Next Thursday, the East Hampton Town Board will convene a hearing on a set of changes to how the town handles applications for structures on farmland and nurseries. The proposed new rules bear close scrutiny.

    The revisions would move the authority over such structures from the planning and zoning boards to the architectural review board. While the A.R.B. already has some authority on farmland projects, it would take over sole review of many site plans, temporary greenhouses, farm stands (of up to 500 square feet), and buildings used for agriculture excluding animal husbandry. Instead of certified surveys of the property involved, the A.R.B. would accept a simple description and sketch. Site plan review, which deals with parking and impacts on nearby roads, would be taken away from the far more expert planning board. Going even further, the revisions would allow the A.R.B. chairman to issue waivers allowing the construction of storage structures for feed, fertilizer, crops, and machinery. This kind of unilateral procedure would not be in the community’s best interest.    

    The basic problem is that the architectural review board is the least rigorous and most informal of the town’s appointed land-use panels. It also makes it more difficult for the public to find out about its activities. Specializing in intentionally fast approvals under its pro-business chairman, Robert Schwagerl, A.R.B. agendas are posted only inside town offices and even then are often not available until it is too late for neighbors of pending projects to become informed about what is going on. In response to a question about this, Mr. Schwagerl said that providing advance public notice would slow down the board and interfere with applicants’ ability to make money in what may be a short season.    

     East Hampton Town Supervisor Bill Wilkinson and Councilwoman Theresa Quigley’s proposal to move many farmland projects to the least accountable board has to be viewed in the context of what they believe is their mandate to “streamline” development review. It is unimaginable that the town would go back to the days when permits were handed out willy-nilly, but we fear this could be the result.

    At minimum, the public-notice procedures of the architectural review board should be significantly improved to allow for ample time for the public to learn what is before the board — and even to express its disapproval if need be.

    Commercial fishermen should be able to sell their catches directly to consumers, so say advocates of what is called community supported fisheries. Community supported agriculture has become familiar during the past decade. Members buy shares in a farm and are rewarded periodically with boxes of produce — and a sense of ownership. In the newer fishing model, subscribers prepay for the day’s catch, accepting whatever comes over the gunwales.

    Sea Grant, a joint program of Cornell and the State University at Stony Brook, has been studying whether community supported fisheries might work on Long Island. Several groups and private citizens are also trying to gauge interest.

    For the South Fork’s fishing families, such a program might be challenging, but it could bring potential rewards as well. From our perspective, a lot more and better marketing could be done to promote this region’s excellent and varied seafood. Trap fishing, in particular, is environmentally sustainable, yields the freshest, best-quality fish, and would be ideal for the subscriber model because catches are varied from day to day and season to season, something consumers require.

    Local farmers have been getting a lot of the attention lately, perhaps it is the fishing fleet’s turn to get in the spotlight.

    The East Hampton Town Board’s decision on Thursday to buy the four-acre Northwest Kennels property off Swamp Road in Northwest Woods was the right call and something many residents would like to see a lot more of.

    With the board’s 4-0 vote in favor last week, an $837,500 deal for the property will soon be signed. The land borders on already-preserved woodland and is at a headwater of Northwest Creek. There is talk of providing residents with racks or even enclosed storage for kayaks and other small human-powered watercraft, as well as opening up a trail head to allow visitors additional access to the county and state parkland nearby. The price was right, and the agreement seems good for all concerned.

    Looking back further, however, it is reasonable to lament that there have not been more such purchases recently. Following the disastrous misappropriation of community preservation money during the Bill McGintee years, land buys were forced to a halt. The program had to be put on ice while the town’s accounts were put in order after Mr. McGintee’s resignation. But some of the stalling may have been attributable to the town board majority’s sympathy for the view that more of our vacant land should go on the real estate market. Spending under the Republican town board dwindled, hitting an all-time low in 2010 of $6.3 million, while at the same time the fund’s revenues were increasing. Only two parcels were acquired that year, and most of the money actually went to debt payments for earlier land buys.

