Editorials

We are represented abroad by a president who regularly engages in schoolyard taunts of the sort that would earn a third grader a trip to the principal’s office.

The first of two electronic billboards along Sunrise Highway in Hampton Bays was made operational in time for Memorial Day weekend. Green-lighted by the Shinnecock Indian Nation, they were described in the tribal trustees’ news blitz as a source of much-needed economic development. They may turn out to be more of a miscalculation than an asset.

At least eight million tons of plastic end up in the marine environment each year, according to researchers. No part of the ocean is immune; contamination reaches even the deepest submarine trenches. 

Wind power is coming, and the waters south and east of Long Island are slated to be the site of more electricity-generating offshore turbines as time moves on. Climate change and energy independence are the big drivers of the move to renewable power. Particulate pollution and the almost unimaginable horror of a potential nuclear plant accident make the East Coast a leading candidate for investment in the new efficient technology. 

Above all else, the East End grumbles about traffic on Memorial Day weekend. Routine errands are run in haste during the previous workweek or put off until Tuesday. If one does venture out, it’s as if on a polar expedition, with circling to find a spot like parking-lot polka. The traffic control officers do their best to keep things moving. Fender-benders abound. Tempers rise. “Who are these people?” we ask. “Where can they be going?” These questions may never be answered.

More seriously, motor vehicles remain one of the largest sources of greenhouse gases.

Alarmingly, the White House appears intent on creating conditions for armed conflict in the Mideast by escalating a confrontation with Iran.

The senseless destruction of the Maidstone Park ball field last week caused outrage and disbelief. But it also should serve as a reminder of how important organized youth baseball and softball are in this community, and the admirable commitment of the adult coaches who make it all possible.

In the annals of jaw-dropping East Hampton political miscalculation, the bugging of the town trustees office is a new low.

Why should some residents hate summer here? We think this is a shame, and that it is the responsibility of the East Hampton Town Board and political challengers to consider a recalibration.

Albany could make New York’s roads safer with one simple measure: reinstating rules that allowed people who are not in the United States legally to apply for driver’s licenses.

We can understand how the people and groups asking to limit hunting on East Hampton Town’s lands to just one day per weekend feel. But that does not mean we agree.

The unfortunate reappearance of measles in this country should send a clear message that science works. It also has a bearing on several other controveries that actually should be nonissues — climate science, for one.

A bill signed by Governor Cuomo sends an important message that New York wants no part of the White House’s push to reopen offshore federal waters to oil drilling.

This is hogwash, but that nearly everyone now in federal government — elected, unelected, and seeking the Democratic nomination to run for president — has so far gone along with it is the genuine crisis.

East Hampton Town officials should tell Tesla to take a hike. The company recently renewed a pitch to install a charging station for its cars on public property in Montauk.

In the absence of a meaningful top-of-the-ticket campaign for East Hampton Town Board this year, the time is right for voters to focus their attention on how the town trustees are chosen.

About every expert on coastal erosion and sea level rise will tell you that the only solution for at-risk areas is to retreat. But right now, the only significant retreat appears to be by the East Hampton Town Board, which collapsed notably amid ill-informed pressure from some Montauk residents and resort owners who objected to a part of a long-range planning study.

In the Notre Dame Cathedral fire, there is a reminder of how buildings can hold a community together. Churches, old houses, beloved places provide a feeling of permanence in an impermanent world. They give us a sense of who we are, simply because they are an icon we can call our own. For France and for much of the world, as one man on a Paris street told The New York Times this week, the Notre Dame tragedy was like losing a member of the family.

The East Hampton Town Trustees appear close to drastically changing the way they manage the rented sites of the old fishing cottages at Lazy Point.

The Long Island Rail Road’s South Fork shuttle train service was launched with high hopes in March. The experiment was years in the coming. Public-transportation advocates and elected officials had long considered trains to be the most likely solution to the hellish trials of the morning and evening commute along our east-west highways.

With the passage of its 2019 budget bill, New York State will become the second in the nation to prohibit so-called single-use shopping bags.

There will never be room enough in East Hampton for all the tradespeople who stream in every morning from the west.

Suffolk’s 10 towns are right to ask for a portion of the proposed internet sales tax now being considered in Albany.

By Hamptons standards, it is a good deal. Bookings opened this week for new luxury tent accommodations at Cedar Point County Park in East Hampton, starting at $300 a night, and, from where we sit, there is every reason to think the venture will be successful.

According to The Los Angeles Times, in the two-plus years that recreational marijuana use was made broadly legal, an expected tax windfall has not materialized.

East Hampton Town, having made its bed as far as overdevelopment of Montauk is concerned, will now have to sleep in it.

The State of New York is barreling fast toward the anticipated legalization of the sale and possession of marijuana as a way to increase tax receipts and reduce the impact of arrests for possession and sale, which fall disproportionately on people of color and the poor.

What to do about weekend hunting?

Well, well. If nothing else, the 2019 campaign season will be lively. Thank the East Hampton Town Republican Committee for stirring things up with an announcement this week of its candidates for town board, supervisor, and trustees.

A decision last month by the East Hampton Town Board to toughen the rules about outdoor lighting, in particular to end the use of strings of bulbs to create outdoor gathering spaces at restaurants and nightclubs, is a good one. But whether it will be enforced is another question.