Editorials

A mailing from the Garden Club of East Hampton with pretty painted images of plants native to this area arrived this week and piqued our interest. There, arrayed on a folding card announcing the club’s upcoming annual sale, were milkweed and arrowwood, viburnum, columbine, eastern shadbush, cardinal flower, New England aster, and bearberry — which hungry deer avoid and are in their own ways important parts of the ecosystem, enjoyed by bird and bug alike.

School district budget planning has recently been without customary fireworks. In part, this is because a state cap on how much taxes can be increased has taken the heat out of the process, with a supermajority of voter approval necessary to pierce the cap. This is not to suggest that school spending is unimportant; rather, as the work educators do gets ever more complex, how money is allotted remains key.

East Hampton Town Trustee Pat Mansir’s surprise resignation last week presents a good opportunity to make some general observations about the town’s oldest continuous government body and how it must now change to keep up with the times.

As the United States enters a dark age for environmental protection by Washington, the job has come down both literally and figuratively to our own backyards.

Many in the commercial fishing industry are frustrated with the pace of planning a planned wind farm in the Atlantic east of Montauk. The project, they say, will hurt their ability to make a living and they are feeling left behind by public officials and by public sentiment, which appears largely supportive. Aware of these concerns, Deepwater Wind, the company planning the turbines, wants to hire a handful of local representatives to help smooth the waters.

John Keeshan, who was in the news last week for folding his eponymous real estate agency into the Compass group, made the papers some years back with his push to get rid of the welter of utility lines that mar the view as one approaches Montauk’s commercial center from the west. The effort to bury the wires stalled, as do many such things, because of money, or, more accurately, the lack thereof. Elsewhere, well-heeled residents have banded together to create special tax districts to pay for taking down the poles; in Montauk that prospect was never good.

Eight million dollars seems like a lot of money for where the Sag Harbor Cinema lobby stood until it was destroyed in fire in December. However, the sum a civic group has pledged to buy the site and the relatively unscated theater behind it and eventually build a new cultural center will prove well worth it in the long run.

Many people, especially urban users of ride hailing services, prefer summoning Uber or Lyft on their smartphones instead of calling for a taxi. Following a state budget deal, Uber and its competitors will pick up passengers legally in East Hampton Town, as well as upstate, where they had been unable to operate because of legal and insurance requirements. Expect traffic around the South Fork’s hot spots to get a lot worse this summer.

Expressions of outrage this week about an announcement by the Corcoran real estate firm that it would fly select potential clients by helicopter from Manhattan to the South Fork to view properties was predictable, if somewhat overblown. While the promotion might well add to air traffic, its effect will be negligible when compared to the ever-increasing use of East Hampton Airport by noisy aircraft of all sorts.

Water quality and environmental well-being are taking top billing these days. Along with East Hampton Town, Suffolk is taking steps to reduce the amount of nitrogen and other pollutants in household wastewater.

By any measure, a report that at least two East Hampton Town employees may have been sickened after being exposed to fumes from spray-foam insulation barrels they were ordered to prepare for reuse as trash cans is bizarre. Both the worker who blew the whistle and the town safety official who shut it down deserve credit. But this risky, and probably illegal, practice has been going on for years, which suggests that far more oversight of some town departments is necessary.

President Trump’s attack on the Obama-era Clean Power Plan should be taken very seriously on the East End. Long Island’s hundreds of miles of bay and ocean shoreline are highly vulnerable to the increased erosion and worsened storms associated with global warming. Walking away from efforts to protect future generations, as well as the natural environment, is shortsighted, to put it mildly.

We were surprised to read recently that New York City prohibits rentals of fewer than 30 days. This is in an effort to keep apartments from being turned into de facto hotels and to protect the interests of neighbors and neighborhoods. Contrast that with East Hampton Town’s confusing regulations, which allow four sub-two-week rentals a year, provided that only two are in the same six-month period and that they are registered with the town clerk’s office.

A fourth-grade initiative at the Montauk School to stop the use of plastic straws there and in the community is worth paying attention to — and bears a lesson for how we should think about our relationship to the environment.

