By a 3-to-2 vote, the East Hampton Town Board further consolidated power in the town budget office in the name of budget restraint early this month. Supervisor Bill Wilkinson, who led the party-line vote, explained that eliminating the town personnel officer would save $170,000. Len Bernard, the budget chief and Mr. Wilkinson’s appointee, will now be the only town official sharing hiring, firing, and, presumably, disciplinary matters with the supervisor. That’s not a good idea.

    East Hampton Town personnel issues have already been highly politicized. Late last year, for example, the Republican-dominated board failed to take action when a town employee was caught on video using a Highway Department truck to run over and remove roadside signs promoting the election of a Democratic candidate. Just last week, the town’s top building inspector apparently was hustled off on an unplanned vacation after a dressing down over having issued a stop-work order the supervisor didn’t like. Town Hall has been described for some time as having an unpleasant atmosphere in which Mr. Wilkinson frequently huffs about “subordinates” and how they should toe the line — as he sees it.

    One would think, therefore, that town officials would be especially sensitive to placing too much unchecked authority in the hands of two closely aligned individuals, especially when one is a political appointee who could be expected to keep an eye on making the boss happy. Lest East Hampton residents need any reminding, former Supervisor Bill McGintee and Mr. Bernard’s immediate predecessor as budget officer, Ted Hults, were responsible for a town deficit of some $27 million, which is still being paid down. It took months of forensic accounting to figure out what, acting exclusively, they had done, and the town’s bond rating, ability to pay for future projects, and credibility paid the price.

    No matter how much confidence Mr. Wilkinson has in Mr. Bernard, and vice versa, and how much money the two may try to save, a system of checks and balances is warranted. Having a career personnel officer, who reports to the town board as a whole, is one way to keep watch on lapses in judgment and untoward influence.

   There were congratulations to go around at an April 3 East Hampton School Board meeting at which it was announced that the district would be able to put its 2012-13 budget to voters while staying within a state-mandated 2-percent cap on the increase in the tax levy. Numerous cuts, especially to personnel, have resulted in a $62.8 million spending plan that stays within the cap. Voters are expected to look favorably on these results when they go to the poll on May 17.

    In Springs, however, there was less celebration at last week’s meeting. Popular programs, including some sports, staff, and funding for Project MOST, an after-school program, are on the chopping block as that district’s board struggles to keep the tax increase low. Staying within the 2-percent cap means that the board can ask voters to approve no more than a $24.6 million budget for 2012-13.

    For any of the districts, going above the 2-percent ceiling would require winning more than three-fifths of the vote on May 17, an apparently impossible task. Difficult decisions are being made to get to the point where approval is merited. The members of both districts’ boards are to be commended for the difficult work they are doing.

   What is unfortunate about the Montauk Ronjo (now the Beach House) controversy is that it has happened at all. The fact that it has points less to politics, as Supervisor Bill Wilkinson calls it, and more to a judgment gap in Town Hall in which flawed decisions can be made casually.

    Back in February, a company headed by Chris Jones, of last year’s aborted Music to Know concert, and Lawrence Siedlick, a big-check donor to local and national Republican campaigns, paid $4.2 million for the Ronjo motel and an adjacent lot. The properties were clearly bisected on official maps by an alley owned by the Town of East Hampton. At least on paper, the alley starts on South Edison  Street and doglegs around to South Elmwood Avenue.

    Over the years, however, the Ronjo was expanded onto the town alley. Recent aerial photos show a couple of outbuildings or sheds in the middle of it, as well as a corner of the motel’s pool deck and a part of a parking lot. How this was allowed to happen and over what time span no one, or at least no one who wants to speak out, seems to know. But for all intents the one-time alley was appropriated as part of the motel grounds; a tree was even planted on one end of it. Nearby Montauk businesses use another part of the alley for back-door access, deliveries, and to get to off-street parking, but what was mapped as access from the east is blocked.

    Mr. Jones and Mr. Siedlick apparently knew they were buying two separate parcels of land; transfer documents filed with Suffolk County indicate this fact. Nonetheless, a few weeks after the closing, they, or a representative, apparently got Mr. Wilkinson to agree to sell them a portion of the alley for $35,000.

    Much has been made of a statement by Mr. Wilkinson that he arbitrarily came up with the $35,000 figure. East Hampton Democrats have seized on it, saying there was no way to know for sure if the price was right. Given the expansion of the Ronjo onto the alley, it is hard to know its fair-market value.

    The deal was approved 3 to 2 on March 6, along party lines. East Hampton Democrats have mounted a petition drive, demanding that the resolution authorizing the sale be overturned or put to public vote. An appraisal paid for by the opponents of the deal by a respected local expert put the alley’s value at $184,000; another one, paid for by Mr. Jones and Mr. Siedlick, came in far lower, at $22,500.

