff whose careers are not on the line if they cross an elected official is essential. Providing oversight to the Building Department, on whose sometimes seat-of-the-pants rulings millions of dollars can rest, will go a long way toward avoiding many of the legal quagmires that have been in the news.

    Also key will be taking on the two-men-in-a-room nature of budget preparation. Town residents saw how bad things could become when Bill McGintee’s budget officer, Ted Hults, improperly moved money around to cover gaps, which led to expensive deficit-financing through bonds and state supervision of the town’s books. Rather than adopt a stronger system of checks and balances, however, the town during the Wilkinson administration moved to hand more authority to the budget officer — whose job as a political appointee is at the pleasure of the town board majority at all times. Contrast this with the way school boards are required to hold public work sessions in creating budgets and ultimately to take them to voters for approval.

    These town governance problems are not new. One solution suggested has been to create a town manager’s post. We are hesitant to support this, as it could consolidate power and put residents at a greater remove from government. Instead, at least for the foreseeable future, the town’s generally fine department heads should be allowed to do their jobs, hewing to the town code with the community’s best interests as their guide.

   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.

   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.

   After several weeks of deliberation, East Hampton Village officials are poised to further limit dogs on the ocean beaches between Georgica and Two Mile Hollow. At a recent meeting, the village board scheduled an April 19 hearing on a code amendment that would require people who bring dogs to the beach to keep them on leashes until they are at least 500 feet from the road-ends and parking lots during the hours when pets are allowed on the sand. The East Hampton Town Trustees, who technically govern the beaches between Wainscott and the western boundary of Montauk, were to have discussed the village’s proposal on Tuesday.

    At one point this winter, the village seemed likely to enact stricter measures, including further limiting the hours when dogs were permitted. Under the code as it stands, dogs and other animals cannot be on the beach between 9 a.m. and 6 p.m. from mid-May through September. Village Mayor Paul F. Rickenbach Jr. was said to have briefly favored keeping dogs away until 8 p.m. in the summer months to protect evening picnickers from their nosy intrusions. However, the new leash law would accomplish the same objective.

    Keeping dogs under control and close to their owners is also likely to cut down on the feces left behind, either willfully by those who walk them or because dogs were out of sight when nature called. Also important is that the new restriction will reduce the chances that loose dogs could bound over to say hello to someone deathly afraid of them or even leap up on someone, an older person perhaps, without sound footing.

    For the time being, the leash rule would appear to satisfy both dog owners’ wishes to be able to take their charges to the beach and the desire of others not to have their sunbathing or lunchtime reveries interrupted. The measure deserves support, with the caveat that enforcement will be the key.

   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.