Several people have been quick to laud the town’s top building inspector for pointing out that the Montauk Beach House needs to seek approval for its public bar and retail store. Although we are loathe to bring up zoning irregularities in Montauk once again, the praise may be premature. Regardless of the inspector’s directive that the questionable uses be shut down, the resort’s owners appear to be going full steam ahead and planning to take it all up with the town zoning board in the fall.

    In effect, the town has sanctioned these offending uses, at least until the appeal can be heard. Nor has the town shown any sign of acting on the fact that the Beach House does not have a required entertainment permit for its D.J.s and live shows, or taken a position on the addition of a members-only pool club, an apparent expansion of its pre-existing, nonconforming status.

    The building inspector’s letter about the two questionable uses is, by all appearances, a stunt intended to deflect heat from where it should rightly rest: the desk of Town Supervisor Bill Wilkinson, who has taken a personal interest in helping the Beach House and similar ambitious, if controversial, commercial enterprises.

    Just down the road apiece, also in Montauk, the Sloppy Tuna bar and restaurant was to appear before the town board next week following multiple noise citations that put its live-band performances in jeopardy; a hearing was scheduled at which the Tuna’s music permit could have been suspended. The only problem is that it never had a permit in the first place. Unless the town suddenly gets tough, the Sloppy Tuna will likely rock on, much to the annoyance of residents and guests nearby. Elsewhere, neighbors who live along Navy Road have griped about their own problems with noise and traffic.

    The owners of the Beach House — and others like them — have made currency of the notion that East Hampton Town makes it difficult to do business. As far as we can tell, this is an attempt to put one over on the rubes from these sticks. You can bet similar projects in, for example, Miami or Manhattan’s West Village meet with far stricter regulatory review.

    What is really disappointing about all this is that the new hoteliers and restaurant operators might well have been granted approval for aspects of their projects had they gone through channels. The argument heard among their supporters is that such delays might have caused some ventures to lose a season as the reviews proceeded. However, this would have fulfilled the requirements of the law and assured the community that the public’s interests were being considered.

    Carl Darenberg of the Montauk Marine Basin might be annoyed, by hindsight, that it took him the better part of a year to win permission for the Hula Hut, a bar on his property, but as painful as it might have been for him and his business parter, he did the right thing. Potentially affected neighbors were heard, and Mr. Darenberg can hold his head high.

    As it is now, a few irresponsible business operators — and their local lawyers and land-use expediters — are laughing as they rake in cash rewards for flouting the law. Meanwhile, a handful of town officials, whose philosophy of local government seems to be that money trumps all, stand by cheering.

   As with the Havens Beach stormwater logjam described on this page, officials have long wondered what to do about pollution from the privately owned Three Mile Harbor Trailer Park near Soak Hides Road. In this case, it is the Town of East Hampton grappling with potential septic contamination of groundwater that can reach a harbor. Over the years, the town, recognizing that the trailers provide low-cost housing, has pumped out the septic tanks at taxpayer expense, although there have been unproven allegations about oddities in the way this was conducted.

    In a 3-2 vote earlier this month, the town board authorized an appraisal of the 16-unit, resident-owned park. The vote apparently headed off, at least for now, a $600,000 plan backed by Supervisor Bill Wilkinson to install a new sewage system there and allow the trailer park to remain in place.

    As difficult as it would be for the town to help relocate those among the 2.1-acre park’s residents who wanted to continue living in the area, removing their mobile homes and restoring the low-lying land to a natural state is a worthwhile objective. The property adjoins a town nature preserve along most of the length of its borders. This would appear to make a purchase justifiable with money from the community preservation fund. In addition, any C.P.F. deal would be contingent on the residents’ agreeing to sell their property, giving them the final say. It is an idea worth exploring before the town commits to yet another new, and expensive, sewage-treatment system as a short-term solution.

   Before the Town of East Hampton goes about opening any new public bathing beaches, it needs to demonstrate that it can adequately police and keep clean those it already has.

    Several town board members are now considering how to provide public parking and access to a 38-acre oceanfront parcel on Napeague — something that neighbors of the parcel, as well as the State of New York, have objected to. Meanwhile, the board has talked about buying land along Cranberry Hole Road in Amagansett, with one parcel providing a path to Gardiner’s Bay and the other intended for vehicles. Residents there, too, have expressed concern about the idea.

    The pressure on the board to provide more ocean beaches comes for the most part from difficult weekend parking at Indian Wells, Atlantic Avenue, Napeague Lane, Ditch Plain in Montauk, and Beach Lane and Town Line Road in Wainscott. As we have observed before, finding a parking spot after 11 on a sunny Saturday morning in some places is nigh onto impossible. Perhaps as a result of the chronic shortage, some owners of four-wheel-drive vehicles head out on the sand at Beach Hampton to the irritation of some property owners there. A couple of lawsuits have been the response, with Town Hall and the town trustees fending them off in State Supreme Court.

