Now that the election is over, the East Hampton Town Board is picking up a matter it dropped hastily last month concerning East Hampton Airport.

    Fearing what would happen if a public forum about Federal Aviation Administration money was held just before voters went to the polls, Town Hall went into panic mode in October, scratching a hearing on the deal. Having avoided what could have been a political bombshell, the board now plans to go ahead with a request for a relatively modest amount of money from Washington for  deer and security fences at the airport.

    A large number of residents, upset about aircraft noise, have decried taking any more money from the F.A.A. because they say (accurately, from what we can tell) that doing so binds the town’s hands in terms of meaningful control of the airport. Further, they say that the airport has a dedicated fund with a substantial surplus in it that could pay for the work, avoiding further entanglement with the F.A.A.

    Exactly why the town board majority, headed by Supervisor Bill Wilkinson, wants the Washington handout is not clear, but there are a couple of possibilities. One is a fear that airport-noise opponents could someday gain the upper hand and curtail hours of operation or limit certain classes of aircraft. By accepting the F.A.A. money, the current board would make it more difficult for the town to gain the upper hand at the airport, something some of the current majority’s backers worry about.

    Another reason could be that the town needs money. The East Hampton budget relies in part on the use of surpluses to keep tax rates down. But when they are gone, taxes will have to rise or more services be cut. In the 2012 spending plan, for example, the airport’s cash reserve is tapped for $400,000, roughly 10 percent of its budget to cover costs associated with a seasonal control “tower,” actually a trailer.

    Mr. Wilkinson and his budget officer, Len Bernard, are in a difficult place, having cut taxes twice and reduced the town work force about as much as possible. This is why they remain interested in selling such town assets as Fort Pond House in Montauk and scratching together additional non-tax sources wherever they can. The revenue has to come from somewhere. This is insufficient justification, however, for a policy decision that many believe will harm East Hampton in the long run.

    With the consensus being that accepting F.A.A. money comes at the cost of local control, the East Hampton Town Board should find other ways to pay for the fencing.

    We wish Stephen Lynch well in his new post as East Hampton Town’s next superintendent of highways, but there is a certain sweet irony in his election. Among the responsibilities he is soon to have is keeping the roadsides clear of anything that does not conform to the town code, notably signs larger than six square feet. This is paradoxical because Mr. Lynch’s campaign billboards and parked, truck and trailer-mounted messages were among the most expansive of this year’s political season and, as such, were obvious violations of the law.  

    We do not mean to single out Mr. Lynch. Plenty of other oversize signs and illegal off-premises come-ons kept his company. Nevertheless, East Hampton Town Supervisor Bill Wilkinson, Scott King, the outgoing highway superintendent, other elected officials, and Town Hall personnel drove to work each day past other examples without doing anything about it. (Yes, we know we bring this up frequently, but we are going to keep at it until someone in authority starts paying attention.)

    Normally, these rules are within the purview of the Ordinance Enforcement Department, but it was as if its staff had never read the town code. You have to wonder what other less-obvious violations of the town code go without remedy.

    As of the January organization meeting at which he is to be sworn in, Mr. Lynch will be in a unique position in town government: He answers only to voters and does not have to operate in the highly politicized environment of the town board. The code, which he will promise to uphold, gives him the right — shared with the town police — to remove signs, illegal obstructions, and other objects of concern within the town’s right-of-ways. Mr. Lynch should study the code, seeking independent, outside advice, if need be, so that he can direct his crews to remove whatever is necessary to put a stop to this ever-expanding visual affront to public property, good taste, and the law.

    In news of the violence that has broken out in Cairo in recent days, a report has circulated that may indicate that the Egyptian authorities are paying attention to how some police in the United States have responded to the Occupy Wall Street protests.

According to the accounts, an Egyptian state television anchor cited the “firm stance” taken by United States law enforcement to “secure the state” as a justification for the Egyptian crackdown. This report came from Twitter, posted by Sultan Al Qassemi, a journalist and important voice in the Arab Spring uprisings. Whether or not this can be independently confirmed, it points to a troubling double standard between the United States’s internal actions and foreign policy.

    Occupy Wall Street first gained widespread attention in September, when a supervising officer in the New York Police Department used pepper spray on an unarmed and nonthreatening group of four women who had been standing together. Before that, the protests had been a curiosity; after it came out that N.Y.P.D.’s “white shirts” from higher ranks were leading an aggressive response to keep “sidewalks clear and crowds moving along,” the protest rapidly grew into a movement. Protesters greeted the news that the officer who had used pepper spray was “punished” by having 10 vacation days docked with anger.

    On Friday, campus police at the University of California Davis used pepper spray on nine seated protesters who had defied orders to move. Photographs of this unprovoked attack have become a new rallying cry of the movement. In one particularly resonant image, some wit digitally placed the campus officer into John Trumbull’s famous painting of the signing of Declaration of Independence, blasting America’s founding document with an orange-colored haze.

