Editorials

A recent analysis by a private group has found that human and animal wastes were reaching the South Fork’s bays, beaches, and harbors at an alarming rate. The eastern Long Island chapter of the Surfrider Foundation took data taken from its Blue Water Task Force project and from the Concerned Citizens of Montauk and looked for trends. What it found should be alarming to anyone who cares about clean water and a productive environment.

Fasten your seatbelts, here comes our annual editorial about beach bonfires. If you are among those who think it is still the 1970s, when the population was 9,000 and the number of summertime visitors maybe twice that, read no further. However, if you are among the majority, who understand that times have changed and that the pressures on public spaces have increased exponentially, and that the old rules no longer work as intended, we ask that you pay attention to what we have to say.

Breitbart News, the arch-right website, helped set the tone some years ago when it posted a story headlined “Ten Reasons Why People Who Support Wind Farms Are Deluded, Criminal or Insane.” Brietbart is not alone; opposition to wind power is common among many on the right, who cite turbines’ wildlife-killing blades as a top concern, though at the same time they back gutting the Endangered Species Act and dismantling the Environmental Protection Agency.

With for all the world what looked like an eye on 2018 and a bid for higher office, Suffolk County Executive Steve Bellone went for a bicycle ride recently in Southampton Village. The camera-ready event (Mr. Bellone eschewed his usual jacket and tie for a T-shirt) was to promote a countywide bike-sharing program, like the ubiquitous blue bicycles in parts of New York City.

East Hampton is in a crisis in which young adults, year-round workers, and ordinary residents struggle to find adequate housing they can afford. But the most recent town board discussion about housing involved temporary, portable units intended for Montauk’s seasonal, resort work force. Taking the proposal seriously is an unfortunate case of skewed priorities.

About a year and a half ago, Jay Schneiderman was able to convince East Hampton Town officials that a mothballed restaurant at his family’s Breakers Motel in Montauk was, in fact, operational and that in any event the clock had run out on a neighbor’s attempt to prevent its reopening.

A stunning juncture occurred Tuesday afternoon when Representative Lee Zeldin broke with the Trump administration over links between the president’s family and individuals with ties to the Russian government who were thought to have damaging information about Hillary Clinton.

The East Hampton School Board will want to carefully consider a residents’ group apparent offer of $2 million to help the district buy a parcel on Springs-Fireplace Road for a school bus parking and service facility. It should also try to be more flexible about the bus depot question in general; so far the board has been somewhat inexplicably attached to a plan for a site it already owns at Cedar Street.

The path forward for owners at the Montauk Shores Condominium at Ditch Plain, better known as the Trailer Park, got clouded recently when East Hampton Town took a hard line on wastewater there. The problems underscore a growing belief that our current environmental laws are inadequate and, in some cases, have not been enforced or were ignored with impunity for a long time.

Politicians in Albany and Hauppauge find it easy to promote shrinking government when it is not their own government they are shrinking. New York Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo has long tried to squeeze local municipalities and school districts through a formula capping the amount that taxes can be raised from year to year. This dictate has come from on high with little in the way of state aid or guidance. Do it or else, the governor seems to say.

A bicyclist was struck and seriously injured Saturday evening in East Hampton Village. According to someone who was nearby, the bike had been weaving unsteadily before it came into contact with a passing vehicle, and the cyclist was thrown to the pavement.

Now that the United States Supreme Court has refused to review a lower court’s decision on local control of East Hampton Airport, the big question is what will happen next. This is a delicate moment; public outrage after another summer of aircraft noise could lead to a confrontation that could, in the end, most hurt the aviation industry itself.

Early morning. The sun just up. The heat warming the pavement. A box turtle, drawn by the warmth or going from one place to another, creeps forward and settles on the center line as a hurtling truck approaches.

What may have seemed impossible following the fiery destruction of much of the Sag Harbor Cinema in December now appears, if not a sure thing, then increasingly likely. The prospect is exciting.

Here’s hoping that the free shuttle bus set to begin in Montauk next week with $100,000 in state funding finds enough riders to justify its operation. Acting on concerns about traffic and complaints about fare gouging by some taxi drivers, East Hampton officials have announced that the Hampton Hopper will operate a route that includes stops at the Montauk railroad station, the docks, Hither Hills State Park, and the downtown business area.

