Editorials

After a successful start buying watershed properties around Lake Montauk, the East Hampton Town Board is targeting land around Accabonac Harbor.

It’s about the money. That was the clear takeaway from the reaction at a May 15 hearing on additional limits on large-lot house sizes proposed by the East Hampton Village Board.

After years of frustration, open-government advocates in New York State may have reason for optimism. A bill before the Legislature co-sponsored by Assemblyman Fred W. Thiele Jr. could revolutionize the way the Open Meetings and Freedom of Information Laws are enforced.

Back in 2010, the Economist magazine observed that railways in the United States were the mirror image of those in Europe. Instead, May 12’s Amtrak crash in Philadelphia underscored the differences, which extend to safety and maintenance.

On the eve of Memorial Day weekend, when for many of us on the East End distractions and frustrations abound, we would do well to think of those for whom the holiday was intended — the many servicemen and women lost in the country’s armed conflicts.

If they did not know already, long-suffering residents of the East End, frustrated by helicopter noise, now truly know who their friends are — and who they are not.

Voters can go to their polling places on Tuesday to give their respective school district budgets the thumbs-up or down, though the turnout is not expected to be large.

Eastern Long Island’s own State Senator Kenneth P. LaValle came out of a closed-door meeting on Monday night to express the Republican conference’s confidence in Dean Skelos following the Senate leader’s arrest on extortion and bribery charges

A bill introduced recently in the New York State Legislature by Assemblyman Fred W. Thiele Jr. to deal with the enduring problem of too little available housing for the region’s work force has a worthy goal

As Baltimore erupted this week after the death of yet another person of color at the hands of police, it has become ever more clear that the ill treatment of minorities by police, particularly young black men, is not limited to any one city or town.

It may be a reach for critics of the current East Hampton Town Board to liken what is known so far about the Suffolk County district attorney’s probe into the town’s use of the community preservation fund for a $10 million acquisition in Amagansett to the debacle that brought down the Bill McGintee administration, but it is a big deal nonetheless.

It was disappointing, to put it mildly, at a recent East Hampton Town Trustees meeting, for the presiding officer, Diane McNally, to put off responding to a question from the audience about whether it would be okay to record a discussion about the terms of their Lazy Point leases on their smartphones.

Heaven help Montauk if it gets another Surf Lodge, Beach House, Ruschmeyer’s, or Solé East.

One wades into the maelstrom swirling around the Common Core tests with extreme trepidation. The battle lines are sharply drawn, with parents and teachers who favor the opt-out position quick to vilify those who may not quite agree, and vice versa.

As if to prove a point we made in an editorial last week about the various hamlet advisory committees’ going off the rails, the Amagansett group outdid itself on Monday night.

“Take only pictures, leave only footprints” is a mantra for the use of many public lands, including national wilderness areas. Whether it would work here is an open question.

A medical professional indicated it might be necessary to leave the area if a place to live proved impossible to find. If this isn’t an example of a housing crisis, we don’t know what is.

When a dozen new names were added to the membership roster of the Springs Citizens Advisory Committee last month it pointed to a core problem. Appointed by the East Hampton Town Board, citizens committees are supposed to be a conduit for the concerns of those who live in the various hamlets — and sometimes they work that way. As often as not, however, the committees become places where old grudges are nursed, petty factionalism runs amok, and misinformation reigns.

We had known for a while that we had honeybees in the attic. But the way things are in The Star’s century-old Main Street building, it was really no big deal. Until roofers exposed their sprawling hive last week, the bees never really bothered anybody as they came and went from a gap in the soffit high above the sidewalk. In fact, the only time they had any impact whatsoever on the ground floor was one hot summer’s day when a thin trickle of honey appeared on the inside of one of our front windows, hardly enough to spread on toast.

Unfortunately, it has come to this: a lawsuit to stop the illconsidered United States Army Corps of Engineers plan to fortify the downtown Montauk oceanfront with thousands of sandbags and tons of imported sand.

If enough harvesters take up a surprise opportunity provided by the state, fresh local bay scallops could again be in supply this month.

We have been very critical of the state’s Department of Environmental Conservation over the last few months, but this is one thing that the stressed agency has gotten right. Normally, scallop season in state waters, those outside the bays and harbors, which are controlled by the East End towns’ elected trustees, would have ended on Tuesday.

At this sorry point, you would probably be asking for ridicule to seriously mention ethics reform in the same sentence as the New York State capital. But calls for change have been heard recently following former Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver’s indictment on corruption charges. Most interesting among them perhaps is one from Attorney General Eric Schneiderman, who said last week that state lawmakers should be barred from outside income.

A fire last week that consumed an oceanfront house in East Hampton Village is a reminder of the astonishing commitment of this area’s fire and emergency medical volunteers.

As many as 100 East Hampton firefighters responded to the blaze, which apparently was sparked by workers and made impossible to contain because of high winds. The volunteers remained at the fire well into the night, but were summoned twice to return, already exhausted, as flames erupted anew from the rubble.

The East Hampton Town Board should stay the course in seeking meaningful relief from the noise of flights headed to or leaving the town airport. Following a March 12 hearing on new, get-tough rules, one began to see signs of second-guessing among some observers. This reticence may have been amplified by the strong turnout at the hearing by the helicopter charter industry, which rightly sees East Hampton’s approach as a potentially risky precedent.

This edition of The Star arrives during Sunshine Week, a once-a-year effort by the journalism profession to focus attention on the continual struggle for open government. Unfortunately, the last 12 months have not been good ones for the cause. Notable problems include the revelation that Hillary Clinton used a personal email server for official messages as secretary of state and may have destroyed important records.

The East Hampton Town Board has tested the waters, so to speak, on allowing the operators of personal watercraft to launch them in several harbors where until now they had been prohibited. The East Hampton Town Trustees, who have an interest in some of the water bodies covered under the existing ban, are sure to weigh in, but the view in favor of allowing Jet Skis, WaveRunners, and the like to use town launching ramps centers on the observation that they are entitled to the same access afforded other small craft.

Close observers are seeing significant progress in New York State’s recent moves on alternative, nonpolluting energy. In late February the state’s Public Service Commission issued an outline for its Reforming the Energy Vision plan, with an aim of making New York’s electric grid cleaner, resilient in the face of natural disasters, and cheaper for consumers. This is extremely good news and dovetails nicely with a goal set by the Town of East Hampton to supply all of the community’s electric needs from renewable sources by 2020.

As the starting date nears for a United States Army Corps of Engineers project to build a giant artificial dune reinforced at its core with thousands of massive sandbags, it is critical that the public and policymakers understand what is really at stake.

The East Hampton Town Board should look beyond an apparent impasse on the airport’s budget and finance advisory subcommittee, which has stymied a financial review of planned limits on the noisiest kinds of aircraft.

The latest in a string of shockers out of Albany came this week when it became known that the Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo administration had begun automatically purging the computers of state workers of email messages more than 90 days old.