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.

    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.

    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.

    Occupy Wall Street may seem an odd name for a protest movement, yet the mass assembly of angry and frustrated people in downtown Manhattan — and increasingly in other cites around the country — appears to be this month’s big story and is drawing more support with every passing day. As the protest neared the conclusion of its third week, large labor unions were stepping up and offering support. Today, thousands of activists are expected in Washington’s Freedom Square. Where this all will lead is unknown, but it surely is significant.

    The concerns that motivate many of the protesters have been mischaracterized in some of the media as vague. This is as much an indictment of the corporate news outlets as it is of those in the streets. Yes, the goals of the Occupy Wall Street encampments are many, but their complexity should not be dismissed as evidence that the people who are expressing these ideas are naive.

    A common theme is evident enough: The protesters are saying that the power structure of the United States has shifted too far toward corporate interests and the wealthiest among us and that the individuals and forces that wrecked the economy have not been held accountable. It is a clear and accurate message — if you take the time to hear it.

    Tuesday’s East Hampton Town Board work session marked a welcome shift in the way discussions with the public at such meetings have been going.

    The subject was the possibility of establishing a new bathing beach with 100 parking spaces on town-owned land off Dolphin Drive on Napeague. Unlike some proposals, which have emerged fully formed from Town Hall’s inner sanctum, this is a very, very preliminary proposal. Faced with the need for more access to ocean beaches, the town board has revived an idea for a protected beach, with lifeguards and toilets, which would take some of the pressure off existing beaches.

    Members of a nearby homeowners’ association and others expressed their concerns, including one environmental advocate who saw problems ahead. Instead of being greeted with the usual bluster and defensiveness by elected officials, those attending were allowed to make their points.

    The chances for a new beach may be low, given opposition and the supposed difficulty of obtaining certain state approvals. Nonetheless, the tone of Tuesday’s discussion was exemplary. Certainly, with the town election only about four weeks away, board members were likely to be on their best behavior. This example of civility, however, of an honest give-and-take, should be allowed to continue beyond Nov. 8.

    The question for Amagansett voters in Tuesday’s balloting is whether to authorize the fire district to buy the two-acre Pacific East property adjacent to the firehouse for the future construction of a separate ambulance facility. The commissioners have said there is no way the expansion they envision could be accommodated on the land the district owns now — 4.7 acres.

    That the commissioners are thinking ahead is laudable. The number of ambulance calls continues to escalate and the Fire Department’s drivers and emergency medical technicians deserve the highest praise. But we are opposed to the deal for several reasons.

    Foremost among them is that no government agency — and the fire district is just that — should be given the green light on a proposal of this scale without first laying out the particulars in detail. If the district gets the okay to buy the property, it will then ask voters for the money to put up a building. Once having agreed to buy the land, it would become difficult for residents to put the brakes on a construction project.

    There also is the possibility that taxpayers would be paying too much if the $2.8 million deal goes through. Pacific East last operated as a restaurant open to the public in the summer of 2007. Under the town code, this would mean its rights as a pre-existing, nonconforming business in a residential zone had lapsed. East Hampton Town’s top building inspector thinks otherwise, however, although he has yet to provide documentation to support his belief. It is unlikely that the property, wedged between the firehouse on one side and the Amagansett Farmers Market on the other, would fetch nearly as much money if it were sold on the residential, rather than commercial, market.

    On Tuesday, in hastily called balloting, Amagansett Fire District voters will decide whether or not to absorb a tax hike to buy what may be overpriced land, while at the same time signaling an inclination to approve the unknown costs of a new building. Voting no would allow time for the commissioners to address the open questions and to give the public stronger assurances of their implied “trust us.”

    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.

    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.

    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.

    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.