Editorials

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.

Of all the battles the East Hampton Town Trustees could be joining, the one in which a majority appears to be fighting for the right of bros to drink at Amagansett’s Indian Wells Beach is one on which they should have taken a pass.

Officials in the East End towns and villages are taking a new look at water pollution and suggesting that a regional approach might be the solution. They have proposed seeking as much as $100 million from the state for rebates on private septic systems or tax credits, acknowledging that environmental damage from failed or inadequate systems is a problem that spans municipal borders.

The world may be undergoing a sixth great wave of extinctions, as recently examined in a book by Elizabeth Kolbert, and this phenomenon may well extend to the seas, including those off our own shores. Symptoms include coral reef degradation, finfish population crashes, toxic algae blooms, and the slow loss of once-familiar and economically vital species. New York State has responded by drafting a 10-year Ocean Action Plan, but the document, while extensive, offers no source for the money needed to address its ambitious goals.

In an interesting development, the Village of East Hampton’s code enforcement officer and fire inspector has suggested taking a hard look at basements. The issue Ken Collum identified and asked the village board to consider regulating is that a growing number of property owners are including vast underground warrens in building or reconstructing houses. They can do so because the village code does not require basement square-footage to be calculated in the size of a house. The loophole is resulting in bedrooms and other amenities beyond what would be allowed if they were aboveground.

Among the wild-eyed robins feeding in a holly bush outside our office window this week we spotted a cedar waxwing. A well-dressed fellow, he perched in sharp contrast to the tatty-looking, larger robins pulling greedily at the red berries. Below his buff-colored shoulders, two white lines, like pinstripes, ran down toward his tail. The pointed tuft atop his head stood crisp and proud.

New York Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo has taken on the state’s public school teachers, and they are firing back — hard. It’s about time.      

Town officials have struck the right balance in deciding in whose interest the East Hampton Airport and the skies for miles around it will be managed.

A happy outcome appears assured for the Springs General Store, whose operator was faced with the prospect of shutting its doors due to a pending sale of the property. Now, as the last minute neared, an “angel” buyer apparently has emerged who will allow Kristi Hood to keep the store open. This welcome denouement may be the exception to the rule, where places and properties important to the community are threatened about as fast as real estate prices rise.

More than a week after the snow from the blizzard that pounded East Hampton and the rest of Long Island began to be hauled away, one aspect of the official preparations and response should be examined.

Attention in Albany may be focused on the apparent downfall of the Legislature’s top Democrat, Sheldon Silver, in a corruption scandal that cuts very close to Gov. Andrew Cuomo, but the critically important work of settling a budget for the coming fiscal year goes on. Two recent reports from the New York Department of Environmental Conservation have raised valid questions about the agency’s capabilities where wildlife is concerned and painted a picture of it as a failed agency.