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.

   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.

   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.

   Verizon gets its bills to its customers on time. So do the Long Island Power Authority, your credit card company, and the people who supply home heating oil. So why did an unknown number of Town of East Hampton property taxpayers fail to get their bills at the end of the year? Answers have not been forthcoming. Nor does there appear to be much interest among town officials in figuring out what happened and how to prevent a similar mistake in the future.

    Here is how the system is supposed to work: Once the 2013 budget is approved in November, tax bills are prepared, and then sent out. As it has in the past, the town hired an outside company to take care of the mailings. First-half payments were due without penalty by Jan. 10. The bills went out of the town offices between Dec. 14 and 19, according to Len Bernard, the town’s budget officer. However, somewhere along the line, either at the mailing company, Town Hall, or the post offices, something went amiss. A number of bills arrived late or never showed up at all, even at addresses to which bills had been posted successfully in prior years.

    The official reaction, that there had been no “noticeable” drop in tax payments, misses the point. If first-half taxes went unpaid until mid-May, for example, when the rest of the bill comes due, the taxpayer would incur a 5-percent penalty, real money for most people. Most property owners probably know that payments are due twice annually, but for those accustomed to receiving tax bills, reminders in the mail are all but essential.

    Town officials should take this lapse seriously, learn what went wrong, and change the way mailings are handled in the future, if necessary.

   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.

   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.

   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.

   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.

   The South Fork’s “mutual aid” system, in which the various local ambulance services back one another up in the event that a squad cannot be mobilized, was called into question recently after a 97-year-old man injured in a fall waited for more than 20 minutes in the rain. This example is not the only time a victim has waited what seems like a long time for a ride to the hospital.

    Emergency service providers have long been aware that their all-volunteer corps are increasingly stretched thin. The number of calls has risen each year, while the number of emergency medical technicians has not. There is concern that the aging baby boom population will put new and additional pressure on ambulance services. On top of this, those at summer resorts, day-trip attractions, and share houses expect the volunteers to be there when they call for help.

    The ambulance companies and associations from Bridgehampton to Montauk are well aware of the demands upon them. Their leaders are said to have been in an ongoing dialogue about whether changes are needed. East Hampton Village Mayor Paul F. Rickenbach Jr. has said that something must be done. This is an important conversation to have, literally a matter of life and death.