Editorials

If there were one thing we wished regarding traffic on the South Fork it would be that state highway planners had spent the past week here just driving around. If they did, we are pretty darn sure things would be different quickly.

Stories have proliferated this summer about odd encounters between a few surfing instructors and the public at Montauk’s Ditch Plain. There was a report of a fight involving a flip-flop slap to someone’s face. We have heard about teachers who suggest, sometimes aggressively, that regular surfers move away from their students.

Only an insider could get terribly excited about recent East Hampton Town Trustee tension with regard to their so-called harbor management committee. Few town residents — some trustees among them — really know anything about the group or what it does. In fact, as far as we know, the committee has scarcely met since about the beginning of 2011.

There was alarm among environmental activists when the Long Island Power Authority failed to take a widely anticipated vote in July on a wind farm that, had it gone forward, would have been the largest in the United States. Perplexingly, LIPA explained that the delay was at the request of state officials, who, LIPA said, wanted to align the proposal with forthcoming offshore wind and clean energy plans. To some observers, this sounded more than a little suspicious, even for an industry that has been plagued by regulatory stalling and controversy.

Complain as we might about East Hampton Town’s long-term planning, a recent idea from Town Hall, about further restricting the size of houses, has merit. Early opposition from a few property owners and real estate agents should not derail what would be an important conversation.

Eastbound in bumper-to-bumper traffic on Tuesday just before noon this week, we wondered why East Hampton Town officials seem unwilling or unable to come up with a sensible, long-term approach to gaining a measure of control over summer crowds. Ask a member of the town board directly about this, and you get a polite, if vacant, stare.

Move over — that’s the least we can do for our ambulance and fire volunteers as they rush on the roads to a call — and now it’s the law, backed up by a $275 fine and points on your license.

After seven appearances before the East Hampton Village Zoning Board of Appeals, Shahab Karmely had had enough. So, too, did Kenneth Kuchin, his neighbor and adversary in a bitter proceeding about a tennis court, who time and again since early this year went to a zoning board meeting for yet another continuation of what should have been an open-and-shut hearing. So-called continuations are the rule rather than the exception in East Hampton Village zoning matters. They should not be.

We hoped that Representative Lee Zeldin, who endorsed Donald Trump for president, would have had a change of heart after hearing his inhumane reaction to the parents of a United States soldier who was killed in Iraq, Khizr and Ghazala Kahn, who appeared at the Democratic National Convention.

In an attempt to keep the sands cleaner East Hampton Town mandated this year that all beach fires be made within metal containers. In several locations early this summer, the rule appears to have improved conditions a great deal. But compliance is not complete, and in some places, Atlantic Drive on Napeague for one and parts of downtown Montauk’s shoreline and Ditch Plain for others, problems with messy charred wood and blackened sand remain.

Too late to be included in an editorial in our print edition last week was the number of undeveloped parcels of land within the boundaries of East Hampton Town. Including vacant commercial and residential land in the two incorporated villages (Sag Harbor and East Hampton), there are approximately 2,580 lots classified as open.

For all the attention being paid to water quality on the South Fork, surprisingly little is being done in the way of data collection by East Hampton Town itself. And, in the absence of regular town or county testing, the East Hampton Town Trustees and Concerned Citizens of Montauk, in partnership with the Surfrider Foundation, have had to fill the gap to the best of their abilities.

Elected officials on the East End, as well as many environmental advocates, are barreling ahead with a plan to seek voter approval to draw as much as 20 percent of future community preservation fund revenue for water quality improvement. However, in presenting the initiative as a good thing, they have failed to study its potential impacts in a meaningful way.

When East Hampton Village Mayor Paul F. Rickenbach Jr. abruptly demoted Barbara Borsack on July 5 from the position of deputy mayor in favor of a relative newcomer to the board, Village Hall’s normally decorous atmosphere was rattled. Calling the move a cabinet shuffle, the mayor declined to elaborate on his decision.

Everything looks great on the downtown Montauk ocean beach at the moment, but behind the scenes a massive economic disaster looms and what could be a major political embarrassment is unfolding. Meanwhile, objections are being heard to a United States Army Corps of Engineers plan to expand the stone bulwark at Montauk Point.

