In the early 1980s, the East Hampton Town Board disbanded the Planning Department. While that does not seem to be the goal of today’s Town Hall leaders, a continued push to change the way the department operates should have those who favor environmental protection and solid land-use management concerned.

    The latest salvo came in a memorandum from a recently appointed member of the town zoning board of appeals to Marguerite Wolffsohn, who heads the Planning Department. In the memo, Don Cirillo expressed displeasure with the planners’ environmental review of building applications. Among other things, he described the planning staff as arbitrary and engaged in blackmailing applicants to do its bidding in order to secure permits. Ms. Wolffsohn fired back in her own memo, calling Mr. Cirillo’s allegations unfounded and defending her department’s professionalism.

     Much of Mr. Cirillo’s language echoed complaints heard over the years from lawyers involved in land-use projects for themselves or clients, as well as from people in related fields, so this is not new. What is unusual, however, is for a blunt, one-sided critique to come from an appointed official. It is unlikely that Mr. Cirillo was alone in his criticism, but he didn’t indicate whether he was speaking on behalf of others, even other members of the Z.B.A. Because the memo was so harsh and because Mr. Cirillo is in a position of influence as vice chairman of the Z.B.A., it is important that he disclose who his confidants are. We have asked him to do so and will report if and when he responds.

    Supervisor Bill Wilkinson and Councilwoman Theresa Quigley, the deputy supervisor, have spoken out about what they see as failings in the town planning-review process and expressed their shared desire to see it streamlined. They have not commented publicly about Mr. Cirillo’s critique, but they have made no secret of their hostility for the Planning Department.

    That Mr. Cirillo is a former treasurer of the town Republican Committee and his wife is a current committee member is relevant here because Mr. Wilkinson, a Republican, is seeking re-election this fall. The memo may turn out to be a political liability, especially if it is consistent with the supervisor’s personal views.

    Among the several points Mr. Cirillo makes, his general assertion that the process is overly cumbersome in all matters is wrong. Most permits that require Planning Department review are processed in an effective and efficient manner; what does take longer — sometimes far longer — are requests for complicated projects, those for which environmental regulations come into play and those for the expansion of businesses in residential zones, among others.

    Yes, tricky applications are going to take a long time to review and the outcomes are not guaranteed. All of the town’s permit procedures, including the Planning Department’s, undoubtedly can be improved. But the memo’s declaration of war on sound environmental review and the professionalism of the town planners is dangerous, poorly thought through, and should be repudiated by those in Mr. Cirillo’s party if they are to have any credibility on these issues among the public. Voters like their East Hampton a certain way, and look dimly at those who favor the bulldozer’s blade over heritage and preservation. It is a message that all sides cannot lose sight of.

    Tucked away in a recent report on the quality of Suffolk’s water is a striking image: a map showing in years how much time it takes for rainwater to get in the ground and reach eastern Long Island’s bays, streams, and harbors. The graphic is meaningful in that it illustrates just how long it takes for contaminants to move from one point to another, as well as the time it takes for pollution-reduction efforts to be reflected in surface water quality.

    For regional planners and elected officials, the map and the document from which it comes — the Suffolk Comprehensive Water Resources Management Plan — make for a sobering reminder of the challenges ahead in protecting marine ecosystems and drinking water.

    For some time now, private organizations, like the Concerned Citizens of Montauk, Peconic Baykeeper, Nature Conservancy, and Group for the East End, have been raising the alarm, but responses, particularly in East Hampton Town, have been wanting. This may be because the town’s leaders have other priorities, lack  understanding of the scale of the risks, or have little willingness to take them on. Even longer term, rising sea level is predicted to reduce supplies of potable waters on both the North and South Forks.

    Fortunately, the crisis is not imminent; the county report indicates that groundwater will remain adequate until 2030. But two decades can come and go all too quickly. And in some coastal locations, the demand for water may exceed the limited and shallow freshwater aquifer more rapidly than in other areas of the East End.