East Hampton Village residents will be asked Tuesday to select either Philip O’Connell or Arthur Graham as a trustee or member of the village board. The winner will face re-election in 2018. In recent interviews, the candidates differed little about how the village should be run, so making an endorsement is tricky, as it comes down to intangibles more than any one thing.

Lost amid all the attention to Russia’s election meddling is the fact that the Trump administration is considering reducing the number and scale of the national monuments across the country as well as 55 million acres of Atlantic seabed off the East Coast. Separately, a suit by a coalition of fishing organizations challenging the Obama decision to create the Northeast Canyons and Seamounts National Monument is making its way toward trial. If the Trump administration eliminates the seamount monument, their suit would become moot.

The funny thing about Memorial Day’s being considered the beginning of summer is that it is not really the beginning of anything, at least not as far as the weather goes. The calendar tells us almost a month of spring is yet to come by the time the big weekend crowds arrive and the season plays along, frustrating those who would want the weather to behave otherwise.

With the assistance of hired consultants, East Hampton officials are taking one of their periodic looks at aspects of how the town is regulated and how they might balance growth and residents’ needs in the future. Changes certainly are necessary, but whether the process embodied in the current set of so-called hamlet studies will be adequate remains to be seen.

A Montauker of our acquaintance told us this week about a low point in her Memorial Day weekend. “I made the mistake of going into town at 1 on Saturday,” she said. “How was it?” we asked. “Hell,” she said.

A story in The Star last week about the Montauk Observatory got us thinking about the number of opportunities here for getting in touch with nature. The observatory, now about to be operational at the Ross School in East Hampton, offers the farthest reach: a powerful telescope that can be booked remotely to view distant celestial objects over the internet.

The East Hampton Chamber of Commerce’s first street fair, held on May 20 on Newtown Lane, was, by most accounts, a great success.

A proposal being worked on by East Hampton Town officials to clarify the law on outdoor seating at restaurants has caused confusion. The misunderstanding seems to have come from those who are unfamiliar with how the process of revising the town code works and who misread a draft described at a May 2 town board meeting by NancyLynn Thiele, a town attorney, which had been circulated to stimulate discussion. Steve Haweeli, the president of the East Hampton Chamber of Commerce, has been sounding the alarm and has urged restaurant owners and their staffs to attend a June 1 hearing.

By the time this edition of The Star is in your hands, the South Fork will have undergone its annual transformation from slow-moving suburb by the beach to frenetic resort. As if from nowhere, the overnight population of East Hampton will jump from the low 20,000s to, by some estimates, 100,000.

Truer words about global warming and sea level rise have rarely, if ever, been uttered in connection with what East Hampton Town government is facing: “Literally, the shape of our town is going to change. We’re better off having a plan.” The speaker was Jeremy Samuelson, who is leading a new effort to come to grips with what lies ahead. What lies ahead looks bad. According to New York State’s most conservative estimate, the bays and oceans will rise by 1.3 feet by 2050. This is enough for Napeague Harbor to expand to Route 27, for example, potentially cutting off Montauk and leading to significant questions about how to replace inundated infrastructure. What will remain of high land along Gerard Drive at Accabonac Harbor would be a pair of islands. Erosion nearly everywhere along the beaches will only further exacerbate the tension between protecting private properties with bulkheads and the inevitable loss of public beaches that would result. So far, the coastal policies of governm

For many business owners here, spring means worry.

A request from the Montauk Playhouse Foundation for $3 million from the Town of East Hampton to help realize a long-imagined dream of an aquatic exercise and cultural center is well worth pursuing.

It was no surprise that voters approved school budgets on the South Fork Tuesday. Thanks to the state’s tax-increase cap, budgets now grow modestly from year to year and antipathy toward school spending, once high here, has abated.

Here in East Hampton Town, because so many delis and other takeout joints around here have seating of one sort or another for patrons, one might be forgiven for believing it was legal. It is not, though officials are considering how to make it so.

School board and budget votes are next week, but you would hardly know it. Meetings at which annual spending plans were discussed this spring have been lightly attended, and for the most part there are few competitive races for school board.