Editorials

   Quietly late last month the East Hampton Town Trustees went to court to seek to overturn a decision by the East Hampton Town Zoning Board of Appeals giving a Lazy Point couple permission to build a sea wall, or revetment. Though as of this writing we had not seen the suit itself, presumably, the trustees are challenging the Z.B.A. ruling on two points: that required trustee approval was not obtained and that the revetment would violate the town’s own coastal erosion law.

   Privatize the Long Island Power Authority? That was the take-away message from the Moreland Commission, which had been asked by Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo to assess the utility’s preparation for and response to Hurricane Sandy. Not so fast, Long Islanders should be saying.

   In the coming days the East Hampton Town Board may appoint several newcomers to fill seats on boards that fulfill some of the most important functions of local government. Although we have not yet heard of any vacancies on the planning board, there are likely to be openings on the zoning and architectural review boards. And the supervisor and other members of the board will have the annual opportunity to name each board’s chair. Judging from the board’s record in this regard, there is reason for concern.

   Another week, another storm. That’s how it has seemed since at least Hurricane Sandy rolled through on Oct. 29. Early morning light last Thursday once again revealed severe dune loss in several places here, notably at Montauk and Lazy Point. And, with perhaps three more months of potential northeasters, the situation is dire.

    The fact is that the number of coastal storms has not been all that out of line with historic averages. What does set the recent period apart is that the waves ride ever-higher, thanks to sea-level rise.

   When it was first envisioned, the folks behind the East Hampton RECenter hardly could have expected how popular it would eventually become. Now operated by the Y.M.C.A., hundreds of people pass through its doors every day it is open, many of them headed for the center’s two swimming pools. The 300 or so swimmers there on a peak day, as estimated recently by the Y.M.C.A. director, apparently overtax the pools’ filtration and ventilation systems frequently, raising the likelihood of health risks for those who swim and work there.

   Please forgive us for saying we told you so, but having reread the following, which was in an editorial here in September on the anniversary of the great 1938 Hurricane, we have to say it: We told you so.

   In keeping with an agenda-laden effort spearheaded by Councilwoman Theresa Quigley to de-professionalize government and hand policy-making over to politically appointed amateurs, the East Hampton Town Board recently discussed asking the town’s respective citizens advisory committees to develop hamlet studies.

   Reflecting on things that were good in 2012, the response on the South Fork to the continuing needs of its residents and neighbors is most heartening. We made a list of other milestones that stood out.

   Though an endorsement in these pages would appear to be unnecessary, East Hampton Village’s plan to create a timber-framed structure historic designation is a worthy concept. The measure appears headed for approval, perhaps as early as tomorrow’s meeting.

   For the Town of East Hampton, a request from a Napeague property owner to change the zoning of the land on which the summertime traffic nuisance called Cyril’s Fish House sits amounts to an existential challenge.

   Most of our daughter Evvy’s Hanukkah presents were stolen Saturday night. The wrapped gifts had been in the back of her grandparents’ car, in a big box to be taken to New York City on Sunday for a party at an aunt and uncle’s place on Riverside Drive.

   If the East Hampton Town Board had set out to appoint a potentially unproductive committee to chart erosion policy for the future, it certainly succeeded at a meeting on Dec. 4.

    Among the group of 10 people, three run Montauk waterfront hotels, one sells real estate, and another operates an earth-moving business. Two are members of the town board: one a lawyer and property-rights stalwart, the other a builder. Two hail from local environmental groups. You get the picture.

   A story that appeared in this newspaper last week, detailing the frustrations two lawyers have had trying to pry public documents out of East Hampton Town Hall, tells only part of the story. Compliance locally with New York State’s Freedom of Information and Open Meetings Laws is spotty at best, and the town is hardly the only entity with trouble keeping up.

   Deer are changing East Hampton’s natural landscape, causing untold tens of thousands of dollars in property damage and endangering human health — and it is about to get a whole lot worse. Just think for a minute, if you will, about all the does and their young encountered here these days. If just half of those yearlings are female, and they begin to breed while their mothers are still in their reproductive prime, the local population is going to experience exponential growth.

   The Town of East Hampton’s sewage treatment plant, even back when it was operational, is hardly the sole — or even most important — source of groundwater pollution here. That distinction falls on the town’s roughly 20,000 private cesspools or septic systems. The Springs-Fireplace Road plant, however, is highly visible and has become a pawn in an ongoing political battle over property taxes.