    It must be conceded that a few angry cops and misguided public officials do not add up to an overturning of democracy. Nor should  the police’s removal of the library Occupy Wall Street put together at Zuccotti Park be  considered on a par with book-burning in Hitler’s Germany. However, violent responses to the peaceful encampments reinforce the movement’s messages about inequality and the use of official force to resist meaningful change.

    If the report out of Egypt is accurate, the world is indeed watching.

    East Hampton Town has two town justices who serve four-year terms and alternate on the ballot. Each appears on the bench for two weeks then uses two weeks for desk work. Each position pays $75,000 despite the job appearing to be less than full time.

    Justice Court is in session only three days a week, and the building itself was summarily closed to the public on Tuesdays earlier this year — and good luck getting a court staffer on the phone the rest of the time. This is high on the list of what Stephen Grossman, who is hoping to unseat Justice Lisa R. Rana, thinks ought to be changed.

    Mr. Grossman has been in private practice here for years and has run unsuccessfully in the past for a number of judicial positions, including this one. He has criticized the court as far too slow in disposing of zoning and quality-of-life cases, allowing violations to continue unchecked, sometimes for years. When businesses are charged, he says, defendants’ lawyers tend to run the show without objection from the bench while the interests of affected neighbors take a back seat.

    Ms. Rana, who comes from Amagansett, is a two-term justice, who is sometimes reported as tardy by those who appear in her court. After eight years, she may be settling in for what appears to her to be a long, comfortable career as town justice. While term limits might not be in the best interest of the electorate, getting a new justice in the court every now and then might make the system run more efficiently and help the town enforce its laws more promptly and effectively. We endorse Mr. Grossman.

    To the unfamiliar eye, metal pipes driven into the sand and tied together with rope in a rough rectangle at Georgica Beach in East Hampton might not look like much, but they represent a new and aggressive front in the war over control of the ocean shoreline, creating another big headache for town and village officials who are supposed to be looking out for the interests of the community as a whole.

    In the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Irene’s approach to Long Island and eventual impact here as a tropical storm, many oceanfront property owners saw much of their dunes eaten away. One family, however, was not willing to accept the conventional wisdom — and the law — that once upland becomes beach, it becomes public. They opted to fence in what they believed was still their property, having the pipes driven deep by a contractor without first seeking or obtaining permits. If so, this would make the work illegal and in violation of town trustee, village, and state law.

    Metes and bounds descriptions of property lines may vary from place to place, but in law and in many — but not all — deeds, it is understood that the right of passage even across privately held beaches cannot be blocked. Nevertheless, an increasing number of property owners here and in Southampton Town have challenged the public use of what they see as theirs alone based on such deeds. The East Hampton Town Trustees, who set policy for the beaches and own parts of them, as well as the town board, are, in fact, ramping up a legal defense in a suit brought by two sets of oceanfront landowners who are seeking to assert what they believe is their right of control.

    At Georgica, a village beach, sand returns naturally more often than not, thanks, it would appear, to the long, perpendicular jetty just to the west. However, erosion from Irene left the shore low and flat, and at high tide, someone, a surfer, for example, would be unable to walk dry shod to the jetty unless he or she ducked under the newly fenced property, ignoring the no-trespassing signs. Regardless of where the property owner believes his land to be, this would appear to be a violation of the public’s right of passage.

    Predictions are that erosion will increase in the coming decades as a result of sea-level rise. This means that disagreements of this kind with oceanfront property owners will become much more frequent. It is important for the village and town to do everything in their power to be sure that legal precedents are set in the public’s favor.

    With high ocean swells from Hurricane Katia expected today, nature may already be reminding us just who has the highest authority along the shoreline. It is up to elected officials to use the law and the courts to assure that access for the public is unimpeded.

    Erosion is an issue on the bay beaches as well as on the ocean, for example, where Mulford Lane meets Gardiner’s Bay in Amagansett. Three houses there are either in the water or about to be. One, on stilts, is not habitable. The owners of another want to replace it with a somewhat larger house and to protect it with a stone revetment.

    The work would require several variances, in addition to permits, perhaps most notably to allow a new erosion-control structure in a place where they are specifically prohibited by the town’s recently passed coastal erosion hazard code. Although the East Hampton Town Zoning Board of Appeals has held a hearing on the application, it is being revised, apparently so the beach in front of the third house, on a smaller lot to the northeast, can also be armored.

    People who own waterfront houses usually would want to do whatever they could to keep them from falling into the sea. This is understandable. It is not, in many cases, in the public interest to allow them to do so. A revetment in this case probably would help the owners save their houses, at least for the near future. But it would mean the disappearance of whatever beach remains there, which is, of course, public. This is a high cost and presents a difficult dilemma for the zoning board.

    That erosion is severe at Mulford Lane is an understatement. It is exacerbated by the surrounding upland (if you can call it that) which is as flat as a prairie. These three houses were built at a time when local laws were lax with regard to potential erosion and allowed them to be sited where none should be.

    The Z.B.A. should deny the application. Perhaps the matter should more properly be something for the town board to consider and ask whether the properties should be condemned and the structures removed. In doing so, the town would save the homeowners great long-term expense, or great grief, and, with the houses gone, be able to preserve access across the land for the public and future generations.

