Editorials

Reactions have been negative to a $60,000, six-month contract between the Town of East Hampton and a New York City-based communications firm hired to help get the word out about Covid-19 issues and to redesign the town website.

For a nation that venerates the throwing off of tyranny the way the United States does at the Fourth of July, the end of a far greater repression of human life and dignity goes largely uncelebrated.

What Obama designates Trump takes away, and in the case of a recent decision to open the almost 5,000-square-mile Northeast Canyons and Seamounts National Monument, what may be taken away if the move is allowed to stand cannot be replaced.

New Yorkers have already been voting in 2020 primaries for a range of local and statewide races. Early in-person polling places, which opened on Saturday, will remain open until Sunday afternoon and then reopen on Tuesday, the actual day of the primary.

No sooner were New York restaurants granted a reprieve from the Covid-19 lockdown did patrons come back in swarms for outdoor dining. But for many on the East End who had become used to hunkering down and ordering takeout, if at all, the return of crowds was an unsettling shock.

There are times when voters are faced with a critical choice. This is one of those times.

The outside of the envelopes from the Internal Revenue Service say “Penalty for private use $300.” It looks for all the world as if the recipient is about to be audited. The stomach drops. But what is inside these letters, which reach 90 million Americans, seems a strange contrast with that message.

When the protesters arrived at Trump Tower, the tone shifted. We were met with scores of police officers in riot gear, batons out, looking, in our opinion, for a fight.

East Hampton Village is a lot quieter now that limits are in place for leaf blowers and other gas and diesel-powered landscape equipment.

Though delayed and being conducted by absentee ballot, school board elections have arrived at last. The ballots are due back in district offices by 5 p.m. on Tuesday, so the time is now to mark them and get them in the mail.

One remarkable success story in our response to the pandemic has been how swiftly and effectively eastern Long Island medical systems scaled up to meet the challenge.

Amid generally good compliance with the New York State Pause order, the Memorial Day holiday excesses were at a minimum.

Only in government would it make sense to take a working public service and place it completely on hold while developing a new one.

The fact that we as a community have to contend with far more people than we can comfortably carry on our shoulders was made amply clear last week when the East Hampton Town Board dispatched a panicked letter begging the state to shut the door on tourist stays.

Given the challenges East Hampton Village will encounter between now and the election, it made sense to name someone to fill the open position. But process matters.

Where have we heard this before? New owners of a hotel want to open a bar for guests only, and then, before long, it grows into a neighborhood annoyance

Absent from the newly appointed Business Recovery Group, which convened by videoconference on April 29, was a single medical professional or anyone at all representing emergency medical services.

This is a thank-you to the readers, our friends. Newspaper people like to think we are doing important work. Sometimes, though, we might feel as if the rest of the world does not see it the same way. Not so now.

Confusion is the order of the day in many aspects of the virus response.

In the early days of the Covid-19 crisis, the structure of East Hampton Town government changed with almost no fanfare.

The point of the stay-home directive from state, local, and national leaders is to reduce the rapid spread of the deadly coronavirus outbreak. Yet it seems widely misunderstood, both here and across the country.

Conceding that nothing is going to keep people inside as the weather warms and that many here will take to bicycles to enjoy the fresh air, an urgent plea for universal helmet use has become necessary.

State officials were right to close some parks as thousands of visitors swarmed over Montauk on Sunday. The drastic step came after the previous weekend, when thousands came to enjoy the sunshine.

Something about students’ laptops that came up at a phone-in school board meeting this week struck us as important and worth a closer look.

Social distancing has appeared to slow the transmission of Covid-19, but the number of new cases remains alarmingly high.   

Writing in the first person, East Hampton Town Supervisor Peter Van Scoyoc issued a rare press release this week listing some of the things he has been up to since the Covid-19 crisis began.

This is a stressful time. Giving when one can or lending a hand in other ways can remind us that we are all in this together.

Covid-19 orders to close schools, businesses, and houses of worship have revealed surprising aspects of contemporary life in our region, aspects worthy of a deeper look at how readily eastern Long Islanders have taken to the outdoors.

On the South Fork, almost all storefronts are dark and workplaces closed as part of a statewide effort to slow the spread of the coronavirus. But landscapers appear to be a large and visible exception. This puts workers, among them some of the area’s more vulnerable members of the labor force, at increased risk of exposure.     

It cannot be stressed often enough that maintaining quarantine conditions is critical now that Suffolk's COVID-19 cases have grown to nearly three times the available hospital beds in the county.