Editorials

   Some Montauk business owners are undoubtedly pleased that when it comes to their interests East Hampton Town’s zoning rules need not apply. Such was the message two weeks ago when Town Supervisor Bill Wilkinson cut a ceremonial ribbon amid an atmosphere of bonhomie at the grand opening of the Montauk Beach House.

   With the hit-and-run death of a nun in Water Mill on Monday, the message is clear that South Fork roads are no place for pedestrians. Only two weeks ago, this community had to digest the news that a high school student was struck and killed as he and several friends made their way on foot from the Amagansett train station to his house. And, although her death did not involve a pedestrian, a Montauk resident was killed when her car apparently went into the path of an oncoming pickup truck on July 4.

   The East Hampton Town Budget and Finance Committee has subtly rebuked Supervisor Bill Wilkinson in a recommendation it made last month that no elected officials or town employees be on a proposed new town audit committee.

   Not too long ago an e-mail crossed our desk alerting us to the “Hamptons Summer Share Must-Have Item.” We couldn’t guess what it could be and doubt that you will, so here goes: It’s an ottoman that folds out into a single bed.

    “It is the new must-have for crowded summer shares and the constant flow of overnight guests at second homes,” a digital press release stated.

   The black dot in the middle of the reddish circle was so tiny you could barely see it, and unless you were a contortionist you couldn’t see the inelegant place where it was lodged either. Just like a tick, to bury itself in a warm spot that’s almost invisible to its unwitting human host —  in the ears, back of the knees, below the belt, in the belly button, top of the head.

   East Hampton Town’s big experiment with an airport control tower began this week as the operators flipped the switches on their communication equipment and radar for the first time. Though the tower is billed as a way to control the routes by which aircraft enter and leave a 4.8-mile radius around the Wainscott runways, and thereby limit noise annoyances for residents, we have our doubts. Bets are that it will not make the noise problem any less, though it may move it around a little bit.

   Channeling the ghost of Martin Luther, East Hampton Town Supervisor Bill Wilkinson figuratively tacked 14 agenda items to the Town Hall door last week, in a grand gesture intended to draw attention to important decisions left hanging, and actions not taken, by a board that is increasingly deadlocked.

    But the list was more theater than anything. Let’s break it down.

    Several of the agenda items could fairly be called important, yes — but none is a Code Red emergency. Some, indeed, are already on the way to resolution. Others are much ado about nothing.

   The death on Saturday of a 17-year-old high school student who was struck by a passing taxi on Old Stone Highway in Amagansett was made all the more painful in that it appeared to have been avoidable. Sometimes accidents are just that, incidents born of chance, nothing more. Other times, we can’t escape the sense that had things just been a little different, a tragedy could have been averted.

   A partially built barn on protected Wainscott farmland is at the center of a legal squabble involving neighbors who say the structure diminshes the attractive view from their house. They have our sympathy, but the question of how such land is managed has greater implications.

   Among the implications of East Hampton Town Supervisor Bill Wilkinson’s apparent failure to summarily reorganize the Planning and Natural Resources Departments is that he might now reconsider how to move the business of government forward and avoid looming stalemates.

   Round about this time of year, if you look among the tide lines on the beaches here, you begin to notice the balloons. Mylar or latex, they wash up with such regularity that in early summer they, and the colored ribbons with which they once were held down, are the dominant non-natural trash.

   Rushed to a vote without advance notice, East Hampton Town Supervisor Bill Wilkinson tried to ram through a massive reorganization of the Planning Department and other land-use departments last week, including management of the community preservation fund and aquaculture, among others. The effort failed, but the implications, both of the means by which the coup was plotted and what effects it would have had, are huge and deserve close scrutiny.

   Seventy years ago Wednesday, four German saboteurs — armed and trained for a mission of destruction — slipped ashore in Amagansett. Though a minor footnote in the annals of World War II, it was one of the very few known incidents in which enemy operatives set foot on United States soil. Moreover, in recent times, the military tribunals in which the would-be attackers were tried and sentenced have been cited as the legal antecedents of how  cases are handled of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

   The near-drowning of a Brooklyn man Sunday afternoon in the ocean on Napeague points to a glaring public safety failure. Each weekend in the summer season, many of the thousands of residents and visitors who take bracing plunges do not understand either the danger of the tumbling waters or that the nearest lifeguards are stationed several miles away.

   Winter seems a long way off at the moment, but that’s not so as far as the East Hampton Village trustees are concerned. Tomorrow, they are expected to approve a law that would require vacant and closed-for-the-season shops to place displays or graphics in their windows rather than cover them with depressingly plain paper.