    An alternative might be for the town to follow East Hampton Village’s lead and cap the number of nonresident parking stickers it sells every year and, in addition, require resident permits to be renewed annually. These measures would cut down the number of vehicles, easing the pressure somewhat.

    As much as we all tout the town’s beautiful beaches, however, conditions at them are far from ideal. Burned remains of beach fires too close to lifeguard stands remain the morning after. Public toilets are too few or inadequate and often downright disgusting. Garbage is left too long at overflowing bins, tempting vermin. Broken, unsightly fences have caused complaints at the Wainscott shore.

    Given these circumstances, the people along Dolphin Drive on Napeague are only being realistic in fearing the worst. Until the Town of East Hampton shows a sustained commitment to maintaining its beaches in the best possible condition, it cannot be expected to handle any more in a responsible way.

   A longtime Montauk resident showed up at an East Hampton Town Board meeting held there a few weeks ago to bemoan the number of young people roaming about the streets and shops in various states of undress — bare-chested men and bikinied women who seem to make no distinction between pavement and sand. There oughta be a law, he said, against “shirtless wandering syndrome.”

    There is one, actually, in Southampton Town, where “no persons attired in bathing suits or garments commonly used for swimming or public bathing shall enter any store, hotel or public building, or walk or otherwise travel while so attired on any public street, road or public place.” The penalty is steep: a fine of up to $1,000 or up to 15 days in jail, though as far as is known no one has ever been put behind bars for deshabille. (Southampton, those of us with long memories may recall, is the town where, once upon a time, wearing shorts more than — was it three inches above the knee? — got you a warning, and on second sighting, a ticket. Showing up in justice court there in a tank top or shorts of any length is still verboten, though these days they keep one-size-fits-all skirts and shirts on hand for the underdressed.)

    Communities are of course free to enact whatever head-scratching local laws they want — in Ocean City, N.J., eating while swimming in the ocean is prohibited — though Marlborough, Mass., probably pushed the envelope last month when it decided to impose a $20 fine for cursing in the street. The police chief of the town, which calls itself the Cranberry Capital of the World, said the law mainly targets testosteronic teenagers who aim “profane language at some attractive female walking through town.”

    “The law is ridiculous, but the kids are also ridiculous,” said one resident.

    Most public profanity is protected as free speech under the First Amendment, and opponents quickly appealed Marlborough’s new ordinance, which is hanging fire until the state’s attorney general decides on its constitutionality. Legal authorities give it little chance of being upheld, however. While they await a ruling, the police might try washing the young offenders’ mouths out with cranberry juice.

   Allegations first reported by Politico.com that Representative Tim Bishop’s campaign acted improperly in seeking a cash donation from a constituent for whom the Democratic congressman did a favor have been seized upon by his political opponents. Randy Altschuler, running with Republican and Conservative endorsements, has sought to make the affair the subject of the week, with frequent e-mails to supporters and the news media.

    According to the report, a Southampton homeowner sought Mr. Bishop’s help in getting last-minute permits for a fireworks display by the Grucci company for his son’s bar mitzvah celebration. The charge is that while Mr. Bishop or his staff were working on it, the congressman’s daughter, who is also a campaign fund-raiser, sent an e-mail to Eric Semler, the person seeking help, asking for a donation. Mr. Semler made a contribution after Grucci was able to hold the show.

    By coincidence, the fireworks company is run by the family of Felix Grucci Jr., a Republican whom Mr. Bishop defeated in 2004. There is sweet irony in the fact that the direct beneficiary of Mr. Bishop’s helping secure the permits was a company run in part by a political adversary. Mr. Grucci gave the Altschuler campaign $500 back in April, his only listed political contribution since 2008.

    After the Politico report appeared, Mr. Bishop gave the Semler donation to charity. He also responded in a press release, apparently contradicting Politico’s timing of his campaign’s e-mail. “I did not solicit the donor during the time I was assisting him,” Mr. Bishop said.

    The key issue for Mr. Bishop is that House ethics rules prohibit contributions linked to members’ actions. Whether or not the Semlers had intended the $5,000 as a thank-you, it was inappropriate for the Bishop campaign to accept it and wrong to solicit it in the first place. This is a serious lapse, not just for Mr. Bishop, but for Washington as a whole, which is widely perceived as a hopeless morass of quid pro quos and mutual back-scratching.

    The millions given each year to House and Senate members, as well as lesser amounts to elected officials all the way down to the town level, are rarely the result of wholly charitable interests. Labor, finance, health care, and agribusiness each hand millions of dollars to officials and challengers, seeking some form of favorable outcome in return. And then there are the millions more in unregulated corporate donations to so-called super PACs. Money is pervasive in American politics, and this is unlikely to change unless public financing of elections becomes law.