    Adding to a sense of urgency is the report’s finding that tests have shown increasing levels of contaminants — nitrates, volatile organic compounds, and pesticides — over the last two decades. The study’s authors recommend continued implementation of groundwater quality regulations, new rules to reduce the impact of future development, improving and monitoring wastewater from existing houses and businesses, and, perhaps most important, open space protection. This recommendation is described in the report as the most effective means of protecting ground and surface waters. No news there, but a welcome reminder.    

    Immediate testing and protections for the roughly 28 percent of Suffolk residents who get water from private wells is suggested. Also on a to-be-considered list are a county law mandating odd-even lawn watering days, mandating sensors that can shut off landscape irrigation when it rains, tiered billing rates to encourage conservation, and other water-wise measures. The study’s authors call for Suffolk to commit funding for the staff and technical resources necessary to protect ground and surface waters for future generations.

    Unfortunately, East Hampton Town appears to be wading in a groundwater problem of its own. Its septic wastewater treatment plant on Springs-Fireplace Road has been cited by the state for discharge violations. As the town board moves to correct this, board members are likely to become more focused than they have been on water quality, maybe even taking the time to sit down and read the county report and take stock of its recommendations.

    Groundwater may move gradually, but government can be even slower. This is an issue that cannot wait for another day or a different political or economic climate. The time for constructive, effective steps on water protection for the long term is now.

    The East Hampton School Board approved a pitch from its athletic director on Tuesday to allow advertising signs around the perimeter of the football field. Talk followed that the baseball field might also be encircled by ads come spring. Initially, the money, estimated to bring in about $6,000 a season, would be split between the youth football program and the district.

    Stephen Talmage was the most outspoken critic of the plan among board members and he cast the lone no vote, saying it represented the commercialization of public property. He was correct.

    Signs have been a hot-button issue in East Hampton for nearly 50 years, with contentiousness dating at least as far back as the early 1960s ban on billboards, which still stands. In recent years, there has been an increasing willingness among elected officials, and perhaps the public, to tolerate commercial come-ons where they once would have been unthinkable. An example is East Hampton Airport, where high-end products have been hawked on brightly lighted placards in a revenue-sharing deal.

    With an East Hampton school budget in excess of $64 million, it hardly seems worth it to place ads in front of kids this way. If the district is short $6,000 for its athletic programs, there have to be better ways to raise the money.

    Spending cuts put in place during 2010 have given East Hampton Town an estimated $11 million budget surplus, which will be used to help pay off the internal fund deficits created in the financially disastrous years when Bill McGintee was in charge. Credit for this turnaround goes to Supervisor Bill Wilkinson and Len Bernard, who runs the town budget office. Cost-saving moves included offering seductive early retirement incentives to town employees and not hiring others for whom places had been reserved in the 2010 budget.

    A huge surplus like this is not likely to be repeated when this year’s numbers come in. Mr. Wilkinson’s 2011 to-the-bone budget was based on substantial tax cuts, and the greatest expense reductions came in the first year of his administration. However, cost cutting, such as by eliminating fall leaf pickup, and revenue growth, from such things as hiking the household waste-hauling fee to $100, will probably head off a big tax increase in 2012. Borrowing to pay off the town’s $27.2 million internal debt will be costly in the long run, but it will not add much to individual tax bills on a year-to-year basis.

    The spending reductions have in several instances aroused anger, but there appear to be no reports of serious ill effects from the town’s doing less with less. Further cuts, however, might begin to hamper the effectiveness of some government functions and the maintenance of key infrastructure. Whether Mr. Wilkinson and Mr. Bernard’s tightfisted spending can be sustained over the long term will be the real test. For now, residents can enjoy lowered taxes and a much surer hand on town finances than in years past.