In the good news department, we are thinking, although a little belatedly, about an expanded effort by the Food Pantry Farm to get quality produce into the kitchens of East Hampton’s less well-off residents. Until now, membership in one of the area’s community-supported agriculture programs had been more or less limited by cost to those in the upper strata of household income. Now, in a first-year effort, the Food Pantry Farm, which is on Long Lane, has 25 members receiving ample portions of vegetables, flowers, and herbs for a fraction of the cost per week of the better-known and established C.S.A.s.

A number of changes at Amagansett’s Indian Wells Beach have corrected what had seemed a permanently bad situation, and East Hampton Town officials deserve a great deal of credit.

“Welcome to New York,” two billboards set up overnight by state workers read, along with six others with similar messages. And Montauk went nuts. To understand why the easternmost hamlet was alarmed, you need to know a little of its history and why the idea of a port of entry there is not all that far-fetched.

On Monday, the South Fork’s only Fourth of July parade will take place in Southampton Village. It is a tradition-filled, small-town affair, with marching groups, veterans and elected officials riding in open cars, and spectators dressed in red, white, and blue waving flags. As lovely as the Southampton parade may be, it raises, at least for us, the question why none is organized in East Hampton Town. One should be.

As Fourth of July weekend and the peak of the summer season approach, complaints already have been heard about the plethora of taxis operating in East Hampton Town. Some residents object to places where drivers park to rest. Others find their sometimes littered and noisy congregation points sore points, which may interfere with the public’s access to shopping.

Other than for fans of the banana Bailey’s colada, a “for sale” sign on the former Cyril’s Fish House on the Napeague stretch of Montauk Highway is welcome. The eponymous owner of the bar and restaurant decided this spring to not open after losing a case in East Hampton Town Justice Court that involved a raft of building code violations.

Speaking at an Amagansett citizens advisory committee meeting recently, Ed Michels, the East Hampton Town harbormaster and the person in charge of the town’s Marine Patrol, said that Montauk’s beaches had as many as 100 bonfires on a summer weekend night. He told the group that as of next week, town officers would begin enforcing a rule that fires be kindled only in metal containers and that a two-gallon bucket of water be kept within 10 feet of a fire at all times.

Two recent conservation initiatives from the South Fork’s larger utilities caught our eye and support a sense that the area has reached some sort of maximum. PSEG Long Island and the Town of East Hampton have announced energy awareness days next week with a goal of dialing back on power consumption. At the same time, the Suffolk County Water Authority is pushing a voluntary odd-even day irrigation schedule to cut demand. Meanwhile, cellular companies are scrambling to erect new antennas, and ambulance companies across the region have added paid paramedics to help the volunteers cope with emergencies.

In the Democratic primary on Tuesday, David Calone, a political first-timer, faces Anna Throne-Holst, a former Southampton Town supervisor. The winner will battle Representative Lee Zeldin, a Republican nearing the end of his first term. How support for the Democratic Party candidates gelled presents an interesting picture of East End politics in which the person one knows well is not necessarily the favorite.

No matter where one might stand on the question of Napeague Truck Beach, it is likely that no one is going to be happy once the verdict is announced in the ongoing lawsuit, probably at the end of the summer.

The East Hampton Town Board appears ready to put a measure on the November ballot intended to provide up to 20 percent of the community preservation fund for water quality improvement. Despite its backers’ good intentions, this has the makings of a massive boondoggle, leaving far too much to the discretion of politicians, if it were approved by voters.

Local officials and community activists might have been a bit premature in declaring that recent measures designed to tame the summer party scene are a success. In the week and a half since Memorial Day we have heard variations on the theme of “it wasn’t so bad.” To those who might think this is the real story, we have one thing to say: You haven’t seen anything yet.

As soon as next year, the South Fork could see a rail shuttle designed to help cut congestion on the roads and provide a meaningful alternative for people traveling among the hamlets and villages.

We were rather pleased to see that Sag Harbor Village as regards an application for a new high-end residential complex on the waterfront near the North Haven bridge is taking a hard line. In meetings last month, Greystone Property Development was told by one of the village’s legal team to think again about its calculation that it could have 11 houses with private parking and boat slips.

Judging from the Memorial Day weekend crowds, East Hampton Town should adopt a zero-growth strategy. Unfortunately, the approach evident in a new round of official advisory studies is to encourage increased development, with commercial sprawl extended in some cases into predominantly residential areas under a smokescreen of “smart growth.”