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.

    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 Napeague homeowners who sued the East Hampton Town Trustees and Town Board, claiming they own the beach in front of their houses from the high tide line down to the surf, and that they can, therefore, deny its use by the public, have incited an opinion hurricane, as might have been expected. They also seem to have raised more legal questions than they might have anticipated.

    The litigants trace their ownership of the beach to a trustees’ deed selling a swath of Napeague to Arthur Benson, the man who also bought Montauk in 1879. But a lot of sand has washed over (or off, as the case may be) the beach since that time, allowing legal ins and outs to arise. 

    How about adverse possession? It is a principle of real estate law that allows title to vest in those making use of someone else’s property when they meet specific criteria. The law differs from state to state, but the standards involve the length of time the property was used by someone who didn’t own it and whether the use was consistent, among many others. Is it therefore possible that a group acting on behalf of the public (the people who populate truck beach) can claim adverse possession and overrule private title?

    Then there seems to be a tricky matter about an easement; according to a knowledgeable source, the trustees obtained an assurance preserving public access to the beach in the Napeague Lane area at the time the upland was subdivided — a reservation, if you will. In addition, there are questions about whether the surveys showed ownership to mean high water, the common practice at the time. Then again, even if the homeowners’ deeds do show title below the high tide line, there’s the matter of whether they acted as owners of private property over which the public made use by blocking it at certain times, and whether they paid taxes on it.

    Although we have encouraged the town to find other places where East Hampton residents who do not live on the water can get on the beach, and although we cannot predict who will prevail, the lawsuit may force the trustees to enact further restrictions on driving on the beaches.

    The numbers of those with four-wheeler permits have grown to the point where they outweigh tradition and what the colonial-era town fathers had in mind when they set down the community’s rules and regulations. Conflicts are inevitable now, though court should be the last place to try to solve them. Even so, the trustees may have a few aces up their sleeves. Whether a legal victory will solve the long-term issue of overuse and abate the frustration of oceanfront property owners is an open question.

    East Hampton Town Planning Board members could make no mistake about where Supervisor Bill Wilkinson and Councilwoman Theresa Quigley, the deputy supervisor, stood when they walked into the meeting room on July 13 and sat down in the audience next to the applicant in a matter before the board. In past practice, there has been a studious separation between the appointed boards and the elected officials who appoint them; this should be maintained.    

    The matter before the board was complicated, but the details are less relevant than the appearance of meddling. For the record, the board had to decide whether to change the terms by which a commercial subdivision had been approved in 2005. Planning board members were told by the board chairman, Reed Jones, that a legal error had been discovered in the original approval, and he asked them to vote then and there. For some reason, the proposed modification had come from the town attorney’s office, whose lawyers are hired and fired by the town board, rather than directly from the applicant. The standard procedure, in which a property owner seeks changes and a hearing is scheduled, was not followed; the reason why was not explained.    

    This is not the only recent example of intrusion by members of the town board into the workings of an appointed board. Councilman Dominick Stanzione is reported to have coached the chairman of the architectural review board on what to say during a hearing on a matter the councilman is advocating.    

    After some heated discussion, the planning board made the change, with the members appointed by the current town board majority voting the way Mr. Wilkinson and Ms. Quigley wanted and those appointed by a prior administration voting the other way. The terms of planning board members are seven years, long enough, the idea is, to allow them to be less beholden to changing politics. The supervisor and deputy supervisor’s involvement suggests a willingness to undermine that wall. It would be far better for East Hampton Town if the process operated without interference.

    As expected, samples taken at South Lake Beach in Montauk after Monday’s rain showed the presence of human waste. The water would be clean enough to swim in by Thursday, at least according to Suffolk Health Department standards, but, frankly, we doubt many people — if they knew about the test results — would want to. The question for East Hampton Town is how officials should respond now that they have been reminded of the problem.

    South Lake is one of two beaches within East Hampton Town’s boundaries where post-rainfall sampling shows unsafe conditions. The other is Havens Beach in Sag Harbor, where bureaucratic inaction has long delayed remediation. Two troubled beaches are two too many. Residents should expect those in charge to make safe bathing areas a top priority.

    A cautionary note comes from the recent experience of Northport Village, which was cited by the Environmental Protection Agency for inadequate stormwater and wastewater discharge management — violations under the Clean Water Act. After inspections, the agency found that the village had failed at a planning level and also had maintenance problems with catch basins and drainpipes, conditions that have been observed here as well.