    In an eagerness to help shield larger home improvement and landscaping companies from competition from those with less overhead, several members of the East Hampton Town Board have set out to revise the town’s contractor licensing law. The law would be expanded to include landscapers, lawn mowers, and handymen, who are now exempt. The board has yet to schedule a hearing on it.

    Licenses would be required for anyone doing work on another’s house, lawn, or grounds, no matter how small the job, eliminating a loophole in the present law that allows those earning less than $500 per job to avoid licensing. While licensing laws may help protect homeowners from incompetent or unscrupulous workers, the proposed law requires liability insurance, with the Town of East Hampton named as co-insurer. No one would be exempt, including those contractors already registered with Suffolk County, such as plumbers and electricians. The license would cost $100.

    Before the town board heaps new regulations at a time of economic difficulty, serious consideration should be given to whether the law may be too restrictive and result in a whole class of workers and entrepreneurs being shut out from economic opportunity.

    The few dollars made by taking care of houses or doing odd jobs matter to a lot of year-round East Hampton residents, many of whom would be unable to afford the required insurance to keep doing what they have been all along. In some cases, the insurance requirement could be duplicative because homeowners usually have liability insurance that covers those doing odd jobs or occasional work for hire.

    Among those who would be hurt are young people and college students for whom summer jobs such as mowing lawns are a critical part of the budget. For a few, it could even mean the difference between continuing their studies or being forced to drop out. For semiretired people and recent immigrants looking to make a few extra dollars for living expenses, the licensing and insurance requirements could turn them into lawbreakers if they failed to comply or put them out of business. Then there are the commercial fishing families who rely on income from lawn mowing and other home services to compensate for reduced catches, lower daily limits, and ever-shorter harvesting seasons.

    Hurt, too, would be residents forced to pay for services in a marketplace with reduced competition in which the bigger operators are able to set the prices. Homeowners should be able to choose for themselves what size firms they hire for routine maintenance and small jobs; they should not have the Town of East Hampton doing it for them.

    Not to get all Horatio Alger about it, but starting out small, a person with a truck, a lawnmower, and a single client can begin a path to long-term financial security here, where other opportunities are limited. The town board should think again before putting up this kind of roadblock to success, and even to the American dream.

    In the grand scheme of things it probably doesn’t matter a fig, but to our ear, a new Z sound in Amagansett is just plain wrong. Sad to say, we hear it increasingly everywhere — a grating “Ama-ganz-it.”

    People don’t want to be told they are mispronouncing a word, so most of us avoid offering corrections. A woman of our acquaintance did just that recently, however, and was met with an indignant response along the lines of, “I’ve been coming here for 10 years, and I’ve always said it that way!”

     Where did this come from? When did it start? And what’s wrong with the letter S?

    Come summer, access to South Fork beaches becomes a sore point for those without requisite parking permits. As in past years, East Hampton taxpayers and those who spend big bucks for summer rentals cannot obtain the coveted passes if they drive rented vehicles; the town assigns them only to vehicles registered at local addresses. These residents believe they should be able to park at the beaches, just like those of us who own our vehicles. It is difficult to think of a reason they are wrong. The question is how to accommodate them.

    Under the present policy, beach parking stickers are marked by hand with each vehicle’s license plate number. This is supposed to prevent permits from being shared or sold illegally, and the system usually works. However, given the cost of automobile ownership, especially in urban areas like New York City, where parking can be difficult and expensive, holding onto a vehicle for the sole purpose of summer use doesn’t make a lot of sense even if you own a house here.

    Tight control of beach stickers is largely a response to overflowing beach parking lots, especially at popular ocean spots. Forget about finding a space at Ditch Plain, Atlantic Avenue, or Indian Wells this weekend; they are all going to be taken by 11 a.m. The new Hamptons Free Ride shuttle is a nice try, but it is unlikely to attract enough people to make a difference.

