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.

   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.

   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.

   In an unfortunate reversal, the East Hampton Town Zoning Board of Appeals has given permission for Lazy Point property owners to build a sea wall in a zone where none are allowed under town law. What makes this bad decision all the worse is that the same board had denied an essentially identical request earlier this year. Complicating the situation was that the State Department of Environmental Conservation handed out approval for the sea wall in direct, but so far unexplained, violation of an agreement with the town that is supposed to make state agencies follow East Hampton’s rules. But the state’s complicity is hardly an excuse for the 3-to-2 Z.B.A. capitulation.

    The area in question is also under East Hampton Town Trustee jurisdiction, but that board’s approval was neither sought nor granted, even though the trustees twice sent letters to the Z.B.A. and state reminding them that it too must be consulted.

    Sea walls (revetments, technically) are built as far back from the water’s edge as possible. But a landward-migrating shoreline — as at Lazy Point — will very quickly erode whatever beach remains right up to the revetment’s base. Scouring then becomes an issue for neighboring properties, which means these owners will also seek permission to armor their beachfront. Unfortunately, elected officials are, perhaps by definition, unable to say, “Too bad. You bought where you shouldn’t, now suffer the consequences.” Property trumps all; the public be damned.

    Already two houses that had once stood on dry land in this area have been lost to the encroachment of Gardiner’s Bay. One was torn down at taxpayers’ expense, the other remains on stilts over the water, a testament to human folly. The couple who bought the Mulford Lane property (in 2010, no less) should have been told about the risk if they didn’t understand it. Buyer beware, sure, but apparently not when you’re talking about real estate in the Hamptons.

    The beach in this area is not coming back anytime soon, and more armoring is bound to follow. The East Hampton Town Zoning Board of Appeals and D.E.C., in their flawed and illegal rulings for the Mulford Lane property, have set a devastating precedent when they should have upheld the law. Public right of passage, assured since the 1686 Dongan Patent, disappears.

   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.

   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.

   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.

   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.

   Most of our daughter Evvy’s Hanukkah presents were stolen Saturday night. The wrapped gifts had been in the back of her grandparents’ car, in a big box to be taken to New York City on Sunday for a party at an aunt and uncle’s place on Riverside Drive.

    For an 8-year-old already having a rough couple of weeks coming to grips with some of the world’s more bitter truths, the theft was a significant blow. Evvy has been more apprehensive than normal, asking questions about the probability that a mass extinction might strike the Earth as it did during the epoch of the dinosaurs, or that a tidal wave could hit Amagansett, that sort of thing.

    That the credit card company said it would reimburse us for the cost of the stolen items made little difference to her. They were her presents, and the fact that someone else now had them left her in tears. As parents, it was a silver lining for us perhaps that the feelings were not for the objects that were lost. Rather, it was the injustice of it all that seemed to matter to her.

    This is, I suppose, how many of us reacted to the news of the Sandy Hook killings in Connecticut on Friday. I, and no one I have come in contact with, knew any of the children or faculty and administrators shot that terrible day. And yet the injustice leaves us with tears in our eyes and a gulf in the heart. Twenty-six memorial Christmas trees were put up at the Hook Mill in East Hampton Village on Monday; I’m certain I was not alone choking up as I saw them the following morning on my way to work.

    So far Evvy does not know about the Connecticut horror, though it is just a matter of time before something of the news will filter to her. Lisa and I have responded to Evvy’s other fears by assuring her that nothing like those events she fears is going to happen — no meteors, no earthquakes. And yet, as we take the role of soothing parents, in the back of our minds is the terrible reality.

    Evvy’s Hanukkah presents, now mostly replaced during a stop at a mall, are a minor matter in the scheme of things, and for the time being, as parents, we would rather keep it that way. She doesn’t need to know the rest — not yet.

   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.