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.

   In a crucially important cover story on Friday about the Long Island Power Authority’s performance before and after Hurricane Sandy plowed into the region on Oct. 29, Newsday reported that the utility failed to prepare for a big storm despite having made repeated commitments to the state that it would do just that.

    The story confirms what had been a widespread suspicion: Many of the tens of thousands of customers without electricity on Long Island for up to two weeks by now might not have lost power — or might have seen it restored far more quickly — had LIPA taken certain steps to get ready. Newsday’s story describes a pattern of poor preparation, including under-funded tree-trimming, outdated computer systems, and the failure to make key improvements to equipment.

    The depth of LIPA’s problems were known as far back as 2006, when a consulting firm hired by the utility pointed out deficiencies and made a range of recommendations. Notably, these included redesigning substations to reduce the risk of flood damage. As it turned out, nearly a third of LIPA’s 185 substations were forced offline during Sandy. After the 2006 report, LIPA announced $100 million over five years in so-called storm-hardening measures. It ended up spending only $62.5 million, according to Newsday.

    In June of this year, the state took a look at LIPA’s storm readiness and declared it insufficient. It cited a lack of procedures for prioritizing repairs near hospitals and schools, for identifying and prioritizing downed wires, for communicating with customers, and for trimming trees. Newsday said LIPA does not meet the common industry standard of cutting back vegetation within 10 feet of power lines, opting for a cost-saving 6 feet. Worse, such work is done on a seven-or-eight-year cycle, not the recommended four years.

    During Sandy, many of the outages reported on the Island were the result of limbs coming into contact with wires. What’s more, LIPA had killed a program of inspecting for weak and rotting poles five years ago and slashed its pole-replacement budget by more than two-thirds during that period, Newsday reported.

    The prospects for a rapid turnaround at LIPA are not good. According to Newsday, the utility’s board tends to rubberstamp management without dissent, and the state’s efforts to provide more control of LIPA by the Public Service Commission have come to naught. This, as Long Island residents know all too well, comes at a high price: LIPA’s rates are among the highest in the United States. It is a pity that the hefty utility bills do not come with an equally sizable commitment to a robust infrastructure that can better bounce back from hurricanes and other natural disasters.

    The solution must include better oversight by elected officials. By ignoring its own 2006 report and failing to live up to promises, LIPA has demonstrated that it cannot be trusted to go it alone any longer.

   Paul Sapienza, the father of soccer here, whose Springs School teams went undefeated in 13 of the 15 years he was here, used to wonder whatever happened to all the talent he was sending East Hampton High School’s way. One answer was that the kids, while they possessed fine individual skills, had not yet figured out how to play as a team, nor had they, in some cases, learned that being a team player meant you also had to keep your grades up.

    They call soccer the beautiful game, but at the high school level it often is not. Frequently it is the tougher team, the one with the players who fight for every 50-50 ball, and who then, through sheer force of will sometimes, put it into the opponent’s goal, that wins. Hold on too long to the ball, however nifty your footwork may be, and it will prove unavailing.

    These days, Mr. Sapienza, one of whose men’s traveling teams once rode a 77-game winning streak in Islandwide competition, would no longer be wondering whatever happened to his kids at the high school level. Rich King, the head coach for the past five years, and his assistant, Don McGovern, who formerly coached Pierson High, have got their charges playing as a team — as a championship team in fact. They play with toughness and with finesse, they’re determined, not cocky, and they’ve been wonderful to watch.

    King and McGovern’s teams have played in three county championship games and have won three league championships in the past four years. They won the county championship last year and this and, while they lost 2-0 to Jericho in the Long Island title game this past week, they gave it everything they had and were unbowed in defeat.

    “It’s been a fulfilling season,” King said. “These kids always found a way to win, they have 10 one-goal victories. As a coach you can’t ask for anything more. . . . They always want to win a state title. It’s not a coach-driven goal, it’s the goal of our kids. And it’s going to happen one of these days.”  

    Meanwhile, there’s plenty for the players, their coaches, and East Hampton to be proud about.

   The Town of East Hampton’s sewage treatment plant, even back when it was operational, is hardly the sole — or even most important — source of groundwater pollution here. That distinction falls on the town’s roughly 20,000 private cesspools or septic systems. The Springs-Fireplace Road plant, however, is highly visible and has become a pawn in an ongoing political battle over property taxes.

    By a divided vote earlier this year, the East Hampton Town Board agreed to pay for a long-term wastewater management plan. Each of the four companies vying to do the study said that no matter what happens to the now mothballed plant, the town will continue to be plagued by septic waste. The East Hampton Budget and Finance Committee, which has reviewed the firms’ proposals, concurs.