    It’s a conundrum for officials, but one they should try to solve. If East Hampton could see a way to open a new bathing beach, with lifeguards and restrooms, it would take the pressure off and allow the town to be a bit more flexible in its permit policy.

    There are very few town-owned parcels on the oceanfront that would be appropriate for beach parking, however, while the cost of condemning private property to build more parking lots would seem to be a nonstarter. Or is it? Perhaps the time has come to think about whether taxpayers would approve a costly town purchase for ocean access if it were put to a vote or if there was willingness to tap the community preservation fund for the purpose. It would be expensive, but it might just be worth it.

   In prepared remarks last month, East Hampton Town Supervisor Bill Wilkinson said that the “dedication of close to 50 percent of the available land to open space has led to a serious shortfall of affordable housing for local people.” If only it were that easy.

    Those who see a simplistic causal relationship between the preservation of open space and an absence of reasonably priced housing are mistaken. There is no evidence that the one causes the other. Quite the contrary, studies have long shown that open spaces and parks help keep taxes low — which, in turn, helps ensure that families with a diverse range of income levels can remain part of a community. As residents of overdeveloped towns UpIsland already know all too well, the things that replace open space — roads and sewage treatment, schools and bridges, policing — don’t come cheap. When a high percentage of land is publicly owned, the cost of living actually is kept down. East Hampton taxes are a bargain by comparison.

    What Mr. Wilkinson and others repeating this misconception seem to believe is that lower-cost houses and apartments are a natural result of denser development. That if, say, Barcelona Neck had been subdivided all those many years ago, the addition of those extra properties to the market would have a ripple effect of lowered prices elsewhere in the town. This simply doesn’t hold water. (Just how much new construction would the town have to absorb, in this scenario, in order to see any decline in housing costs? Would anyone even find that trade-off desirable?)

    Of course, the serious risk of thinking like this is that it might go beyond idle talk and become the basis of policy. This could already be happening: Community preservation fund land buys have been few and far between lately — at a time when purchases of vacant land appear to be otherwise accelerating, and the last open spaces disappearing.

    East Hampton voters three times approved the preservation fund by wide margins. It has never been funded by a general tax on all of us, but by a 2-percent transfer tax paid by purchasers of real estate above certain minimums. To argue that it is any sort of egregious tax burden akin to school or property taxes would be specious. By almost any measure, the C.P.F. has been a wild success. And it is most certainly not to blame for our housing ills.

   The majority of the East Hampton Town Planning Board missed a golden opportunity recently to wipe the slate clean of a bad precedent. The question before the board, at a meeting last month, was whether to require a detailed site plan review of the Amagansett Reform Club, whose owner was seeking permission to build two sheds. The construction of two sheds might seem to be a piddling matter, not worthy of government meddling, but there was a lot more to it than that. Some brief history is in order.

    Several years ago, Randy Lerner, who also owns Amagansett Square and the shuttered Exile restaurant on that hamlet’s Main Street, bought the Mill Garth Inn on Windmill Lane. The inn was a modest, more or less seasonal affair that had been in existence before the area was zoned exclusively residential. Under law in East Hampton, pre-existing, nonconforming businesses are allowed to remain in place in residential zones as long as they are not expanded; any work on these sites that requires a building permit is supposed to be approved in advance by the planning board.

    That never happened. Beginning in 2007, the Mill Garth Inn was torn down and rebuilt — much larger and apparently in a slightly different location on the 1.8-acre property — without the planners getting involved. In 2009, it reopened as the Reform Club. Plenty of triggers for site plan review were ignored and, when alerted to this strange oversight, town officials, from then-Supervisor Bill McGintee on down, declined to say peep. Oddly, a town sidewalk that had once run across the property was relocated to the opposite side of the street — again, without public review or opportunity for comment. Neighbors, who could have fought the building permits for the project with an Article 78 lawsuit, had little interest in tangling with the billionaire next door.