    There is reason for hope. An audit of the community preservation fund’s income and expenses for 2008 through 2010 is in the final stages. With the dollars and cents finally sorted out, the town board should see no more impediments in what is now an excellent time, given the economic doldrums and depressed prices, for a spending spree on preservation.

    The East Hampton Town Board must become active buyers of suitable vacant land whenever it becomes available. It is reasonable to expect that the real estate slump will not last forever and that when the next boom comes, today’s deals will seem like bargains.

    Land the town does not preserve will be seen as a missed opportunity and a long-term liability for whichever political party fails to act. Going into the run-up to the 2011 election, residents should demand a renewed commitment to the preservation program.

    The commissioners of the Amagansett Fire District apparently believe they are in a race against time in seeking voter approval on Oct. 4 for buying a former restaurant property next door to the firehouse. Unfortunately, with a public meeting on the subject Tuesday and the balloting to follow only a week later, the district’s taxpayers will hardly have enough time to weigh the pros and cons of the plan. The process should be slowed down.

    The urgency appears to be misplaced, or at best, unexplained. The two-acre site has been listed with real estate brokers since 2007 with its price steadily declining as no buyers were really interested. Moreover, the building’s status as a viable restaurant in a residential zone is questionable. The value of the property would be further reduced if it could be shown to have lost its pre-existing, nonconforming status.

    At the core of the questions we expect the commissioners to answer Tuesday is what voter approval of the $2.8-million price they apparently have already agreed to would mean for the tax rate. The old Pacific East restaurant building would be removed and a new ambulance facility built there, but the public hasn’t heard what the estimated costs for all this would be. Nor is there time for objective vetting of any numbers the commissioners put forth on Tuesday.

    Worth considering, too, is the fact that the East Hampton Fire Department operates from a far smaller site than Amagansett’s already-roomy 4.7-acre lot. East Hampton houses police, fire, and ambulance squads on 2.1 acres. The Amagansett commissioners have pointed out that the department uses the field behind the firehouse for helicopter landings from time to time so that putting an ambulance barn back there would seem to be off the table. Could a redesign of the existing firehouse solve the department’s space needs? We don’t know, but the taxpayers might like an analysis of this alternative before being asked to vote.

    Some residents have objected to the plan on aesthetic grounds, saying that Amagansett Main Street should not be home to another brick hulk. These people might be mollified if the commissioners were to put forth a conceptual drawing.

    No one likes to be in the position of saying no to the extremely dedicated volunteer firefighters and emergency medical technicians, but too many questions surround this plan. There is simply not enough time for these important considerations to be fully worked through by those who will be paying the bill. A longer period of review would benefit all concerned.

    Irene, the hurricane that became a tropical storm as it reached Long Island, did more than knock out power for days and topple rot-weakened trees. For many in the hospitality and retail trades here, its impact was a tough hit in an already tough year. Ask most any shopkeeper on the South Fork how their summer 2011 went and more times than not they will say it was okay until the storm warnings came. Then, as one in Montauk told us this week, things just dropped off a cliff. Customers left as the forecast worsened, he said, and just didn’t come back.

    Much has been made of the additional costs the Long Island Power Authority will have to absorb or pass on to its customers for restoring power after long outages. LIPA has set the figure at $176 million. County and state lawmakers are looking into whether the utility was adequately prepared for what turned out to be a modest blow. Expect a fair amount of grandstanding at a hearing today in Mineola in which a New York Senate committee will consider what LIPA did and what it could do differently next time.

    Likely to be unasked and unanswered tomorrow is what can be done to help those businesses that had been depending on strong Labor Day receipts to help turn a profit. As residents finish their back-to-school purchases and as holiday shopping looms, they might think about keeping their dollars and cents on the South Fork whenever possible.

    Lost in the discussion about whether some East Hampton Town Human Services Department records were improperly shredded as its former director and others prepared to retire were valuable pointers about how town departments should operate. Meaningful recommendations in an outside consultant’s report on the department have been overshadowed by implications of wrongdoing that were made in a separate letter sent to Supervisor Bill Wilkinson after the report was completed.

