The candidates in the East Hampton Board of Education election Tuesday present a range of perspectives and qualifications. Of these, one, Jackie Lowey, stands out as an outstanding and obvious choice. Ms. Lowey has an impressive résumé with work in Washington, D.C., as well as locally for the Wounded Warrior Project. She is a parent of two students at the John M. Marshall Elementary School, but she also would bring her significant professional qualifications, as well as intelligence, to a post on the board. We can confidently vouch for her intellect and strong commitment to the causes she takes on. (In the interest of disclosure, it should be noted that Ms. Lowey is a personal friend of The Star’s editor.)

     Less clear is the best choice among the four remaining candidates. With the retirement from the board of John Ryan, a longtime East Hampton teacher, and James Amaden, a businessman, there are only two seats open. From among Liz Pucci, Marie Klarman, Pat Hope, and Paul Fiondella, it is Ms. Hope who will be the best fit at this time.

    As parents of students now in the district, Ms. Pucci and Ms. Klarman, to some extent, would come from a perspective similar to Ms. Lowey’s. Though their individual strengths are different from hers, should either succeed in Tuesday’s voting, there would be a degree of duplication. Nevertheless, it should be said that we believe both would make fine school board members.

    As a retired science teacher at East Hampton High School, Ms. Hope could be viewed as likely to be too sympathetic to her former colleagues. However, to assume that is to not understand who she is. Ms. Hope was ever the iconoclast, someone who has always known her own mind. There is also a certain delicious irony in her running for East Hampton School Board, as it was in a previous incarnation that it was responsible for briefly bringing her to national notice.

    Way back in 1982, when she was still teaching at the school, the board nearly fired her for getting pregnant but not being married. Rival petitions circulated, network television crews descended on East Hampton, People magazine ran a long feature, and in the end the board let her keep her job. Little about that controversy matters much now; it was a different time with different players and different ideas. But it does point to Ms. Hope’s long history in East Hampton as a teacher, a single mother — and as a parent of daughters who went through the schools here, too. Her philosophical bent, ability as an educator, and thrifty common-sense approach make her a superb candidate.

    Lastly and put simply, Mr. Fiondella would be a mistake. Based on our years of observations of his past performance at a range of public meetings, he does not have the temperament for group deliberations or teamwork; respecting the opinions of those with whom he disagrees is not his strength. We could even imagine that his combative style, if he takes a place on the board, could become a disincentive to other prospective candidates in future elections. Regardless of his dedication and many qualifications, Mr. Fiondella is not suited for a seat on board that is best fueled by cooperation, not confrontation.

    We endorse Ms. Lowey and Ms. Hope.

    As to the East Hampton school budget of $64.4 million for 2011-12: We can only say that, when considering that impressive figure, a highlights and bloopers reel of the administration’s recent history runs involuntarily through our head. The district has made only a halfhearted effort to control costs after several years of wasteful and embarrassing spending growth. A yes vote would result in a 5.89-percent tax-rate increase, according to the district. It must be up to individual voters to decide whether or not they, personally, can afford to support it.

    Springs voters will be asked on Tuesday to choose from among four candidates running for two board of education seats, and you would be hard pressed to find a better qualified group. They are Tim Frazier, Phyllis Mallah, and Arthur Goldman, each of whom is a former or current educator, and Liz Mendelman, a career human resources executive for General Electric and Springs School PTA president.

    Ms. Mendelman’s varied background and involvement with the school augurs well for her as a board member. She has said she is of a mind to cut costs wherever possible while saving “critical” programs. She would be an asset on the board.

    From among the others, it is almost a tossup. Each is reasoned, well-educated, and appears committed to the school. In 2010, we endorsed Ms. Mallah for the Springs School Board, citing her long and valuable experience in the Yonkers school system. As a retired person living on what she has called a “small income,” she also has emerged as a voice for thrift, something many Springs voters are interested in this year, to say the least. Our preferences by only the slightest of margins are Ms. Mendelman and Ms. Mallah.

    Voters also will be asked on Tuesday to confirm a new three-year tuition agreement with the East Hampton School District. This is a good deal for Springs, as well as the other sending districts, and should be approved. Likewise, a request to allow up to $150,000 to be transferred each year to a repair fund is prudent.

    The Springs tax rate will increase by 5.8 percent if the budget is approved. As in the case of East Hampton, we find it difficult in these economic times to suggest what voters should do. Nevertheless, it is important to remember that when budgets are turned down, school districts invariably cut programs that directly benefit students. Salaries, no matter how high, benefits, and committed construction projects don’t change. Voters would do better to approve budgets, choose candidates whose views they find compatible, and promise themselves to make their voices heard by participating in school board meetings in the year ahead.

    “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.

   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.

   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.

   Is it coincidence that two of America’s most prominent liars have called East Hampton home? “Tangled Webs,” a new book by James B. Stewart, includes on its cover Martha Stewart, once of Lily Pond Lane, and Bernie Madoff, who summered in Montauk before taking up permanent residence in federal prison.

    Mr. Stewart, a columnist for The Wall Street Journal, hypothesizes that untruths by these and other high-profile prevaricators undermine trust not just in the judicial system, but in the structure of the nation itself by undermining its code of honor and good will.

    Ms. Stewart, before her 2004 conviction for making false statements to investigators and obstructing justice in an insider-trading case, was a straw-hat-wearing supporter of East Hampton’s upstanding Ladies Village Improvement Society. During her five-month stretch in a West Virginia pokey, The National Enquirer reported with relish on her run-ins with more rugged inmates.