    If anything, Mr. Bishop’s current problem is another reminder of the lack of adequate walls between the constituent-service side of Congress members’ work and their election-year needs. There is no evidence that the congressman made any promises of action in exchange for a donation. Nonetheless, the solicitation by his campaign never should have happened.

   In an important and well-researched report, the East Hampton Town Budget and Financial Advisory Committee has recommended closing the town waste-treatment plant on Springs-Fireplace Road immediately while a long-term management plan is drafted. This is sound advice, and the East Hampton Town Board should act on it without delay.

    Key among the committee’s points is that the town must retain control over the plant if it is reopened, whether to be run by a private company or as a public facility. This would help assure compliance with state regulations about effluent as well as provide a measure of what is politely called “odor management.”

    The waste plant has been a headache for a long time. Last year, the town was hit with a series of state citations about groundwater contamination. Following the notices, the town closed the plant and prepared a corrective plan, which the state accepted. Since then it has functioned only as a transfer point where local sewage haulers may dump their loads, with the waste then taken by large tanker trucks for disposal UpIsland.

    Because it was not designed as a transfer site, the state limited the sewage that can be dumped there to about 10,000 gallons a day, a fraction of the 80,000 gallons or more per day collected here during the summer. As it turned out, only one local hauler is using the plant; the others made arrangements elsewhere.

    At about the same time, Town Supervisor Bill Wilkinson, backed by Councilwoman Theresa Quigley, pushed for selling the plant to the one firm that submitted two offers, albeit at rock-bottom terms, for its purchase. Others on the board balked and demanded a comprehensive study before any sale or other solution was seriously contemplated. Whether the town sells the plant or not, it appears to be responsible for the cost of cleaning it up.

    In the committee’s estimation, closing the plant  would save the roughly $30,000 a month it now costs taxpayers as a transfer station. We can think of no other local industry or business with so generous a public subsidy, and there should be no argument for putting a stop to it. No decisions about the plant’s future should be made, the committee said, until the wastewater plan is completed.

    A central consideration in such a study is the unknown proportion of the town’s roughly 20,000 septic systems that could be failing — and what to do about them. A comprehensive approach could minimize negative environmental impacts at their sources, the members concluded, and perhaps decrease the plant’s needed capacity, leading to cost savings. Half-measures, such as a quick sale of the plant, or continuing to keep it open for a single user, are not a solution. The waste plant is not going to up and evaporate on its own.

   Another summer season has just about come and gone and nothing has been done to stop potentially harmful bacteria from floating through Havens Beach in Sag Harbor.

    The problem comes from septic waste and road runoff that reaches a narrow creek or ditch that crosses the beach and empties into Northwest Harbor, part of the federally protected Peconic Bay Estuary. The Suffolk Health Department orders the beach closed for swimming after heavy rains — as it did on Friday. As we have been told before, no warnings were posted, and the beach reopened early Sunday with equally minimal fanfare.

    This is far from breaking news; contamination at Havens Beach has been known to authorities for well more than a decade. Efforts to do something about it date to 2007. In March 2011, a study presented to the Village of Sag Harbor by a consulting firm recommended that wetlands there be restored and an expensive “biofiltration” system with oversize artificial sponges be put in. Both would help trap contaminants. Apparently the work is hung up while the village responds to the flaws identified in the proposal by the State Department of Environmental Conservation.

    Top among the requirements the state said must be resolved before permits can be issued is reducing the amount of stormwater runoff that reaches the ditch in the first place. This would reduce contaminant levels and cut the rate at which the costly artificial sponges would have to be replaced, thereby increasing the system’s useful life. Getting stormwater into the ground before it is channeled into the ditch would be preferable, the state told Sag Harbor officials in the spring. The bottom line, as far as the D.E.C. is concerned, is that the village commit, in writing, to maintaining the entire drainage system.

    It took until July for the village to respond. It conceded the “necessity of installing additional leaching basins in the Havens Beach watershed,” but it told the D.E.C. that doing so was beyond the scope of the project it previously had been asked to develop and that, in any event, it didn’t have the money.

    c, who must assure the state that they have the intention — and the money — to keep the water clean. In the meantime, the village owes it to residents and visitors alike to do a better job of alerting beachgoers to the risk of swimming there after heavy rains. If history is any guide, a long-term solution may be years away.

   The news about the climate is bad. Even if you are among those who have tried to disparage global warming,  the overwhelming scientific consensus about its causes and the numbers are indisputable: the Earth is getting warmer — and fast. Long Island must prepare for the worst. But it appears that most of the region’s public officials have not gotten the message.

