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.

   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.

   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.

   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.

   A new package of laws written in response to the Sandy Hook school shootings was making its way rapidly to Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo’s desk this week. The hastily prepared rules would tighten New York State’s already-tough gun laws, putting further restrictions on so-called assault weapons and providing law enforcement with procedures to take firearms away from some people deemed mentally ill.

    An expanded state ban on rapid-fire weapons and large-capacity ammunition clips might reduce the death toll in extremely unlikely mass shootings, but it would do nothing about the almost run-of-the-mill shootings that take place in the state’s cities and rural areas. Moreover, New York already is among the states with the lowest number of firearm deaths per capita. According to the Violence Policy Center, which advocates for gun control, only New Jersey, Hawaii, and Massachusetts had fewer. The states with higher rates of gun ownership had higher rates of gun-related deaths.

    While dramatic and headline-grabbing, Albany’s effort will probably do little to reduce gun violence. What would do so is a long-term approach to reducing the number of firearms in the state over a period of 10, 20, even 30 years. Unfortunately, any state effort will be at best only a half-measure without national action.

    New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who has emerged as a leader of the gun-control movement, presented a plan at Johns Hopkins University in Maryland recently to reduce firearm violence. His ideas include thorough background checks, making illegal gun trafficking a federal offense, and limiting assault weapons and clips.

    These steps, while sensible, fail to make a priority of reducing the sheer number of guns — both legal and illegal — in this country. The statistics are unarguable: The more armed a state’s populace, the greater the chances its residents will die from firearm injuries. Measures that do not over time draw down the innumerable private arsenals tucked away in closets, gun safes, and under beds through buy-backs and other measures will only prolong the killing.

   The great scramble to spend will begin in earnest now, following Monday’s passage in the United States Senate of a $50.5 billion aid package for areas hit by late October’s Hurricane Sandy. The challenge is to make sure the money will be used in a sensible manner and with the long term in mind. In East Hampton and elsewhere along the coast, with pledges to rebuild houses, businesses, and infrastructure, the outlook is not good.  

    What would be key as local, county, and state leaders look at the path ahead is to consider how to mitigate potential dangers based on the best available science and technical advice. The impulse to rebuild and defend after a natural disaster is understandable, but this defiant approach may not be the right one. To endure for generations, coastal communities must prepare for more and stronger storms, as well as rising sea levels, which means we all need to rethink how we live along the shore. So far, the necessary mental adjustment has not taken place. In fact, the promise of piles of federal dollars may put the inevitable day of reckoning further off.

    It is critical to remember that Hurricane Sandy was only a Category 1 storm, and that Irene, which passed through the region in 2011, was a tropical storm by the time it made landfall here. By contrast, the Great New England Hurricane of 1938 was estimated to be of Category 3 strength, and it carried a tsunami-like surge of water far in excess of any seen here during Sandy. We also must not forget winter northeasters, which, because they can stick around for 24 hours or more, can produce hurricane-style erosion. 

    Unfortunately, East Hampton Town Supervisor Bill Wilkinson has been preaching what amounts to a false dichotomy between an environmental perspective and the needs of commercial property owners, particularly in Montauk. This shows that like many other elected officials he simply doesn’t get it.

    Our economic vitality is inextricably linked to the area’s environment. To consider them at odds is more than misguided; it is irresponsible. The landward movement of the shoreline is inevitable. Retreat from the brink would not damage business interests. On the contrary, it is the only long-term way to be certain that the economy will thrive for decades to come. Lest one think that short-sightedness is limited to just one political party, Senator Charles E. Schumer, a New York Democrat, declared, “We are now just a presidential pen stroke away from beginning the rebuilding process in earnest.”

    The federal bill is lopsided in favor of the status-quo. Some $16 billion will go to the Department of Housing and Urban Development, $11 billion for shelter and utility costs from Sandy and other storms, and $10 billion for New York and New Jersey transit systems. Projects with an eye beyond immediate rebuilding are the stepchildren and will have to compete for a share of a mere $1 billion set aside for the Army Corps of Engineers.

    Given the distribution of funding in the Sandy bill, as well as the ongoing federal budget debacle, counting on an unending stream of federal dollars for sand replenishment at Montauk is a sucker’s bet. Far more sensible, if nearly impossible politically, would be to seek funding to reduce the number and density of shorefront structures through relocation and/or condemnation while creating a dune line to protect the remaining properties.

