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.

   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 East Hampton Town Board is to hear from the public this evening about a proposed revision to existing taxi regulations. Under a law passed in 2011, the town requires a license to operate a taxi within its borders. The beefed-up provisions of the new law would require proof of insurance, fingerprinting and background checks of all drivers, and applications to be vetted by the Police Department. The law would also create a taxi review board.

    These additions to the town’s taxi law may be for the best, but where the proposal begins to raise questions is in a provision that would limit taxi licenses to companies and individuals with a physical address within the town. It would be difficult to come up with a parallel example in which the town similarly restricts commercial activity to residents alone. Building contractors, for example, must be licensed to work in the town, but they can hail from elsewhere.

    Furthermore, none of the proposed changes really addresses the taxi problem from the rider’s perspective. Out-of-town drivers are drawn here in the summer season by the prospect of making hundreds of dollars in a single night, shuttling revelers around on the party, share-house, and bar scenes. Even were taxi owners and individual drivers to obtain local business addresses, exorbitant prices would be likely to remain. This preys on those who have no other way home and creates a counterproductive incentive for those who might drive drunk instead.

    And there is another hitch: The new regulations would not cover taxis that pick up or discharge passengers across the town line. Under those circumstances, taxis are regulated by Suffolk County, which just last year gained the right to do so by an act of the State Legislature. It is not clear how East Hampton Town’s effort would dovetail with the county’s, or if, technically, it would even be legal.

    As proposed, the law would, in effect, create an improper monopoly for locally based livery companies while doing nothing to curb the sometimes outrageously high fares charged, especially for late-night rides. Although additional regulation appears warranted, East Hampton Town’s changes must be undertaken in concert with Suffolk’s authority and, foremost, with the right of passengers to a clean, safe, and affordable ride in mind.

   Privatize the Long Island Power Authority? That was the take-away message from the Moreland Commission, which had been asked by Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo to assess the utility’s preparation for and response to Hurricane Sandy. Not so fast, Long Islanders should be saying.

    Governor Cuomo appears to favor scrapping the public-private LIPA and replacing it with a wholly independent utility company answerable to state regulators, according to news reports. Kathleen Rice, the Nassau County district attorney who was a member of the Moreland Commission, said the leading alternative, reconfiguring the utility, would not gain ratepayers’ favor. The third course mapped by the commission — and perhaps the least-popular among officials — would be to to allow the New York Power Authority to take over.

    There is no question that LIPA was unprepared for Hurricane Sandy and, as a consequence, was unable to speedily restore electricity to many customers. A 2006 study commissioned by the utility itself identified striking deficiencies in its storm plans. LIPA had a trial run after 2010’s Hurricane Irene, but failed afterward to take adequate corrective steps.

    Part of the blame must rest with the governor. Despite two years in Albany, Mr. Cuomo has left open four of the nine seats on the LIPA board of trustees, although he can appoint members. If, as many observers agree, oversight was lacking, there can be no excuse for not filling these positions regardless of whether he believes the utility is fatally flawed.

    If privatization were to work, as the commission said, it would have to be within a highly structured regulatory framework developed with consumers’ best interests in mind. But even then control would be at a remove and filtered through a corporation that answered first to shareholders and Wall Street. Considering this, the third option, putting Long Island’s electric service under the New York Power Authority, might be the best choice for all of us who ultimately pay the bills.

   For evidence that the East Hampton School Board has made a serious commitment to reversing years in which the public and press were excluded from the decision-making process, one need look no further than the meetings scheduled to prepare the 2013-14 budget. Work sessions are to continue more or less every other week until the May 21 vote. Inviting the public, and especially parents, to look on as the details are worked out began last year.

    The long slog began last night in the district office on Long Lane with the presentation of the first draft of the coming year’s spending plan. A regular school board meeting will take place on Jan. 22, and the next budget work session on Jan. 29. Anyone can attend these meetings, although public comment will be permitted only during the regular meetings. Nominating petitions for school board candidates are due on April 22.