    In comments at a recent town board meeting, Mr. Wilkinson said the town attorney had told him that an appraisal of the roughly 3,700-square-foot portion of the alley the new owners want title to was not necessary. This could be true if you don’t look all that closely, but local governments are obligated to get the best prices they can when they sell assets and to avoid the appearance of favoritism. Clarified state law on how local governments divest assets may be in order here. Already, the Town of East Hampton is embroiled in a lawsuit challenging its effort to sell Fort Pond House, again in Montauk, which some have said may be an improperly shuttered and dumped public park.

    The Ronjo dispute is surely political, but that does not mean appropriate procedures were followed. That many of the petition’s 644 signers do not live in Montauk, as the supervisor has protested, is a red herring. All town residents have an interest in how Town Hall is managed and especially when it comes to selling public property.

    The town attorney’s office, which allowed the town board under Mr. Wilkinson to blunder into Mr. Jones’s failed Music to Know concert, appears to have done it again. It is a serious disappointment that its lawyers didn’t speak out about an arrangement that was so primed to blow up in Mr. Wilkinson’s lap. Impulsive in his eagerness to do what he can for what he perceives is beneficial for taxpayers and local businesses, the supervisor is going to do what he is going to do. It is up to the town’s legal team and land-use professionals to make sure he does it in a way that is squeaky clean, not a jumbled-up mess in which numbers are pulled out of the air. No one in Town Hall, it seems, has had the nerve to object when obvious trouble looms. Agree with his policies or not, the supervisor deserves better, and it is not fair for him to take all the blame.

    What is regrettable is that the solution appears simple: The town could throw out the resolution to sell the property to Mr. Jones and Mr. Siedlick and seek an appraisal of its own. Another route, one that has not been discussed as far as we know, would be for the town to grant the motel owners an easement over the disputed property — in which no money changes hands. Though perhaps not the bloodbath the Democrats might be hankering for, it could be a satisfactory alternative.

    Resolving the Ronjo tangle will be the easy part. Providing the structure and openness that will make competent decision-making in Town Hall the rule will be a long-term project.

   Work has been under way this year on the South Fork to clear debris from streams in the hope of increasing the population of alewives, an oceangoing fish that spawns in freshwater. These efforts are extremely important, not just for the species, but for improving the overall health of our treasured ecosystems.

    Historically, alewives were thought to have spawned in nearly every pond here they could reach, rushing up rivers and streams in early spring. Now their runs are limited to a few places, and poor water quality, physical obstructions, and overfishing have hurt their numbers. The New York Department of Environmental Conservation considers the alewife a species “of concern.” Fishing for them is prohibited in several states.

    Like menhaden, alewives are a key prey species for  larger and more commercially and recreationally sought fish, such as striped bass. They are also food for herons and other birds that lurk along the migratory streams. The fish that don’t survive and don’t get picked off by predators sink to the bottom of their spawning ponds and, as they decompose, release carbon and nutrients to replace those lost as waters flow to the sea.

    Public officials and citizens whose properties border ponds and streams should find out what they can do to help. Restoring the alewife should be a goal all of us can get behind.

   Suffolk County is facing a budget deficit that could reach $530 million or more by next year. From the perspective of many who live on the far eastern end of Long Island this doesn’t seem to matter a fig. That is not really true, of course. The county will find new ways to pass its problems along to taxpayers no matter where they live or what services they receive. That the massive money crisis does not appear to register with more people here can be read as an indication of just how distant many feel from the county centers of power. The feeling is apparently mutual; Steve Bellone, during his successful run for county executive, never officially made it east of Sag Harbor, as far as we know.

    To be fair, although Suffolk government is no great presence in most people’s lives here, it is often behind the scenes. Local criminals are housed in the county lockup, and the district attorney weighs in on occasion. Now and again a county dredge clears harbor inlets. The Suffolk Health Department is said to keep an eye on places where the public gets food. There is a county health clinic in East Hampton. The county also does mosquito spraying, keeps property records, and oversees new septic systems. And, of course, there are the county parks at Cedar Point and Montauk. It’s something, but not as much as is provided in the western Suffolk towns, which do not have their own police forces and are covered by the county department.

    South Fork politicians, and East Hampton Town officials in particular, have long complained that we have never gotten back in services what our residents give the county in property and sales taxes and fees. Once upon a time, many people here dreamed of a breakaway Peconic County. And last fall, State Assemblyman Fred W. Thiele Jr. and Senator Kenneth P. LaValle introduced bills in Albany that, in part, called for a study of the feasibility of the five East End towns going it alone.

    As Suffolk grapples with a budget nightmare that the East End had very little part in creating, could the time for Peconic County be now?