    A plan for the South Fork that does not include retreat as an option cannot be considered complete. Likewise, officials across the region must resist the temptation to spend first, plan later.

   One thing is clear about the East Hampton Town Trustees: They are the proprietors of a gold mine in the form of sand, which can be dug and sold to oceanfront property owners whose houses are threatened by erosion. How officials have been going about divvying up this increasingly valuable commodity, however, leaves room for improvement.

    In recent years, the trustees have begun selling sand scooped from the seaward bottom of Georgica Pond to contractors, who then resell it by the yard to homeowners. Unfortunately, the process has been fraught with controversy, with allegations about lax bookkeeping, some contractors taking more than their agreed-upon number of cubic yards, and apparently arbitrary choices about who the trustees give contracts to. Like town and village boards, the trustees are obligated to advertise for bids from the companies that do the digging and selling, yet they appear to have drifted away from this procedure, deciding against one applicant for sand because they did not like the cut of his jib.

    New York State Department of Environmental Conservation, which has environmental authority over tidal areas, insists that only clean and “beach-compatible” mined sand can be placed along the shore. This means that sources are extremely limited. The D.E.C. has set a 12,000-cubic-yard annual limit on the amount of sand that can be dug from Georgica Pond; a similar amount has been taken each year at Mecox, which is within Southampton Town Trustee jurisdiction.

    This year, the East Hampton Trustees decided to grant sole access to the Georgica sand to a single contracting company. Another contractor, Billy Mack of First Coastal Corporation, has complained, saying he had believed the trustees would divide the 12,000-cubic-yard allotment among several firms and that the late-hour change left him and his clients with few options. One property owner needs about 10,000 cubic yards alone, Mr. Mack told the trustees at one of their recent meetings.

    If an increase in the amount of sand that can be taken from Georgica Pond is deemed environmentally sound, the Department of Environmental Conservation should agree to allow the East Hampton trustees to sell more to meet emergency needs.

    From where we sit, it appears that the trustees have to come up with a new system of awarding sand contracts that is open to scrutiny, and fair. The money involved is sizable. The demand is not likely to diminish in the foreseeable future. Seat-of-the-pants procedures are no longer good enough.

   Pretty much everyone who follows such things has noticed by now the starkly uneven way East Hampton Town’s building and zoning laws are applied, particularly when it comes to Montauk. How you are treated apparently depends on who you know — and how deep your pockets are. And right now there is probably no sharper contrast than that involving the Beach House hotel-slash-club and the Montauk Brewing Company.

    The beer-makers, three local men who have been friends since their years at East Hampton High School, have asked the town for permission to convert an existing barn behind their tasting room into a proper brewery; up to now, they have made the beer elsewhere. Going through the review process the right way, they have run up against the town’s off-street parking requirement, by which it has been calculated they would have to pay the town a substantial fee, instead of providing spaces for three or so vehicles on their modest lot. With no room for parking, the cost would be a substantial burden on the start-up business. The year-round brewers are considering their options and may ask the town board to allow them to make the payment over time or to change the parking rules.

    On the other side of Montauk’s main drag, the very seasonal Beach House was expanded last winter and spring without the obviously required prerequisite of full planning board review. As a result, the one-time basic motel became something else altogether and now includes a daytime membership pool club, full bar, nightclub with live acts (but not the required music permit), an on-premise space lately occupied by a fashion boutique, and a gift shop — all without a code-mandated planning decision.

    And how many parking spaces did the owners of the high-end hotel and party spot have to ante up for? None. That’s right, not one. Because the Beach House was able to skirt nearly all review, the parking requirements never came up.

    The difference between the way that the Beach House, a well-funded operation, and the brewery, a do-it-yourself undertaking, have been treated demonstrates just how prone to outside influence town government has become. At least two of the town’s Republican leaders — Supervisor Bill Wilkinson and Councilman Dominick Stanzione — attended the Beach House’s grand opening, making it clear that the project had their backing even though questions were already swirling about its legality. This was also well after the supervisor pushed for a deal in which the town sold the Beach House a strip of public land that, in effect, made the whole thing possible — and at a price, according to records we have seen, named by the Beach House rather than picked out of the air, as Mr. Wilkinson had claimed. Later, it was only when pressured into doing something about the renovations by some outside government that the town building inspector sent a letter to the hotel’s owners politely asking what their intentions were.