    Getting a clear idea of the actual number and quality of these many, many private systems, many of which probably are not shown on property surveys, will be a gigantic task, but one that must be completed before a long-term decision can be made about how to minimize the environmental and health risks. This will cost money — lots of it — whether or not the treatment plant is ever put back in working order. Knowing the enemy — decentralized sources of water pollution — is the central challenge to finding a way to defeat it.

   Deer are changing East Hampton’s natural landscape, causing untold tens of thousands of dollars in property damage and endangering human health — and it is about to get a whole lot worse. Just think for a minute, if you will, about all the does and their young encountered here these days. If just half of those yearlings are female, and they begin to breed while their mothers are still in their reproductive prime, the local population is going to experience exponential growth.

    Such is the backdrop within which the East Hampton Deer Management Group has been working. Its draft plan for limiting the deer will be the subject of a hearing this evening at 7 in Town Hall. “The emergency is already obvious,” the plan’s authors wrote.

    Among their recommendations is getting a better estimate of how many deer actually live here. However, the facts already argue for aggressive control. Increases in the number of ticks and in tick-borne diseases — including a once-unknown allergy to meat apparently spread by the lone star tick, which can cause fatal anaphylaxis — have been tied to the deer population. In addition, the period from 2000 to 2011 saw the number of motor vehicle accidents involving deer increase four-fold, according to the East Hampton Town Police Department.

    The environmental cost is somewhat more difficult to quantify, but it is significant. Deer are altering East Hampton and not for the better. According to the draft, deer have changed the distribution of wildlife and migratory species and altered the “fundamental structure” of local ecosystems. Many wooded sections of East Hampton lack nearly all native herbaceous plants, and with no saplings coming up due to deer, nothing will replace canopy trees as they age and decay, the draft said. And farmers and property owners have been forced to install costly fences to protect crops, gardens, and ornamental plantings — about 40 of them have been reviewed by the town’s architectural review board in the last two years, and many, many more have undoubtedly been put in without permits, making unintential lawbreakers of residents who feel they have no other choice.

    The deer management working group considered the proposal by the East Hampton Group for Wildlife that fertility-control measures be used in lieu of hunting. The draft notes, however, that fertility control is permitted by the State Department of Environmental Conservation only for scientific research, and it recommends that the town consider such research once the deer are reduced to a healthy level. Instead, the management draft suggests that the town adopt a five-year program, ideally with the cooperation of the other East End towns, that includes hunting. Although this is bound to arouse spirited opposition, at this point there appears to be little option.

   If the East Hampton Town Board had set out to appoint a potentially unproductive committee to chart erosion policy for the future, it certainly succeeded at a meeting on Dec. 4.

    Among the group of 10 people, three run Montauk waterfront hotels, one sells real estate, and another operates an earth-moving business. Two are members of the town board: one a lawyer and property-rights stalwart, the other a builder. Two hail from local environmental groups. You get the picture.

     This is not to say that the views of the members of  this committee should be ignored. It is simply that a different, more measured approach would be necessary to gain an unbiased assessment of the town’s existing shoreline laws and whether they are adequate and in the best interest of the East Hampton population as a whole — beachgoers as well as those on whom fortune has smiled.

    After roughly a decade of work, the Town of East Hampton had its own detailed coastal hazard plan approved by Albany in 2007, and by the United States Office of Ocean and Coastal Resources Management the following year. This allowed the town to take over from the state most regulation of responses to erosion. At the time, we had doubts about the wisdom of handing such politically charged work over to local elected officials. Now, that concern appears to be borne out.

    East Hampton Town Supervisor Bill Wilkinson, whose close ally, Councilwoman Theresa Quigley, urged the creation of the new committee, has several times told town employees to go ahead and violate local and state regulations when waters have threatened private property. At the Dec. 4 meeting, Mr. Wilkinson remarked that the town’s overarching coastal policy law was merely a “snapshot in time.” Presumably, he meant it could be rewritten under cover of the new committee.

    As scientific predictions about the pace of sea-level rise are becoming better understood it is reasonable that the town, villages, and other shoreline communities take a good look at their response planning and determine whether changes are needed. This can only be meaningful if the review is undertaken by professionals with the best credentials. Long Island has no shortage of universities whose talent could be tapped to produce a comprehensive analysis. Only when that was done would the opinions of ordinary citizens and stakeholders, such as beachfront property owners, be appropriate and valuable.

    The new committee is certainly going to reconsider the Local Waterfront Revitalization Plan. But before doing so it should call for and oversee a professional analysis. Any group challenged to consider changes in erosion-control policy should include people with deep personal interests in the shoreline. But it should not, at the outset, be dominated by those for whom one particular outcome is a foregone conclusion.