   Once again, East Hampton Town officials are hearing a plea to use the community preservation fund, which has swelled to $23 million, to save a historic property. This time, the request is to save a homestead at the north end of North Main Street in East Hampton, which has been in the Sherrill family since 1792.

    The town bought the development rights to 16 acres around the Greek Revival farmhouse some time ago. Now, the family, as well as an informal group of supporters, would like to see the house and the acre it stands on preserved. There will be an open house there tomorrow at 3 p.m. to show the property to anyone interested. Members of the town board have been invited, though they have not expressed support for a deal. Supporters envision a museum that would celebrate East Hampton’s agrarian past — and present. This is an attractive idea, but it presents challenges.

    To a certain extent, one difficulty for those who hope the town will buy the farm is that it already has taken on a number of historic properties and not done much with them. Duck Creek Farm at Three Mile Harbor, the Lester farmstead at the corner of Cedar Street and North Main, and perhaps, even more notable, the Amagansett Life-Saving Station. To date, these properties have, to put it mildly, not been used to their full potential, though the signals are good concerning the Life-Saving Station.

    Setting any or all of the above up as museums or visitors centers would cost the town real money, but there may be an alternative. In the wake of the McGintee financial scandals, the town has assumed self-imposed parsimony where the preservation fund is concerned. In the current climate, no one appears ready to ask taxpayers to take on a new expense for something nice but not necessary. However, the town might look favorably on acquiring the Sherrill Farm if money to operate it were to come from somewhere else.

     There appears to be a ready-made constituency for doing something meaningful with the house — the growing number of farming enthusiasts and those in the slow-food movement here. If a public-private partnership could be worked out, all concerned could ride the wave of locavore zeal. A distinct possibility would be for one of the new community-supported agriculture groups to use the house as its home base, giving staff or interns a place to live upstairs and having meetings and demonstrations on the first floor. Perhaps even the farmers market now held on Fridays in the parking lot at Nick and Toni’s restaurant could move there. The property would be an astonishing opportunity for the right group, perhaps with agricultural use of some of the accompanying 16 acres added to the mix.

    As close as one can come to a sense of how town residents would feel about the town’s purchasing the Sherrill Farm comes from voters’ repeated and overwhelming approval of the community preservation fund itself. The economy may have changed since the fund won at the polls, but support could be realistically gauged by putting the proposal before the public at a Town Hall hearing. 

    Preservation would be only the first step, but we are confident that an end result could be found so that the property remains a community asset rather than being lost to the open real estate market. It may take some doing, creativity, and open minds, but East Hampton should be up to the challenge.

   Summer swimming season is a couple of months away, but something crossed our minds the other day that might be worth considering — in-season ocean safety courses for adults tailored for those from away.

    East Hampton’s public beaches are well served by outstanding lifeguards. A crack ocean-rescue squad can rapidly reach others in distress when called. A junior lifeguard program each year trains scores of kids in being safe around the water. And yet, despite all this, there remain blank spots on the miles of beaches where there are no lifeguards.

    Offering free and frequent, basic instruction to resident grown-ups and summer visitors about what to do in a waterside emergency — and how to avoid them — would not be a bad idea.

   For some years now, climate scientists have been trying, without much success, to get public officials in low-lying coastal areas to begin planning to meet the challenges of rising sea level. Although their warnings are not new, a report from a nonprofit organization — and a nifty associated interactive Web site — may help focus attention on this looming if slow-motion disaster.

    East Hampton and Southampton Towns, surrounded and indented by water as they are, should be at the forefront of planning for what scientists say could be an eight-inch rise in sea level by 2030 and two-foot rise by 2100. But there has been little, if any, preparation. The state asked municipalities to deal with coastal issues by adopting Local Waterfront Revitalization Programs, but these documents were largely drafted before the scale of climate predictions was widely understood.

    The risk, as documented by Climate Central, based in Princeton, N.J., is that by the end of the century, as many as 3.7-million United States residents could see their homes threatened by flooding and erosion. An eight-inch vertical rise in sea level may not sound like much, but studies have demonstrated that the shoreline moves landward at a disproportionate and frightening rate. The results can be seen at sealevel.climatecentral.org.

    Scientists say the only rational policy is an orderly retreat from low-lying portions of the coast. Nowhere in East Hampton Town is this more obvious than in Montauk, where a two-foot rise in sea level — erosion or storm surge — would undermine about 33 houses and erase more than 3 percent of its landmass. Factor in the landward migration of the shore as the water rises and you have a disaster of tremendous scale. With a three-foot rise, as some predict, all of Lazy Point and Gerard Drive in Springs, as well as most of Star Island, Montauk, would be gone.