    The Beach House’s representatives appeared in front of the town zoning board of appeals this week on the narrow issues of whether the bar and retail conversion could remain without permits. This is an obvious smokescreen that obscures the key question of how the expensive renovation and plain-as-day change of use from what was a modest, pre-existing, nonconforming motel could have been allowed to happen in the first place without a stringent examination of plans — and their impact on parking in downtown Montauk —  before it broke ground.

    Meanwhile, the Montauk Brewing Company partners continue to pursue their goals by the book, as they have for more than two years, seeking proper approvals for their expansion. Unfortunately they may end up paying dearly for their willingness to follow the letter of the law.

    The least the Beach House owners could do to make amends is offer to carry the brewery’s excellent ales and porters on its illegal bar’s taps. Of course, no dummies, they probably already have.

    The rest of us should demand that Town Hall get its act together and at the very least apply the law in a fair manner.

   The Sag Harbor Zoning Board of Appeals has been asked to give approval to a controversial project at the Harbor Heights service station on Hampton Street, on the East Hampton side of the village. In a plan put forward by the property’s owner, John Leonard, the existing service station would be razed and a new, larger one — with a convenience store, roughly the functional size of the village’s 7-Eleven — would rise on the site.

    But the question for the Sag Harbor Z.B.A. is of a more existential nature than how high the canopy at the station should be or just how many square feet might be acceptable for the convenience store. Instead, board members ought to be asking why Harbor Heights should be allowed to expand at all, especially since it would be in clear contradiction of local regulations that bar the gas station’s growth because it is on land with residential zoning.

    The basic issue is how Sag Harbor officials deal with this and other projects proposed for businesses that are on property zoned for houses alone. Such businesses are termed pre-existing, nonconforming uses, and they can be updated, restored, or repaired — up to a point. That mark, and this is key, is that the “degree of nonconformity shall not be increased,” according to Sag Harbor law.

    Another section of the village code supports the belief that any discussion of how much to allow Harbor Heights to grow is misplaced. It states that “every effort shall be exercised to contain those nonconforming buildings and uses that now exist.” Doubling the number of gas pumps from two to four, adding a food market, providing more space for mechanics, and putting up a high, lighted canopy cannot by any stretch of the imagination be considered containing or restraining the use. Officials appear to have fallen for the old lawyer’s trick of debating the details while looking past the fundamental problems with an application.

    By a back-of-the-napkin calculation based on traffic projections provided by the applicant, the new station and convenience store could increase the number of patrons there by 40 percent. Others looking at the developer’s numbers have said traffic could triple. And this, even at the lower figure, is not expansion? Hello, Sag Harbor, is anyone home?

    Repair shops and filling stations are flat-out prohibited in the village’s residential zones. However, a convenience store as part of a filling station is allowed by special permit under a provision of village law suspiciously relevant to this application. If the property owner is to be believed that there is no money in selling gasoline, the main business on the site might be the store — which should have raised a question about change of use earlier in the process.

    Beyond all this is an unmentioned section of the law that allows the Sag Harbor Village Board to terminate a nonconforming use, like Harbor Heights, “when it is found detrimental to the conservation of the value of the surrounding land and improvements or to future development of surrounding lands and therefore is tending to deteriorate or blight the neighborhood.” As neighborhood opposition to the proposal coalesces around fears of falling property values and a loss of community character, the Harbor Heights property owner should keep in mind that the village, in the end, has this as its ultimate option.

   In years past, it was the Town of East Hampton that led the way among local governments in providing affordable, or so-called work-force, housing for its residents. Now East Hampton Village is finding a way to inch into this role. The first step, though it appears minor, could actually be significant over time and make a meaningful addition to the stock of reasonably priced rental apartments in the village.

    On Jan. 18, the village board approved a change to the zoning code that will eliminate an onerous fee that otherwise has been sought from those who would develop or convert buildings to apartments in the centralized business districts. Applicants were asked to pay the village $10,000 for every parking space deemed necessary that they couldn’t provide. The cost was an obvious disincentive for property owners to create apartments; although second-floor residential rentals were permitted, few were built. The revision allows the fee to be waived on a case-by-case basis, giving the zoning board of appeals the responsibility.

    One of the possible, if unspoken, upsides of the change is that it could help steer new affordable housing toward the central commercial centers, where essential services, food, entertainment, and public transportation are available. By contrast, most of the Town of East Hampton’s affordable residential projects have been dispersed, adding to the number of cars on the roads rather than diminishing it.

    The irony is that East Hampton Village erred long ago by allowing the conversion of second-story apartments to offices, retail spaces, and the like. This measure would reverse this mistake, if one small project at a time.