New York Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo announced a new, $70 million rebate program this week aimed at getting more electric vehicles on the roads. This is an important step, especially in light of hostility from the Trump administration to rational efforts to protect the global environment and fight climate change, though dollars and cents play a role as well.

For eastern Long Island, a White House budget item that would cut funding for the Coast Guard should be cause for alarm. Fortunately, opposition from members of Congress is bipartisan and loud.

East Hampton Village should have just said no to a smoke-and-mirrors request from representatives of Ronald Perelman, the owner of the Creeks estate on Georgica Pond, at the outset. Mr. Perelman seeks a new zoning classification created for him alone specifically to legalize illegally built structures there. Instead, though skeptical, board members are taking time to consider the proposal. They should not have been so polite.

What ever happened to wait-and-see? State, Suffolk, and local governments announced closings in advance of a winter storm that was supposed to cover the region on Tuesday.

Government does some things well and there are some things best left to private contractors. The East Hampton Town Trustees are thinking about buying and operating a dredge to keep East Hampton’s harbor entrances navigable. This is one job better left to the professionals.

President Trump, who owns a handgun and has a New York State permit to carry it hidden, has killed a rule that President Obama put in place before leaving office that would have limited access to guns by some of the more than 70,000 mentally ill who receive full disability benefits from the Social Security Administration. The Obama measure was opposed by both the National Rifle Association and the American Civil Liberties Union, an apparent anomaly that points to the possibility, however far-fetched, that strict gun control could become a nonpartisan effort, as it should.

There is scarcely any aspect of the South Fork economy that does not rely on immigrant workers to some degree. People from the Americas, the Caribbean, former Soviet states, and parts of Europe, among others, keep this place humming. Foreign-born hands help build the houses, make the food, take care of our elderly, write novels, create art, teach children, pay taxes, turn down the beds in the hotel rooms. In short, they are us but for place of origin, and paperwork.

After reviewing complaints from residents dating back several years, the East Hampton Town Board is taking a needed step to control film and television shoots on private property.

Football in East Hampton, though not dying, according to the sport’s energetic coach, Joe McKee, has a problem because the high school’s new enrollment numbers have kicked it up into the hard-playing, black-and-blue Conference III, whose players greatly outweigh those of East Hampton’s, on average.

It is a dilemma. On one hand, Representative Lee Zeldin would like to meet with his constituents. On the other hand, he does not want to be the focus of confrontations by First District residents who do not agree with his support for President Trump. So what is a congressman to do?

Buoyed by the prospect of millions of dollars over time from the community preservation fund, East Hampton Town officials are moving quickly on plans to reduce water pollution. In a program that could begin later this year, properties that meet certain criteria could have a portion, or even all, of a replacement sanitary waste system paid for with public money. This is good, but there is still reason to be wary about potential misuse because of a lack of clarity in the underlying state law.

By rough count, 30,000 active beach driving permits have been issued to East Hampton Town residents. This is an astonishing number but more easily understood if you consider that old red-and-white stickers are valid until a truck is sold, same as with beach parking permits. In practice, nothing stops a resident from passing on a vehicle to someone from away, and because nonresident beach driving permits are priced at $275, some purchasers may just leave one on the bumper when a vehicle changes hands as a little deal-sweetener.

The New York State Department of Environmental Conservation recently announced plans to “streamline” a key method of environmental review. Part of the reason is that the department has been underfunded and spottily staffed for years.

The East Hampton Town Trustees could use a workshop on civility. For those who are not clear about what the trustees do, think of them as the stewards of much of the town’s waterways, some of its beaches, and a few woods roads. They oversee mooring permits outside of Lake Montauk and have a say on where docks and aquaculture projects are allowed, as well as on beach driving.

We hate to rain on the recently revived commuter train parade, but for all the enthusiasm, it is difficult to see how it could be a success.

A wave of commercial redevelopment in Montauk has had impacts on traffic and noise and the hamlet’s sense of neighborliness, but it also is suspected of having a huge impact underground.