    Not everyone has ignored the threat. Insurance companies began dropping homeowners’ policies in coastal areas several years ago. New York State has tried to divest itself of responsibility for managing aspects of the shoreline by handing control of erosion-control structures to the localities. But, despite the whole problem’s being dumped in their laps, town and village officials have reacted with a collective shrug. At the very least, they should study reports like this and establish goals for retreating from rather than armoring the shores.

    The time to prepare for the worst is now.

   In making a point about what he sees as the inadequacies of the East Hampton Town Ordinance Enforcement Department at a town board work session on March 20, a Springs illegal-housing activist raised a question that needs an answer: Is the department working to its full potential?

    David Buda, who has in the past expressed frustration with local enforcers’ rate of success in dealing with illegally overcrowded housing, made an analogy that suggested the town, for reasons unknown, is failing to seek compliance with certain obvious violations of the law — the proliferation in recent years of banned, lighted signs. He speculated that this could be because the six-person Ordinance Enforcement Department might be, in his words, “understaffed, undervalued, and underpaid.” Politics, too, may play a part, with some members of the town board appearing to take sides with landlords and business owners who benefit from the cheap labor provided by those who have to live in substandard housing.

    To make his point that the town was not effectively watching its own streets, Mr. Buda displayed a poster-size printout of photographs of businesses with signs that violate the East Hampton Town prohibition on neon, L.E.D., and other forms of internal illumination. A handful of antique neon signs that were installed before this section of the town code was adopted in 1962 can remain up, Mr. Buda pointed out, but the rest are just plain illegal. This should be obvious to the enforcers, as well as to other town officials who drive by them every day.

    Laughable in this context are signs in some shop windows announcing the presence of automatic teller machines, or A.T.M.s. A.T.Ms did not come into widespread use until more than a decade and a half after the town ban on signs with internal illumination was put in place. Lately, inexpensive L.E.D. “open” signs have been popping up across town, too. Mr. Buda documented them in photographs and offered their locations to an impassive town board. (We called Betsy Bambrick, the town’s director of code enforcement, who also heads the town’s Animal Control Department, for a comment but did not get a response.)

    Mr. Buda said he had minimal response from anyone in Town Hall about his presentation, although Patrick Gunn, the director of the town’s Division of Public Safety, which oversees the Ordinance Enforcement Department, took a photograph of Mr. Buda’s display board at the meeting.

    Illegal signs are the easy part; dealing with less obvious and more serious alleged violations, such as overcrowded houses, can take lots of time and manpower — and the will to do so. Whether because the enforcement staff is overworked or because they know which way the political winds are blowing, the impression is that they have not lived up to their responsibilities. It is time this was corrected.

   If they have not already done so by the time you are reading this, the East Hampton Town Planning Board is about to vote to increase traffic tie-ups on Montauk Highway in Wainscott. An investor in commercial real estate bought the former Plitt Ford dealership there in September 2010 for $3.9 million, and he has gotten the town to think positively about his plan to redevelop it into a far more intensive retail space. Little analysis of the new store’s impact on nearby residences or the vehicles passing the site has been conducted. This should have occurred, and it bodes ill for the kind of scrutiny future highway-side commercial projects will receive.

    Whether by design or happy accident, the developer neutralized would-be opposition by hinting that a high-end food market, like Whole Foods or Trader Joe’s, might be in the cards. That apparently sounded good to a lot of people as well as the planning board, and the board is set to approve a high-traffic use to replace the nearly no-impact businesses that had been there for many years. Privately, the property owner has been saying that it looks as if he is about to sign a deal with the CVS drugstore chain, which takes the bloom off the rose a little. (CVS apparently would give up its site and overcrowded parking lot next to the East Hampton Post Office.)

    Unfortunately, a “hub” store, such as the developer plans, will add to year-round congestion at an already jammed section of Montauk Highway. Vehicles headed east stall there on Fridays, while the westbound trade parade backs up traffic on weekdays at around 4 p.m. Let’s face it, this area of Wainscott already has poorly thought-out commercial development, too much blacktop, and inappropriate signs. The planning board is on its way to making it worse.

    It has fast-tracked the redevelopment by deeming it insignificant in terms of the effect on the environment, including traffic. Under the State Environmental Quality Review Act, the board could and should have asked for a thorough study of what the project, if approved, would mean for its surroundings. Instead, it ruled that it would have “no impact.” The traffic study that was done and the state’s response to it were inadequate.

    One solution is not unprecedented: This would be for the Town of East Hampton to buy the property using money from the community preservation fund, level the buildings, and shrink the parking lot to make it a park, either by restoring the land to a natural state or by planting grass and trees. This was done to good effect at the former Mark R. Buick property on Pantigo Road in East Hampton Village. Of course, such action is highly unlikely, since the owner has indicated no interest that we know of in unloading the property, and the current town board is more interested in economic development than environmental preservation. But we can hope. Wainscott deserves better.