   With sandwich-making competitions a la Dagwood Bumstead, the English village of Sandwich is celebrating the 250th anniversary this year of the moment Sir Edward Montagu, the fourth Earl of Sandwich, ordered his beef served between slices of bread so he would not have to interrupt his game of cribbage. According to village lore, the others around the gaming table began to order “the same as Sandwich,” and a multibillion-dollar industry was spawned.

   Given all the ink that has been spilled over the Surf Lodge’s problems with some of its neighbors and the Town of East Hampton, we are hesitant to add more, yet to judge from the Memorial Day weekend crowds, more will need to be done to seek compliance with local laws there and at some other successful social spots.

   In East Hampton last weekend, standing next to a car parked by the side of Accabonac Road, a very young woman was seen crying. A few drivers had pulled off the road and were clustered worriedly around her, some consulting their cellphones. A man who’d come out of his house to investigate and gone back in to get a map was squinting at it, frowning.

    The young woman looked up as a newcomer approached. “Do you live around here?” she blurted. “Do you happen to know where Lily Street is?”

    “Lily? Do you mean Lilla? There’s a Lilla Lane in Springs.”

   The portrait of East Hampton Town painted in a new lawsuit is sharply unflattering — and may ring familiar among those who have been close observers over the last few years. A 2009 decision by the East Hampton Town Board to shut down an auto repair business in a Montauk residential neighborhood is at the center of the case. The suit alleges that the way in which a plan was approved to seize vehicles and tools belonging to the business owner, Tom Ferreira, deprived him of due process in the courts and demonstrated a willful ignorance of state law.

   Taken at face value, a statement that East Hampton Town needs help enforcing the laws on its books is disturbing. Patrick Gunn, a town attorney who heads the Division of Public Safety, told the town board last week that the Ordinance Enforcement Department was understaffed and could not meet the “level of service” of previous years.

    This comes at a time when the town’s budget director has been touting the healthy condition of the municipal coffers and considerable surpluses. Something doesn’t add up.

   For visitors to East Hampton Town — and especially for the part-time residents who almost single-handedly keep the local economy afloat — the sight of overflowing garbage cans on public streets and beaches must be puzzling. How could a community with such wealth, one that supposedly prides itself on its aesthetic qualities, allow such unsightly heaps? How could the town’s work force and its elected officials look the other way? Is somebody on strike? Does no one care what the place looks like anymore?

   New Yorkers can be proud that their state helped pave the way for the ground-shifting announcement by President Obama on May 9 that gay and lesbian couples should be able to get married if they want to.

    The Empire State legalized gender-blind marriage last summer, after years of struggle. Albany’s accomplishment was remarkable in that although it took precipitous machinations to make it law, New Yorkers supported it by a comfortable margin. Only about a third of the state’s residents expressed outright opposition.

   After months of work, a deer-management program is emerging from East Hampton Town Hall. Its preliminary recommendations set a goal of reducing the townwide deer herd by half within five years in order to reach what it calls an “ecologically and culturally sustainable level.”

   Voters go the polls Tuesday in their respective school districts for the first time since a state law mandating a 2-percent cap on year-to-year tax levy increases has been in effect. As a result of tough cuts by school budget committees, this is a very different year as far as spending is concerned from those in recent memory.

   That the East Hampton Town Trustees should have to contemplate new, stricter limits on the commercial use of the town’s beaches is a sign that our values have changed. Their review is overdue.

   Buried within a proposed revision of the rules governing entertainment at bars and restaurants in the Town of East Hampton is a disaster waiting to happen. At a hearing at 7 tonight in Town Hall, the board is to consider “outdoor occupancy” limits, in places where there is live music, a D.J., or other events, without regard to the location or zoning of each establishment.

   On Route 24 in Flanders not long ago, grumpily contemplating a long wait ahead at the Department of Motor Vehicles, we passed a bright flash of purple that had no business being there.

    Lilacs? Surely not, not in mid-April. Lilacs say May just as surely as roses say June or holly December.

    If nothing else, the two forums that have been held recently about East Hampton Town’s scavenger waste plant on Springs-Fireplace Road are putting the matter of the long-term quality of our groundwater back into the public dialogue. This is important for several reasons, not the least of which is that thousands of residents depend on shallow, private wells for potable water, and many of them are highly vulnerable to contamination.

    The New York State project to install light-up crosswalks in two locations on East Hampton Main Street is a welcome experiment. But experiment it is — and pedestrians will still need to keep their wits about them.

    No one can know until the work is done how drivers, especially those unfamiliar with the village, will react. Nor will the new crosswalks address the bigger problem of walkers darting across the street near the movie theater or making the Starbucks sprint in the morning while traffic is at its highest.