    The new openness stands in sharp contrast to the way East Hampton school budgets were written in earlier years — and to the norm in other districts. Time was not so long ago that the budgets would be dumped, fully formed, on the public only a week or so before the required May vote. Historically, the unwarranted — and under the State Freedom of Information Law illegal — secrecy left parents and taxpayers without an opportunity to understand what they were being asked to approve.

    School costs are the largest items on local tax bills for most property owners. Whether or not board members, administrators, and staff enjoy working in front of an audience, the law requires it. There is still some distance to go in assuring that the East Hampton School Board fully meets its obligations as outlined in the Freedom of Information Law. That said, its commitment to opening up the budget process is worth acknowledging.

   Quietly late last month the East Hampton Town Trustees went to court to seek to overturn a decision by the East Hampton Town Zoning Board of Appeals giving a Lazy Point couple permission to build a sea wall, or revetment. Though as of this writing we had not seen the suit itself, presumably, the trustees are challenging the Z.B.A. ruling on two points: that required trustee approval was not obtained and that the revetment would violate the town’s own coastal erosion law.

    Back in 2010, by the time Joshua Young and Christine Lemieux bought their one-story Mulford Lane, Amagansett, house the landward-shifting shoreline there had already undermined one structure, which the town ultimately condemned and had taken away. Another house, which now teeters high on pilings, was surrounded by water at high tide and a third was threatened, forcing its owners to attempt to fortify its foundation with heaps of rocks. (You have to wonder what the couple were thinking when they were first shown the obviously doomed property and what malarkey the seller or real estate agent dished up to convince them it was a good deal.)

    In 2011, Mr. Young and Ms. Lemieux asked the town for permission for a revetment, which was denied — and rightly so. The property is in a zone where no new “hard” erosion-control structures are allowed. But then, just last year, the Z.B.A. inexplicably reversed itself after the couple asked again, granting its blessing for the precedent-setting project, despite a Planning Department analysis that suggested the project would have negative long-term effects on the area.

    The trustee lawsuit is a necessary challenge to Town Hall, which has played fast and loose with building and zoning regulations for too long. This could be an important moment in town history, and the trustees are to be commended for standing up and saying, in effect, the rules must be followed and their authority over the beaches cannot be ignored.

   Another week, another storm. That’s how it has seemed since at least Hurricane Sandy rolled through on Oct. 29. Early morning light last Thursday once again revealed severe dune loss in several places here, notably at Montauk and Lazy Point. And, with perhaps three more months of potential northeasters, the situation is dire.

    The fact is that the number of coastal storms has not been all that out of line with historic averages. What does set the recent period apart is that the waves ride ever-higher, thanks to sea-level rise.

    The Town of East Hampton, of all coastal communities in the United States, should be at the forefront of calls to reverse global warming and the rising of the seas. Instead, property owners and officials alike cling to the archaic notion that they can hold back the tides — and fate.

    If 2013 is to stand for anything positive, perhaps it will be the year when local officials face the reality of a changing climate and begin to respond in a meaningful way. The evidence that things must change is no farther away than our very own beaches.

   When it was first envisioned, the folks behind the East Hampton RECenter hardly could have expected how popular it would eventually become. Now operated by the Y.M.C.A., hundreds of people pass through its doors every day it is open, many of them headed for the center’s two swimming pools. The 300 or so swimmers there on a peak day, as estimated recently by the Y.M.C.A. director, apparently overtax the pools’ filtration and ventilation systems frequently, raising the likelihood of health risks for those who swim and work there.

    More or less everyone involved thinks something should be done to upgrade the filter equipment. The key questions are what a retrofit should include and who should pay for it.

    But there is more. Steve Kenney, who runs a well-respected Wainscott pool service company, and whom we know and trust, thinks the RECenter has been run in a negligent manner and that the air in the pool area presents a health risk for those who frequent it. Juan Castro, the facility’s director, has brushed off these claims, prematurely in our view.