    Board members last month were at long last given the opportunity to at least take an accounting of what currently exists and is now planned for the property. But, apparently anxious to put the whole episode behind them, they declined to do so. This was a mistake.

    Given all that had come before, the Reform Club’s seeking planning board approval for two simple sheds might seem solicitous in the extreme — but perhaps those involved gambled that if the board declined to order a full review, all the controversial changes that had come before would get a de facto stamp of approval. And that is exactly what happened.

    East Hampton Town has long had rigorous rules to control sprawl and protect the peace of quiet neighborhoods. These are sensible statutes, and they have helped us keep our town beautiful. The town has, at least in theory, sought to apply them fairly.

    Despite what some people (with either vested interests or extreme property-rights philosophies) have to say about it, pre-existing, nonconforming businesses in residential zones are not supposed to grow. When the government ignores its own laws, faith in that government is eroded. This is especially so when it isn’t readily apparent on what grounds the powers that be decide who is deserving of such favor and who isn’t.

    “I never saw an Arctic char/

    I never hope to see one/

    But from the pictures in the book/

    I’d rather see than eat one.”

Okay. I owe Arctic char an apology. It’s a pretty fish, with flesh similar to the salmon’s, that is pink. What I really don’t plan to ever eat again, after reading about it in The New York Times this week, is tilapia, but the word didn’t fit the meter.

    According to Seafood Watch, a program of the Monterey Bay Aquarium, Arctic char is raised in land-based, ecologically regulated farms. It contains the omega-3 oils that are good for you and is a good substitute for salmon or trout. I hear it’s become a hit here on the summer party circuit. On the other hand, farmed tilapia isn’t very good for you, and the fish farms in Nicaragua, Honduras, and Ecuador, where it is raised in huge quantities, are destroying natural lakes.

     I admit to a deep-rooted prejudice in favor of wild — local — fish. Unfortunately, the slow-food movement hasn’t really hit the fish industry yet, and it’s long overdue.

    Laura Donnelly, The Star’s food and restaurant writer, recently described Silvia Lehrer’s new book, “Savoring the Hamptons,” in these pages. Ms. Lehrer is a devotee of Slow Food International, and the foods and recipes in the book are organized by the seasons in which they are locally vailable. (Yes, I know you can find fairly good strawberries “from away” in the markets here in months other than June, but, even if you don’t care about the carbon footprint of the foods you buy, a delicious Wainscott strawberry is worth waiting for. And, P.S.: Check the label on the crate, if you can; at a high-end emporium nearby, we’ve seen a “local strawberries” sign slapped on berries pulled from a box shipped from across the country.)

     A similar book could be filled with information about and recipes for fish that pass this way, and I wish someone would take it on. The truth is, the East End of Long Island has a greater variety of fish in inshore and offshore waters than anywhere else on the Eastern Seaboard. Air and water temperatures are more moderate here than to the north or south, and the Gulf Stream, which carries large species, is not far away.

    I wasn’t familiar with fish when I first came here. We didn’t eat much of it at home when I was growing up. In the dining hall of the college I went to, you couldn’t see or taste the difference between breaded and baked fish and veal cutlet. Until I was treated to bay scallops in an expensive Manhattan restaurant, I didn’t know they existed.

    But, getting married and coming to live here — it’s some 50 years ago now, when there were more baymen around — I dove into the culture and ate porgies, blowfish, bluefish, and striped bass constantly, and with delight. As our inshore fisheries declined and as the effects of overfishing and ocean pollution became better known in the past decade or two, I became more cautious about which offshore varieties I chose, but, to this day, I see absolutely no reason to buy or eat any seafood that isn’t local.

    Arm yourself with a little knowledge: Just because the grocer says the bass was caught here, if it’s midwinter, you should doubt his word; if a scallop is the size of a hockey puck, you can bet it didn’t come out of the bay. Why bother with anything else when the freshest and most varied creatures of the deep are nearby — as fresh as can be? The world really is our oyster.