    The National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder, Colo., in collaboration with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, said this week that the extent of sea ice, critical to stabilizing the Earth’s temperature, had been reduced by about 40 percent from 1970s levels, and is now smaller than ever recorded.

    Cornell University’s Regional Climate Center reported this month that 2012 was the hottest year on the books for the Northeast since detailed records began to be kept in 1895. Warmer temperatures in the Arctic are expected to contribute to the melting of the Greenland ice sheet, which will cause acceleration of the rise of sea level. And a hotter planet will cause further sea level rise due to water expansion. Regarding the Arctic, a Rutgers researcher told The New York Times that “climate change is actually doing what our worst fears dictated.”

    Separately, two nonprofit organizations joined yesterday to bring attention to how climate change has already altered Fire Island National Seashore and six other federally preserved coastal recreation areas on the East Coast. The greatest dangers, both economic and environmental, the Natural Resources Defense Council and Rocky Mountain Climate Organization said, were from storm surges, the loss of barrier islands, and destroyed roads.

    This is of particular relevance to the South Fork of Long Island, where a rising sea will cause massive — and costly — inundations. So far, officials, undoubtedly overwhelmed by the scale of the challenges, have essentially pretended that nothing is happening. Instead of banning new construction and extensive renovations in the danger zones, for example, the Town of Southampton is encouraging the creation of quixotic erosion-control districts along the ocean shoreline. Instead of coming up with a long-term plan for downtown Montauk, the Town of East Hampton has allowed commercial expansion on properties only a few feet above sea level.

    For decades now, experts have been cautioning that the only sensible response is managed, orderly retreat. State disaster preparedness officials have been called on for more planning in a series of reports, which have been largely ignored. The last East Hampton Town official to even talk about the rise in sea level was Supervisor Bill McGintee, who was taken up with unacceptable financial manipulation and forced to resign. Since then there has been silence at Town Hall. You have to wonder what it would take for our elected officals wake up.

   It could have been an innocent mistake. The official map of the farmland where the Town of East Hampton began digging a drainage sump this summer — despite its development rights having being sold long ago to Suffolk County — is spread across two pages that are not contiguous. On one of them, only a portion of the large parcel is shown, with no hint that almost any change or construction would be restricted. On the other, the fact that the county is effectively a co-owner is clearly described. Perhaps when town officials awarded a $293,000 contract for the sump they had looked at only half the map. But even if this surmise is accurate, it is no way to do the public’s business.

    This matter, in which the town hired one of the supervisor’s cronies to dig a pit intended to control flooding of Route 114 and adjacent streets just south of Stephen Hand’s Path, has turned out to be an embarrassment for Town Hall and throws the competence of those involved into question.

    Work was halted suddenly when the county objected. The trucks disappeared, though not before they had carted away almost all of the roughly 1.2-acre sump site’s prime farm soil for the contractor’s own purposes. And don’t believe assertions that the land was not farmed because of silt problems; as recently as last season potatoes were planted there. We know this because we went gleaning on the land ourselves in the fall.

    Now the town is left with the difficult question of what to do, having destroyed a portion, albeit a small one, of farmland the taxpayers paid to preserve. By itself, this debacle would not amount to much, but, once again, it points to a breakdown in town leadership. There have been far too many other examples, most coming from the office of the town supervisor or his deputy, Councilwoman Theresa Quigley.

    It was Ms. Quigley who handled the drainage project, and, as a lawyer and lawmaker, her failure to notice the county’s interest is unacceptable. That the pages of the official map of the acreage are not consecutive may be an explanation, but it is no excuse. Longtime town employees, with experience and institutional memory, should be consulted when such projects are under consideration, and every “I” dotted and “T” crossed. The cowboy, go-it-alone approach must end — and soon.

   All of a sudden, those who object to the noise of aircraft using East Hampton Airport have become a lot more numerous. After a unilateral decision by the Town of East Hampton to direct more traffic over Noyac and eastern Southampton, residents of those areas are mobilizing. There have been meetings, visits by Southampton Town officials to the new air traffic control tower at the airport, and even protests by placard-carrying people from both sides of Town Line Road, who seek quiet. This is new and bears watching. Elected officials and their respective parties would ignore these voices at political peril.

    A primary issue is the early morning and evening din from commercial helicopters, though fixed-wing aircraft contribute their share. These are distinct from the planes of private enthusiasts who use the airport and whose interests have unfortunately been co-opted by those of the commercial companies. Local pilots should be working to protect their passion, not promoting increasing expansion of for-profit use of the airport — something that could lead to a final showdown that nobody wants.

    Voluntary no-fly hours and different routes have not provided relief for beleaguered residents. Nor has the control tower made a wholesale difference. The course being charted by East Hampton officials is one of greater confrontation rather than concerned response. Limits on what kind of aircraft can use the airport and when appear to be the only solution. The current, anything-goes approach is destined for failure.