   In an unfortunate reversal, the East Hampton Town Zoning Board of Appeals has given permission for Lazy Point property owners to build a sea wall in a zone where none are allowed under town law. What makes this bad decision all the worse is that the same board had denied an essentially identical request earlier this year. Complicating the situation was that the State Department of Environmental Conservation handed out approval for the sea wall in direct, but so far unexplained, violation of an agreement with the town that is supposed to make state agencies follow East Hampton’s rules.

   If you have not yet seen the new Parrish Art Museum from the inside, it should be high on your to-do list. The venerable institution has been reborn in a striking new home in Water Mill designed by a renowned Swiss firm. Long and deceptively low-slung in its farm field-like setting, the museum has been called “an unexpected monument” in New York magazine and “a triumph” in Architectural Record.

   Reports of a die-off elsewhere notwithstanding, this season’s East Hampton scallop harvest has been another for the record books. Not only are these succulent shellfish abundant here, some of the individuals are huge, with shucked meats exceeding an inch and a half in length. This is good news for local harvesters and gourmands, and a significant turnaround from the situation only a few years ago when scallops were so few and far between that the commercial harvest was essentially halted.

   Reading between the lines after taking a long, hard look, the East Hampton Town Budget and Finance Committee, an unpaid group of citizens with tons of business and accounting credibility, has concluded that the work of setting Town Hall to rights remains half done.

   Paul Sapienza, the father of soccer here, whose Springs School teams went undefeated in 13 of the 15 years he was here, used to wonder whatever happened to all the talent he was sending East Hampton High School’s way. One answer was that the kids, while they possessed fine individual skills, had not yet figured out how to play as a team, nor had they, in some cases, learned that being a team player meant you also had to keep your grades up.

   Some of the most enduring images of the days following Hurricane Sandy have been of citizen volunteers helping victims in the Rockaways, along the Jersey Shore, and elsewhere. On the other hand, the picture has been one of failure by the institutions in which many trusted. The Long Island Power Authority, for example, and nearly every level of authority were unprepared for the scale of devastation and disruption of normal, day-to-day life.

   The war on evidence-based policy-making being waged by some in the House of Representatives continued this week, with three members in the running to become chairman of the important Committee on Space, Science, and Technology. Each is deeply skeptical of the widely held belief that human activities are a cause of global warming. Barring an unexpected reversal, either Representative Dana Rohrabacher of California, F. James Sensenbrenner Jr.

   In a crucially important cover story on Friday about the Long Island Power Authority’s performance before and after Hurricane Sandy plowed into the region on Oct. 29, Newsday reported that the utility failed to prepare for a big storm despite having made repeated commitments to the state that it would do just that.

   An increasingly popular idea among the owners of oceanfront properties on Long Island has been to organize into tax districts to fund erosion-protection measures, such as pumping millions of tons of sand onto narrowed beaches. For these property owners, the districts may seem attractive, but they may well delay the day of reckoning along the coasts at a time when a more flexible response to rising sea level is needed — one that would not almost guarantee that United States taxpayers would be asked to pony up to protect coastal vacation properties.

   A debate about how to respond to storm damage like that seen in Hurricane Sandy’s glancing blow on the South Fork is sure to go on for some time. A more immediate concern for East Hampton is whether Town Hall officials follow the rule of law when properties are left at risk by the inevitable natural onslaughts. The record in the last few years is not good.

   Sunday is Veteran’s Day, traditionally a time when organizations that aid those who have served in the United States armed forces are beneficiaries of increased charitable giving. This year, as the region’s attention is centered on communities reeling from Hurricane Sandy’s flood waters and prolonged power outages, there is a fear that veterans groups might see a dip in what they receive.

   Representative Tim Bishop’s victory over Randy Altschuler Tuesday despite the astounding amount of super PAC money — $3.4 million — that fell upon the First Congressional District, gives testimony to the voters’ ability to think for themselves. Everywhere you turned in the last few weeks, you saw or heard the attack ads paid for by a seemingly bottomless pool of dollars — radio, television, the Internet.

   Pity the poor New York voter confronted with Tuesday’s ballot and a top of the ticket that really was not in play here. New York has been a reliably “blue” state, going for the Democratic presidential candidate most of the time since the Great Depression, and in an unbroken streak since 1988.

   For the first time in a long while, State Senator Kenneth P. LaValle, who has been a fixture on the political scene for a generation, has a challenger with a real shot.

   What difference a hundred miles makes. Hurricane Sandy made its landfall on the New Jersey shore, wiping away whole beachside communities. Damage was massive in the New York Bight, on Staten Island, in Manhattan, the Rockaways, Long Beach, and Fire Island, lessening to the east and north, farther from the storm’s highest winds.

    Our sympathies first are for those who lost family or friends. Locally, we mourn Edith Wright, a Montauk woman whose body was found at Georgica Beach.