    Mr. Madoff’s massive Ponzi scheme, which so recently unfolded, requires no retelling quite yet. His Montauk oceanfront house was auctioned off to help pay back his victims.

    In interviews, Mr. Stewart has decried what he sees as a greater willingness among the American public to forgive liars and the lies they tell . . .  even massive falsehoods, like that Bush administration whopper about those weapons of mass destruction. The resulting war of supposed pre-emption was paid for by U.S. taxpayers at a direct cost of at least $3 trillion. A quarter of today’s national debt can be attributed to this war, as can escalating oil prices, and it was sold to the nation and Congress on a lie.

    In our rehab-to-riches culture, we seem to take special delight in redemption stories. Back on top, Ms. Stewart has a Mother’s Day television event planned with Michelle Obama. Our grandmothers would probably have been perplexed to see a First Lady hanging around with an ex-con, and an unrepentant one at that.

    No date has been announced for Mr. Madoff’s future attendance at the annual Rose Garden Easter Egg Roll, but, really, you never know.

    Tax day this year was a reminder, according to State Assembylman Fred W. Thiele Jr., about the annoying and costly Metropolitan Transportation Agency payroll levy, which most businesses in the downstate region have to come up with. The tax was put in place two years ago to help the M.T.A. with its budget problems. It is especially galling on the East End, where service by the M.T.A.’s Long Island Rail Road is almost a minimalist joke.

    The tax snatches 34 cents of every dollar of payroll for businesses in nine counties, and it does not even exempt the self-employed. Critics, including Gov. Andrew Cuomo, have said it is a drag on the state’s economy at a time when businesses are hard pressed.

    Mr. Thiele has proposed three related bills to repeal the tax. At one extreme, he would see it repealed immediately; at the other, it would be phased out over five years. His middle course, and the one that seems most fair, would end the tax in the six eastern Suffolk towns. The M.T.A. could continue its payroll surcharge in the commuter communities it serves best, but it would be blocked from collecting it where the trains and buses are an intermittent part of the transportation picture. Others in the State Legislature, particularly those from other poorly served districts, have proposed their own bills to end or limit it as well.

    However it is accomplished, the M.T.A. should be forced to solve its own problems without asking struggling downstate entrepreneurs and business owners to bail it out. Mr. Thiele’s proposals and those of the others would be a place to start.

    Is it just us, or does it suddenly seem a whole lot busier on the South Fork? After three difficult off-seasons for the local economy, the spring rush appears to have strength not seen for some time.

    The signs of life are anecdotal, sure, but they include a slight uptick in home-repair projects, such as shingling, which is noticeable as we go about our daily rounds. We remember well that during the winter doldrums of the past few years passenger vehicles were almost alone on the roads. No more. Traffic, especially the morning and evening trade parade of vans and work trucks, is heavier outside our Main Street windows. New restaurants are opening and old ones are changing hands or being revamped with new menus, new chefs, new design.

    Real estate news is mixed. In the first quarter of 2011 on the East End, the number of sales was down as was the median price compared with the same quarter in 2010. However, sales of vacant land were up slightly, an indicator that builders may be feeling hopeful. And the median figure’s decline might indicate that activity has shifted away from the ultra-high-end market, which had been less affected by the recession. For some sense of how bad things had gotten and how far we have come, consider that only 55 properties changed hands in the first quarter of 2009; more than twice that number — 115 — were sold this year.

    There is no denying that the last few years have been tough. Businesses have struggled through the long, cold months to keep going. Some have folded. There are still vacant storefronts. And plenty of the self-employed are still waiting for the phone to start ringing again. Yet there is a sense that the tide has changed, that this season will be a little better than the last, that the worst has passed. Then, too, we are not alone in hoping so.

    Like coastal and inland waterfront communities across the country, the Town of East Hampton is getting ready to address federal water quality standards that have been imposed recently on small municipalities. The program is intended to eliminate to the greatest degree possible the runoff of polluted stormwater into waterways. The program is known as MS4, in the confusing jargon of government, which signifies “municipal separate storm sewer system.” Its implications are far-reaching.

    Back in 2009, the State of New York told the town that it would have to meet the standards and gave it a 2011 deadline. This was triggered in part by findings that Accabonac Harbor, Lake Montauk, and Northwest Creek were exceeding allowable pathogen levels.

    Stormwater runoff is a leading source of contamination of the marine environment. East Hampton’s waters are among the town’s most cherished assets and part of what keeps the area viable as a summer retreat. Take away healthy bays, harbors, and creeks, and you take away much of what makes this place attractive — and worth living in. The rules will require the town to improve road drainage, check that land-use and development regulations are adequate, and inventory and fix any and every source of private discharge, something East Hampton officials have openly worried about paying for.

    Public education is part of the plan of attack, with the idea that residents can make sure their own properties are not harming the environment and can help keep an eye out for violations.

    The goals are ambitious, and they are long overdue. East Hampton will be the better for complying.

   From our vantage point, it seems that somewhat fewer Earth Day events have been planned this year than previously. This is a shame, as the need for vigilance on all things ecological has perhaps never been higher.

    If we are allowed to speculate, the absence could be a product of the still-struggling economy. When people are worried about the bills, health care costs, and saving for the future, it can be difficult to be actively concerned about those things at a slight remove. Then, too, fatigue could be an explanation; there is so much to be done and the problems, such as climate change, water contamination, and species loss, are so great that it is easier to look away.

    This is where Earth Day, which is a week from tomorrow, fits in. It was created in 1970 at a time when the environmental movement was gaining strength, but its message of concern and shared responsibility should resonate even more today. In our hurry to get on with the exigencies of daily life, we must never forget the world around us — the only one we have.