    Northport has until Sept. 30 to beef up its road-runoff efforts, until Nov. 30 to deal with non-point sources into its harbor, and until Jan. 31 to complete a full pollution audit. Penalties could cost the village up to $37,500 a day if it fails to meet the deadlines.

    East Hampton Town cannot wait until federal inspectors appear on our shores to improve the situation. It must identify and eliminate the sources of human waste at South Lake and work with Sag Harbor to finally solve the Havens Beach problem. These steps, though urgent, will take time. For this season, officials should post detailed warnings at these beaches to allow those who might go in the water to make informed choices.

    Eighteen years ago, a few months after my grandmother on my father’s side celebrated a milestone birthday, she and my stepgrandfather, Milt, took the entire family on a weekend getaway to the Catskills.

    There were 16 of us then and our destination was the Concord, the largest resort in the Borscht Belt, and at the time one of the last of its kind. According to Wikipedia, it had some 1,500 rooms and a dining room that seated 3,000. The food was kosher, to cater to what had historically been a Jewish clientele.

    The weekend we were there, Howie Mandel was the Saturday evening entertainment, offering a stand-up routine rife with four-letter expletives. (The children were supposed to be in bed.) Though I was already 22 and in college, my grandmother — a modern woman and not overly proper — told me recently that she had been surprised by his language and embarrassed that I was exposed to it.

    Before that trip, everything I knew about the Catskills I had learned watching “Dirty Dancing.” But despite the instructive value of the movie, I knew nothing of the area’s history or its popularity as a Jewish summer vacation spot. My father and his two sisters had gone to summer camp in the Catskills and had memories of family vacations not far from the Concord.

    Most of the other big Borscht Belt resorts were already closed by the time of our visit. Five years later, the Concord would follow suit, sitting empty and abandoned, with only its golf course operational, for a decade until demolition finally began a few years ago.

    To me, the Concord was like a landlocked cruise ship, a mammoth place where activities were scheduled throughout the day and you dressed up for dinner. It was fun, in an unexpected way.

    Two weeks ago, as a belated celebration of Nana and Milt’s 25th anniversary and an especially big birthday for Milt, my grandparents again gathered the family for a weekend in the Catskills. This time we were 21 and our destination was the Villa Roma Resort and Conference Center in Callicoon. Not quite as vast as the Concord, it still offered an array of on-site activities including indoor and outdoor pools and boccie courts, tennis, golf, shuffleboard, a bowling alley, a nightclub, bumper boats, and, my favorite, a go-kart race track, a k a the Monaco Speedway. Had it rained, we could easily have entertained ourselves without ever leaving the expansive building.

    The family portraits looked very different this time than they had 18 years ago.

    Age aside, there had been two divorces, an uncle lost to cancer, and the addition of two fiancées, a grandchild, a grandson-in-law (my husband), and two great-grandchildren (my kids). Cousins who were toddlers or not yet born in 1993 were old enough, or almost, to share a beer with this time around. After rendezvousing with the rest of the arriving family members at our hospitality suite on Friday afternoon, my daughter declared it “a party” and determined to sleep as little as possible for the entire weekend.

    She didn’t want to miss a moment, and I don’t blame her.

    At dinner on Friday and Saturday nights, with all but the youngest of us clustered around a big table with a view of the pretty hills beyond, my grandmother gushed about how lucky she was to have all of us there together. I couldn’t agree more.

    The older I get the more I appreciate time with family. And with relatives who are emotionally connected but geographically scattered, that time doesn’t come often enough. Who else will volunteer to hang out with your 3-year-old or vie for a chance to chase after your fiercely independent 1-year-old walker? For other people, even the closest of friends, it gets old. For family . . . well, they’re family.

    Having experienced the fun of her aunts, uncles, cousins, and grandparents at dinner and then breakfast on Saturday, Jade had no interest in spending time away from them in the kiddie pool — “too splashy” — or even going to the playground. She just wanted to “go to the party.”

    There were three outdoor pools, but securing a lounge chair near them was harder than getting a parking spot at Indian Wells in August. The pool gates opened at 9 a.m.; however, if you were not up and waiting on line by 7, you were out of luck for the day. Being a beach girl, the idea of sitting in such close quarters with so many other people by the side of an overly warm and overcrowded pool did not appeal to me. Maybe that’s because I did not get on line at 7 and therefore did not have a lounge chair.

