Editorials

As the South Fork clears out after what was, by almost all accounts, an unpleasant summer, work continues in East Hampton Town Hall on a proposal for a rental registry. Modeled on those in other towns, notably Southampton, the draft-in-process is expected to set up a procedure by which landlords would have to sign up with the town before offering anyplace for rent.

Water quality has been in the news this summer, thanks in part to Suffolk Executive Steve Bellone’s seizing on it in his re-election bid. Locally, there have been closures of Georgica and Hook Ponds after potentially harmful bacteria were found. At the state level, there is a bid to allow up to a fifth of future income to be skimmed off the community preservation fund for water improvement projects.

Long Island Sound is a federally designated no-discharge zone, but apparently no one told the right people at the Environmental Protection Agency and Army Corps of Engineers.

It is surprising that the big story of the summer of 2015 was not a celebrity drunken-driving arrest or a devastating fire but instead the summer itself. East Hampton Town — and Montauk in particular — hit some kind of tipping point by the Fourth of July, and residents had had enough.

Go ahead, make a left. Make two, if you want. It’s September! Tumbleweed Tuesday, some call it, the day after Labor Day when we East Hamptoners get our town back.

As the 2015 high season comes to a close, East Hampton Town officials should begin working on to-do lists in an effort to make next summer a better one.

One of the reasons many people go to East Hampton Village’s ocean beaches is precisely because they are not — underscore not — like those maintained by the Town of East Hampton, where a degree of slovenliness and barely maintained, cement-bunker-like facilities are unfortunately the norm.

Quick: If you live and pay taxes outside one of the incorporated villages in East Hampton Town, name one of your fire commissioners. Can’t do it? You’re not alone.

Recent dustups over public land in East Hampton Town have a common thread. In two instances, neighbors worry about what would happen if the public actually showed up. And, while the specifics of the debate about Dolphin Drive on Napeague and the opposition to the upcoming purchase of two house lots overlooking Three Mile Harbor are worth a close look, the underlying sense of dread is also noteworthy.

Reading last week’s story about the Amagansett Citizens Advisory Committee, we were struck by a brief mention of that hamlet’s train station and the vehicle congestion during high-season weekend arrival and departure times.

A trash-talk war over trash on the beaches has heated up among some members of the East Hampton Town Trustees, the East Hampton Village Board, several village employees, and assorted members of the public.

Crews under contract to the State of New York will begin resurfacing Route 114 between East Hampton and Sag Harbor sometime in the fall. The work follows a larger effort on Montauk Highway, Route 27, which was completed in the spring.

Congratulations are due the East Hampton Town Board for unanimously voting last week to ban parking on a significant portion of Edgemere Street, where patrons of the Surf Lodge bar and restaurant (and lately, full-on concert venue) have made the road treacherous.

A bill awaiting Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo’s signature that was recently approved by the State Legislature could signal the beginning of the end of the much-vaunted community preservation fund program. The proposal is to allow local governments to take up to 20 percent of the money for water quality projects, including new and upgraded sewage treatment plants.

Pizza boxes, cracked lobster claws, napkins, beer cups, empty bottles of good wine, plastic tablecloths, half-eaten salads, disposable forks, paper plates, a box of fava beans, broken umbrellas, blown-out chairs, a snapped body board.

The village has been ahead of the town, however, in the regulation of beach fires. About two years after it banned blazes built right on the sand, the experiment has proven worthwhile.

The latest developments in the United States Army Corps of Engineers project to build a 3,100-foot-long sandbag wall on the downtown Montauk oceanfront warrant close attention. Though a private lawsuit could still derail this massive boondoggle, the Corps, East Hampton Town officials, and the state appear to be moving forward.

Kicking a few ideas around at last week’s editorial meeting, we hit on the subject of pet peeves. Everybody has a few, and with the Hamptons high season at full boil, a lot of us are happy to share. In no particular order, here is a list of a few things that get the staff’s collective goat.

One of the solutions that has been floated regarding Montauk’s too-much, too-wild party scene is eliminating outdoor music altogether. At an East Hampton Town Board meeting in the besieged easternmost hamlet this month, however, the general sense among the hundreds who attended was that doing so would be going a step too far.

Several weeks ago, we briefly described an ostentatious party on one of East Hampton Town’s ocean beaches and suggested that a little more restraint by all concerned would not be a bad thing.

Against a photo of two codgers clinging for dear life to a contraption that looks to be an iron lung but is actually a piece of playground equipment, an online publication called Wellness Warrior reports that the latest phenomenon sweeping Europe and Asia is the “multigenerational playground.”

Faced with residents who have become more vocal about unwanted changes, the Sag Harbor Village Board is getting serious about how land-use decisions are made, and by whom. It is about time.

It is remarkable to think that Soldier Ride began here, with the vision of a single man, Chris Carney, who wanted to raise some money and increase awareness for a fledging organization that was helping injured military veterans.

The tone was cordial, though the message from the massive crowd of citizens at Tuesday’s East Hampton Town Board meeting at the Montauk Firehouse was unmistakable: Do something and do it fast.

A couple of weeks back on a Thursday evening a Star staff member sent a text message to one of the editors about a massive party on the beach at Atlantic Avenue in Amagansett, suggesting we had to see it to believe it.

By any measure, East Hampton Town officials have a massive crisis on their hands. Forget about the airport. Forget about pollution of the waterways. At this moment, right now, it’s all about quality of life and a widely shared sense that Town Hall is not able to keep up.

Madonna, the pop star known as the Material Girl for her 1985 hit, is becoming Exhibit A in the case for better protection of farmland.

Now in its second year, a joint Concerned Citizens of Montauk-Surfrider Foundation water testing program continues to show worrisome bacteria levels in several locations.

By now too many questions have been raised for the Village of East Hampton to move forward with a second phase of its controversial deer-sterilization project.

In light of this week’s report that a 4-year-old girl was badly burned on one foot after stepping on the smoldering remains of a beach bonfire at Maidstone Park one thing is clear: The era of freestanding fires at the town’s heavily used public beaches is over.