    The Suffolk Health Department, which has found no major problems with the pools’ “water quality procedures,” according to Mr. Castro, has not tested the quality of the air. Mr. Kenney has said that chlorine in the pools, during periods of heavy use, can combine with body fluids from bathers to produce chloramines, which can cause eye and skin irritation and respiratory problems such as asthma. The federal Centers for Disease Control offers advice to the effect that indoor pools need at a minimum an “adequate” fresh-air exchange and good water quality.

    Some of the resistance to modernizing the pools’ systems comes from the ownership of the facility. While the Town of East Hampton owns the building, the underlying land is East Hampton Village’s. The Y.M.C.A. runs the center by arrangement with the town, and the East Hampton School District sends students there for practices and competitions.    

    At this point, there is no scientific evidence that the RECenter pools are harming patrons, but, anecdotally, there is ample reason for independent testing. Correcting the problems, if they are confirmed, could cost $100,000 or more. Under the terms of the agreement between the town and the Y.M.C.A., East Hampton taxpayers are ultimately responsible for big-ticket repairs and maintenance.

    Given the heavy use of the RECenter, the cost should be secondary to setting things right. All parties involved, the town, Y.M.C.A., and, yes, the school district, whose board brusquely dismissed getting involved at its last meeting, should cooperate to see that it is done promptly and to the highest standards.

   In the coming days the East Hampton Town Board may appoint several newcomers to fill seats on boards that fulfill some of the most important functions of local government. Although we have not yet heard of any vacancies on the planning board, there are likely to be openings on the zoning and architectural review boards. And the supervisor and other members of the board will have the annual opportunity to name each board’s chair. Judging from the board’s record in this regard, there is reason for concern.

    Given the questionable performance of the town’s legal and ordinance enforcement functions, the citizens appointed to the various boards have become even more instrumental in upholding the law and helping to ensure East Hampton does not turn into a place its residents dislike. And, in the waning 12 months of Bill Wilkinson’s business-first administration, you can expect the pressure to be on to get the more problematic applications through the approvals process as fast as possible.

    A great deal is apt to rest now on the shoulders of Councilman Dominick Stanzione. He has emerged as the town board’s swing vote and the key voice of moderation in most controversial debates. At least a 3-2 majority will be required to change the composition of the various boards, and Mr. Stanzione may well face heat from the supervisor and his ideological ally, Councilwoman Theresa Quigley, if he bucks their hard-line choices.

    Members of the town’s appointed boards serve for long terms, up to seven years on the planning board and five years on the Z.B.A. This is intended to allow them to learn the intricacies of the town code and also to remain above the fray of political infighting and influence. Any appointments or decisions about how the boards are to be organized must be made with the long-term in mind. The struggle for the heart and soul — not to forget the environment — of this place we call home now comes down to private properties, backyards, and small businesses, and the battle’s front line is in front of the town’s appointed boards.

   Reflecting on things that were good in 2012, the response on the South Fork to the continuing needs of its residents and neighbors is most heartening. We made a list of other milestones that stood out.

    The bright spots include the astonishing response, in fund-raisers, donations, and effort, of East End Cares, other groups, and individuals after Hurricane Sandy. In other notable achievements, new senior citizen housing is about to open in Amagansett, the Town of East Hampton resumed in earnest its land-buying efforts, and Sag Harbor finally appears ready to do something about pollution at Havens Beach. We praise, too, the involvement of the Group for Good Government in keeping a sharp eye on East Hampton Town Hall.

    In the arts and culture, 2012 saw the opening of the new and renewed Parrish Art Museum in Water Mill. The music scene continued to grow and become more interesting. The oddly titled “slow” food movement kept great produce on our tables. And last but hardly least, Montauk got its own craft brewery.

    With all this in mind, we raise a glass to the good of 2012.