    I wondered, as I stepped between the tanning-oil-slathered bodies, where did these people come from? What was Villa Roma’s primary demographic? I’m a reporter, an amateur anthropologist. I can’t help it. I always want to figure a place out. Did they come from a nearby city? From suburban New York or New Jersey, and if so, why wouldn’t they go to the beach? Were they upstate vacationers? People without pools or beaches at home?

    An answer of sorts came later that evening during the resort’s Saturday comedy show. A comedian whose name I did not catch with a routine aimed at Italian-Americans from Jersey, like him. Who knows? We may not have been the typical Villa Roma guests, but it didn’t matter. It was fun to be somewhere different, to be away from one resort area in the height of the season and enjoying another.

    And did I mention there were go-karts?

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    Carissa Katz is an associate editor at The Star.

    The joint East Hampton Town and Village Disabilities Advisory Board has issued a call for the public to help it develop a list of spots where access by the disabled is a problem. Civic-minded citizens and officials should make it a priority. The committee has only met irregularly, but its chairman, Glenn Hall of Amagansett, is eager to take problems with accessibility, whether to public or business places, to the right officials.

    As a former disabilities committee chairman has pointed out, in several instances East Hampton Town itself is apparently in violation of its own access policy, as well as state and federal law. Two problems Richard Rosenthal cited were at Town Hall, where assisted-listening devices were not provided, and at the entrance to the Town Justice Court. There, the wheelchair ramp is a lumpy splash of asphalt, while handicapped parking is tucked away senselessly around a corner of the building without proper pavement markings.

    The Americans with Disabilities Act is intended to ensure that all citizens have equal access to workplaces and government offices. However, the act can have no effect unless citizens and officials alike speak out about where changes are necessary. Furthermore, town and village officials should not let budget restraints interfere with quick corrective action. We have heard that East Hampton Town Supervisor Bill Wilkinson has taken notice of these problems and is working to correct them. This work is to be encouraged.

    A war for the future of Lake Montauk is on, and the battle going on right now is about docks. No sooner did the East Hampton Town Zoning Board of Appeals allow one property owner to extend his pier farther into the lake, than another decided to take his chance. If this second applicant manages to convince the Z.B.A. of his case, expect more to follow.

    Lake Montauk, unlike East Hampton’s other waterways, is the responsibility of the town board; the town trustees manage our other bays and harbors. The trustees have long had a strict no-new-docks policy, and they have gone to great lengths to limit what happens along their shorelines.

    Lake Montauk, on the other hand, suffers from its general popularity and proximity to world-class fishing grounds. Unfortunately, upland conditions have added to the deterioration of the lake’s water quality as development has been allowed to proceed with only minimal limits. Another negative factor is a thick clay layer over the soil in some places, which helps speed waste from septic systems along in the groundwater, much of which enters the lake fairly rapidly.

    A few docks will not break the lake. However, taken together with all of its other stresses, plans for any new construction on or near this important waterway should be subject to the strictest environmental review, and existing violations should be prosecuted to the fullest.

    The sperm whale calf that died on a rocky Montauk beach on July 30 did more than tell darkly of the mysteries of the deep. It brought to mind the awful time in April 2010, when a young humpback whale languished in the East Hampton surf. This time, the Montauk calf died relatively quickly, unlike 2010 when the larger humpback hung on for the better part of three days before succumbing to a shot from a high-powered rifle and a dose of phenobarbital.

    Now, as then, some people are critical of the time both cetaceans spent marooned before they died, saying a more humane, speedier method of dispatching the huge animals must be found.

    One expert in marine mammals said that quick, if bloody, methods for euthanizing whales could be used by those who know how, and could have worked in the Montauk whale’s case. He criticized the length of time it took before both whales died. Other experts have defended the official responses, pointing out that whale strandings are very rare and that no one has much experience with knowing what to do when one must be put down.

    Of course, this would not have been the case a century ago, when East Hampton’s whalemen still watched the surf for telltale spouts. The old killing implements hang in museums hereabouts, and, if someone still knew how they were used, even the largest whale could be dispatched in a hurry. In those days, the boatheader would creep to the front of a light, 28-foot, offshore whaleboat to kill the whale with a 15-foot-long, razor-sharp lance. In time, the men turned to so-called bomb guns, but they apparently never worked very well and the more sure results of an experienced hand and a well-honed blade were preferred.

    Those who work with whales say that a modern analog to the time-honored lance can be found — a means of more quickly dispatching these creatures when there is no hope of recovery. The federal government, whose responsibilities include marine mammals, and the Riverhead Foundation, which handles strandings on Long Island, should work with local, willing veterinarians to take care of these majestic animals more swiftly when their time has come.