    It is odd, to say the least, that none of the report’s 26 recommendations mention the destruction of documents. Nor does the so-called “management letter” issued after the fact say who made this troubling accusation.

      The $15,000 analysis was opposed from the start by the town board’s two Democratic members, who worried that it might be used to scapegoat the department’s former director, Edna Steck. Those fears appear to have been well founded. Nawrocki Smith, the firm chosen by the Republican majority to review the department’s activities, told the supervisor, in the separate letter, that it had been in contact with the Suffolk district attorney’s office for guidance and counsel.

    That the report was completed in August but its release delayed until after Labor Day — and after the far more damning letter to Mr. Wilkinson was sent on Sept. 1 —  suggests that the timing may have been intended to coincide with the time when voters begin turning in earnest to local politics. Could this be a baldly political attempt to get headlines in the run-up to the November town board elections? It is likely that this affair was at least in part spun up by Len Bernard, the politically savvy East Hampton Town budget director, who has said that the matter has also been referred to the state comptroller’s office.

    Politics aside, it is somewhat difficult to see how the report (widely misrepresented as an audit) from Nawrocki Smith, a Melville accounting and business consulting firm, will offer much in the way of dividends for taxpayers, though its findings should be heeded. Primarily, it calls for corrections in what was overly casual record-keeping under the Human Services Department’s former staff.

    Among the recommendations are that there should be guidelines for handling grants, that employee time sheets should be better maintained, and that reimbursements for the use of personal vehicles should be reviewed more carefully. The report says the department’s senior citizens transportation procedures should have included income verification, but did not. Nor did Human Resources maintain a daily checklist of vehicle maintenance or properly log donations of toys, books, and food.

    Nawrocki Smith found that the department was not licensed for psychotherapy, and this and several other problems have now been corrected. In all, however, the report paints an unflattering picture of the mom-and-pop way Human Services, and undoubtedly other town offices, were, and probably continue to be, run. There is room for improvement and we expect the Wilkinson administration will continue to make sure it takes place.

    Since the Nawrocki Smith report itself has nothing in it about the destruction of records, however, dark hints about illegal acts seem out of place at this juncture. If documents were improperly destroyed, as the letter to the supervisor suggests, it would be a serious matter, particularly if some of those records dealt with finances. However, this so-far unsubstantiated and anonymous allegation should be viewed, at least for now, for what it is.

    The United States Census Bureau this week confirmed what many indicators have already shown: More Americans are among the poor, and middle class income continues to shrink. The stark figures underscore the weakness of the recovery from the recession and should send a message to Washington: The people of this country are hurting, and much more needs to be done to get the economy on the right path.

    The number of those below the poverty line was the highest in the 52 years the statistic has been kept. According to the Census Bureau, 46.2 million people were below the line, about 15 percent of the population. But the poverty line — an annual income of $22,314 for a family of four — is set so low that millions more Americans are undoubtedly in dire straits, although not counted.

    Relative wealth fell for all Americans in the last decade, though the drop was more pronounced at the lower end. The median household income went down to about $49,000. Pay fell by 12 percent since 1999 for low-wage earners. By comparison, the rich, those in the top 90th percentile, had an income drop of just 1.5 percent.

    Unemployment, according to a census official quoted in a report in The New York Times on Tuesday, was largely responsible for the increased number of the poor. In 2010, she said, about 48 million people between the prime working ages of 18 to 64 did not work even one week. And 22 percent of children, the highest percentage in 18 years, are now in poverty.

    President Obama’s proposed jobs bill might help a bit — if much of it could get through Congress — but this report suggests that far more than new payroll and business tax cuts and a modest infrastructure program is called for. A decade’s slide is not going to be reversed by these mostly temporary measures, though nonpartisan economic analysts have said it would do some good. The economic well-being of America’s poor and middle class now must be Washington’s priority. The census report should be a wake-up call.

    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.