   Though an endorsement in these pages would appear to be unnecessary, East Hampton Village’s plan to create a timber-framed structure historic designation is a worthy concept. The measure appears headed for approval, perhaps as early as tomorrow’s meeting.

    The village already has a historic district, which controls certain exterior changes on some properties. The new program would protect important buildings outside the district from destruction and major alterations. In exchange, it would promise owners incentives in the form of “bonuses” that would allow them to build larger accessory structures than would ordinarily be allowed on the same properties.

    According to Robert Hefner, who helped prepare the proposed law as director of historic services for the village, the measure would make it the first municipality in New York State to couple preservation with such a sweetener. The deal is a worthwhile concession. There might be circumstances in the future, however, when such arrangements would be impossible; in those circumstances, the village should not consider itself required to offer other trade-offs.

    Much of the charm of the village, not to overlook its apparently ever-swelling real estate values, is wrapped up in its appearance, particularly in the green that runs from Town Pond to Buell Lane lined by ancient houses. Some are said to date to the late 17th century and are already in the historic district. The new designation would extend protection of 25 other structures’ rare character and should be approved.

    East Hampton Town is another story. It has let its enforcement of historic-district rules wither, and no new preservation measures appear in the offing. We hope Town Hall is watching Village Hall’s fine example.

   For the Town of East Hampton, a request from a Napeague property owner to change the zoning of the land on which the summertime traffic nuisance called Cyril’s Fish House sits amounts to an existential challenge.

    From the property owner’s perspective, seeking permission to legalize a host of additions on the property, improve septic conditions, and add parking spaces makes sense. The land’s classification as residential makes Cyril’s what is known as pre-existing and nonconforming. This means that while its operation cannot be summarily shut down by the town on land-use grounds, neither can it be expanded or improved without being subjected to hypothetically stringent site-plan review.

    The town’s decision on this is not yet known. The planning board, asked to review an application for a change of zone that would make Cyril’s a conforming use, split 3-3. The final say now rests with the East Hampton Town Board, which would have to schedule a hearing — though it also has the option to decline consideration altogether. Two reasons why town should not proceed any further are how Cyril’s Fish House has been operated historically and how a zone change would set a potentially disastrous precedent.

    At this point there are probably few residents who have not at some point driven by Cyril’s on a hot summer day and been disturbed, if not shocked. Traffic in both directions slows to a creep well before the restaurant comes into view. Vehicles of patrons are parked for a quarter mile or more to the east and west. Then, as one gets nearer, taxis are stacked up or double-parked and hundreds of people are clustered in the gravel by an outside bar, frozen drinks and beers in hand. This goes on well into the sunset.

    A couple of years ago, a pickup truck struck a woman crossing the highway to get to Cyril’s and, in an unrelated incident somewhat more recently, a driver involved in a road-rage confrontation wound up flipping his vehicle off the road’s edge instead of plowing into the crowd. In the early morning, empty plastic cups and other litter is seen strewn along the highway, along with the odd vehicle or two of people who found other ways home. Last summer, the East Hampton Town police began posting emergency no-parking signs nearby, hoping to reduce the risk of harm to drivers, pedestrians, and bar-goers alike.

    Just why this growing eyesore, probable environmental risk, and seasonal traffic nightmare has been allowed to persist is anyone’s guess. The town should have done something about it long ago, but, as with other commercial ventures here, especially when they have strong ties to a local political committee, the tendency is to look the other way, even though much of the money that changes hands there heads straight out of town come fall.

    The town code was drafted in a way that acknowledges pre-existing restaurants, rooming houses, and the like on property zoned for residences but in the hope that they would disappear over time, or at least not be made larger, or, in the parlance of planning and zoning, more nonconforming. In practice, however, top town officials have again and again ignored this aspect of the law, standing by while the Building Department handed out permits on the scantiest of supporting documentation, for example, or simply not reacting when certain businesses are expanded without any permission at all, as at the Montauk Beach House and former Reform Club in Amagansett.

    Cyril’s, which has been cited dozens of times for code violations but never been required to correct them, would see most if not all of its alleged transgressions erased if the town board agreed to change its zoning. This would be an unconscionable reward for a venture that has been ignoring the law for so long, and a signal to others that the rules need not necessarily apply if you really know how to play the game.

   A story that appeared in this newspaper last week, detailing the frustrations two lawyers have had trying to pry public documents out of East Hampton Town Hall, tells only part of the story. Compliance locally with New York State’s Freedom of Information and Open Meetings Laws is spotty at best, and the town is hardly the only entity with trouble keeping up.

    The problem is twofold: Many officials are reluctant to let the public in on the sometimes messy business of government, and the law itself is toothless, without sanctions or fines — or any consequences whatsoever — for those who fail to meet its requirements.

