Editorials

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.

East Hampton Town’s double standard on group housing is something that deserves attention.

To what degree restaurants and bars are an essential part of hotels, motels, and the like will be considered this evening at East Hampton Town Hall.

The remarkable thing about the online blowup last week over Uber “ride sharing” service’s decision to stop operating in East Hampton Town is that both Uber and local officials are trying to solve the same problem.

Downtown Montauk business owners and others are beginning to hear about a sewage treatment project for that area that could get started soon.

We found ourselves stewing last week about a worsening situation on the Napeague stretch of Montauk Highway as three of four restaurants there, the Lobster Roll, the Clam Bar, and Cyril’s Fish House, grow ever more popular.

A federal probe into Albany corruption has reached yet closer to Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo. A report this week from the International Business Times says that his administration has confirmed it is being investigated over ties between the state and Mr. Cuomo’s top campaign donor.

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.