    It comes as no surprise that the Long Island Power Authority can be criticized for what appeared to be a slow and noncoummunicative response to Hurricane, or, Tropical Storm Irene. In the aftermath of what was a relatively mild blow, few LIPA crews were seen on the South Fork, and for many, electricity was not restored for up to a week. A reasonable worry is how LIPA and its partner, National Grid, would perform in a real catastrophe.

    The company has said that its major circuits were restored quickly. What took so long, it said, was sorting out all of the many problems that kept the lights off, some in backyards that were choked by trees and limbs. That sounds suspiciously like a utility that wants to blame its customers for its problems.

    It was reassuring to hear this week from Assemblyman Fred W. Thiele Jr. that state hearings about LIPA’s performance after Irene were inevitable. He said the state should extend questioning to disaster-recovery planning and public outreach in addition to performance in this test. He added that greater thought should be given to burying power lines to prevent widespread outages. To see this done, Mr. Thiele said the members of LIPA’s board, who are politically appointed, should change in order to foster greater accountability.

    These seem prudent steps, particularly for a utility with rates that are always among the highest in the nation but one that surveys show is among the lowest in customer satisfaction.

    If someone took the time to make a list of the businesses East Hampton Town residents complain about all the time, one thing would become clear: The bulk of the trouble spots are in locations with residential zoning.

    Those who follow local government, or who live near one of these places, can point fingers if they like. Our intention is not to name names; rather, it is to point out that it doesn’t have to be this way. In fact, and this may surprise some people, the town’s own laws were written to gradually make development consistent with good planning.

    Tension between commerce and homeowners is not new. When the East Hampton Town zoning code first was adopted, in the early 1960s, so-called pre-existing, nonconforming uses, such as restaurants, bars, delis, and repair shops, were supposed to fade away over time. More intensive-purposed properties would be centered where the appropriate infrastructure, such as parking lots, road drainage, street lighting, and public transportation, was provided. The basic idea was that there were appropriate places for houses and appropriate places for things that were not houses. No great mystery there.

    What is new, although it reaches back from the present administration to prior administrations, is a sense in Town Hall that pre-existing, nonconforming businesses should not only be grandfathered, that is, allowed to remain as they are, but should be encouraged to grow and become permanent. This violates both the East Hampton Town Code and widely accepted notions of livable communities. The net effect of the easy-does-it approach is suburban sprawl, with low-key, helter-skelter businesses getting even more entrenched and the major roads between the South Fork’s villages and hamlets increasingly commercialized. There are ways to combine commercial and residental development, sure, so-called smart growth concepts, but that is not what we are talking about here. Unmanaged, it might better be termed dumb growth.

    The record shows that the Town Building Department has been far too willing to certify pre-existing, nonconforming uses in residential zones on the scantiest of excuses and absent of any documentation. If the department were to faithfully follow the town code, it would demand better evidence that such uses had the right to remain. Moreover, the department has repeatedly failed to refer requests for building permits to the planning board for site plan review, as required in many cases.

    This stands in stark contrast to one of the overarching goals of  East Hampton’s 2005 comprehensive plan update, to maintain and restore the town’s rural and semirural character. Another objective listed in the plan is to protect neighborhoods from incompatible development. The plan was the product of more than four years’ work by elected officials and scores of dedicated citizens who attended meeting after meeting.

    Taming certain commercial outliers is part of what would make East Hampton a better place to live. We wonder what it will take to shift the balance back.

    Amagansett residents gave themselves a tax increase last week. On Oct. 3, 140 people who live in that hamlet’s fire district trooped to the firehouse to support a bond deal that will add something on the order of $50 to $100 a year, depending on assessments, to their property tax bills. Similarly, higher school and library levies have also passed in recent rounds of voting. Considered together, these votes suggest, at the very least, that no widespread well of anti-tax sentiment exists here.

    Of course, fire districts and schools are like mom and apple pie, and each has strongly motivated constituencies to help guarantee budget-vote successes. Still, we can’t help but notice that when given a choice, local residents have time and again approved tax hikes.

    It seems that residents’ willingness to pay more when asked for something they think is worthwhile is at variance with the tax-cutting obsession that now reigns in East Hampton Town Hall. No one likes paying higher taxes. But it also appears that when residents perceive a good cause they are willing to vote yes with their hard-earned dollars and cents.

    By declining to review a challenge to East Hampton Town’s strict limit on the types of ferries that can dock here, the United States Supreme Court last week put an apparent end to a long-fought struggle. This is an important victory for East Hampton residents.

    The Supreme Court agreed with a lower court that had ruled the town had the right to regulate ferries and had said East Hampton’s 1998 law preventing car-carrying and high-speed ferries from docking here did not violate the Constitution’s Commerce Clause. The appeals court had ruled, in effect, that local restrictions designed to control traffic or protect certain areas of town from added congestion and parking problems were reasonable.

    Common sense appears to have prevailed in this matter. Summer on the South Fork is busy enough, and local governments clearly have an obligation to citizens to do what they can to gain the upper hand. At least as far as ferries are concerned, residents can breath a sigh of relief.