    Consider, for example, what would happen if speed limits were not backed up with the threat of fines. It is pretty easy to guess what the roads would be like if motorists tore around without fear of repercussion. Many public officials are like these hypothetical lead-foots, ignoring the law as they please, whether because of lethargy or indifference, or because they never bothered to inform themselves of the rules.

    The Town of East Hampton appears to be the biggest offender locally when it comes to failure to respond to Freedom of Information Law, or FOIL, requests for documents. Rather than hand over copies of public records sought by lawyers, the media, or residents, or provide a valid reason why they are being withheld, officials just don’t do anything. Short of heading to court to get an injunction forcing an answer, those making requests have no recourse. The most obvious fault lies with the town’s legal department headed by John Jilnicki, which should be the agency helping provide access under the law, not hindering it.

    Similarly, the state’s rules on so-called executive sessions are frequently bent, if not broken. In a guarded statement earlier this year, Robert Freeman, the head of the state’s Committee on Open Government, faulted the East Hampton Town Board for improperly meeting behind closed doors. In particular, Mr. Freeman cited a discussion of whether or not to sell some town-owned property in Montauk, which, he said, should have been conducted in public. Exemptions to the rule that all discussions are to be held in open session are strictly limited. In the case of real estate transactions, closed-door sessions are allowed only when disclosure would substantially affect the sale price.

    The East Hampton Town Board is not alone, however. Until recently, the town planning board would often get together for drinks after the night’s meeting was done. If a majority were there, it was an illegal meeting no matter whether they discussed pro sports or the latest site plan applications.

    School boards routinely put executive sessions onto their schedules, to be held an hour or so in advance of ordinary meetings. Not so fast, Mr. Freeman has said. Executive sessions can only be held after a public vote by a majority of a board’s members. Therefore, he said, it is impossible to schedule such sessions beforehand, not knowing what the outcome of the required vote would be. Furthermore, and as troubling, is the frequent abuse of the Open Meetings Law’s requirement that the subject of closed sessions be identified in advance and in reasonable detail (the frequently cited “personnel” excuse is not adequate).

    Any correction would have to come from Albany in the form of some mechanism to assure that officials comply. Without consequences, these laws are simply too easy to ignore.

   Please forgive us for saying we told you so, but having reread the following, which was in an editorial here in September on the anniversary of the great 1938 Hurricane, we have to say it: We told you so.

    “If a storm of comparable power arrived here tomorrow, the damage would be orders of magnitude greater because of the sharp, if ill-considered, increase in shoreline construction since the 1930s. Though the loss of life would be far less, thanks to improved weather forecasts, the cost to insurers, utility companies, and governments responsible for cleaning up and repairing infrastructure would be astronomical.”

    “Disruption of everyday life would drag on for weeks. Then would come the debate about whether to allow property owners to return to harm’s way, rebuilding (or not) billions of dollars in lost waterfront real estate.”

    The foregoing passage was hardly prescience; it stated the obvious. People who study such risks have sent out warnings for years. Still, although Hurricane Sandy, or Superstorm Sandy, or whatever you want to call it, was cataclysmic — with at least 100 people killed, an estimated $80 billion in damage, untold sums more in lost economic activity, and long-term environmental costs —  it seems that out here at least there were few lessons learned, not from 1938 or Oct. 29, 2012, or from any of the storms in between.

    Instead of initiating a sensible review of coastline policy and emergency preparation, the Town of East Hampton named a charade committee. In the Town of Southampton, some officials’ top priority appears to be how to siphon off federal restoration dollars to pay to permanently elevate perennially threatened Dune Road so that wealthy vacation-house owners can continue to get to their doomed properties. To call both towns’ responses shortsighted and tone-deaf would be polite.

    Meanwhile, it has been left to the heroic efforts of ordinary citizens — many from our South Fork communities — to provide basic human necessities, in an ongoing and essential effort, for our neighbors in the Rockaways and elsewhere on this vulnerable island. We cannot forget, too, that our local libraries had to pick up the slack left by East Hampton Town Hall’s it-can’t-happen-here myopia, providing places of refuge for those left without heat, light, or a connection to the outside world for up to two weeks in some cases. (Kudos to the actor Alec Baldwin for recognizing this and saying thank-you with generous grants from his philanthropic foundation.)

    The pages of this newspaper are often filled with matters having to do with storms, hurricanes, and the like. This makes sense considering where we live and the region we cover — a sandy, rapidly eroding spit of land stuck out in the unforgiving Atlantic Ocean. Yes, back in September we may have struck our usual Chicken Little chords, but we underestimated how bad that next one would turn out to be for so many people — and how poorly our elected representatives had prepared for it and now continue to avoid the obvious.

    There were lessons to be learned after Sandy all right, but it is unclear if anyone of authority here was even in the classroom.