Editorials

    Tuesday’s East Hampton Town Board work session marked a welcome shift in the way discussions with the public at such meetings have been going.

    If someone took the time to make a list of the businesses East Hampton Town residents complain about all the time, one thing would become clear: The bulk of the trouble spots are in locations with residential zoning.

    Those who follow local government, or who live near one of these places, can point fingers if they like. Our intention is not to name names; rather, it is to point out that it doesn’t have to be this way. In fact, and this may surprise some people, the town’s own laws were written to gradually make development consistent with good planning.

    Occupy Wall Street may seem an odd name for a protest movement, yet the mass assembly of angry and frustrated people in downtown Manhattan — and increasingly in other cites around the country — appears to be this month’s big story and is drawing more support with every passing day. As the protest neared the conclusion of its third week, large labor unions were stepping up and offering support. Today, thousands of activists are expected in Washington’s Freedom Square. Where this all will lead is unknown, but it surely is significant.

    The question for Amagansett voters in Tuesday’s balloting is whether to authorize the fire district to buy the two-acre Pacific East property adjacent to the firehouse for the future construction of a separate ambulance facility. The commissioners have said there is no way the expansion they envision could be accommodated on the land the district owns now — 4.7 acres.

    Commercial fishermen should be able to sell their catches directly to consumers, so say advocates of what is called community supported fisheries. Community supported agriculture has become familiar during the past decade. Members buy shares in a farm and are rewarded periodically with boxes of produce — and a sense of ownership. In the newer fishing model, subscribers prepay for the day’s catch, accepting whatever comes over the gunwales.

    Next Thursday, the East Hampton Town Board will convene a hearing on a set of changes to how the town handles applications for structures on farmland and nurseries. The proposed new rules bear close scrutiny.

    The East Hampton Town Board’s decision on Thursday to buy the four-acre Northwest Kennels property off Swamp Road in Northwest Woods was the right call and something many residents would like to see a lot more of.

    The commissioners of the Amagansett Fire District apparently believe they are in a race against time in seeking voter approval on Oct. 4 for buying a former restaurant property next door to the firehouse. Unfortunately, with a public meeting on the subject Tuesday and the balloting to follow only a week later, the district’s taxpayers will hardly have enough time to weigh the pros and cons of the plan. The process should be slowed down.

    Irene, the hurricane that became a tropical storm as it reached Long Island, did more than knock out power for days and topple rot-weakened trees. For many in the hospitality and retail trades here, its impact was a tough hit in an already tough year. Ask most any shopkeeper on the South Fork how their summer 2011 went and more times than not they will say it was okay until the storm warnings came. Then, as one in Montauk told us this week, things just dropped off a cliff. Customers left as the forecast worsened, he said, and just didn’t come back.

Meaningful recommendations in an outside consultant’s report have been overshadowed by implications of wrongdoing

The United States Census Bureau this week confirmed what many indicators have already shown

    It comes as no surprise that the Long Island Power Authority can be criticized for what appeared to be a slow and noncoummunicative response to Hurricane, or, Tropical Storm Irene. In the aftermath of what was a relatively mild blow, few LIPA crews were seen on the South Fork, and for many, electricity was not restored for up to a week. A reasonable worry is how LIPA and its partner, National Grid, would perform in a real catastrophe.

    Erosion is an issue on the bay beaches as well as on the ocean, for example, where Mulford Lane meets Gardiner’s Bay in Amagansett. Three houses there are either in the water or about to be. One, on stilts, is not habitable. The owners of another want to replace it with a somewhat larger house and to protect it with a stone revetment.

    To the unfamiliar eye, metal pipes driven into the sand and tied together with rope in a rough rectangle at Georgica Beach in East Hampton might not look like much, but they represent a new and aggressive front in the war over control of the ocean shoreline, creating another big headache for town and village officials who are supposed to be looking out for the interests of the community as a whole.

    For Long Islanders, Irene was the hurricane that wasn’t, thanks to a last-moment change of course, faster-than-expected weakening, and a downgrade to tropical-storm status. Still, in its wake, the storm left some 40 people dead across the Eastern Seaboard, with horrendous inland flooding, property damage that is still being tallied, and as many as 750,000 utility customers without electricity in New York alone as of press time.

    Late Sunday afternoon, amid all the talk about the flooding, downed trees, eroded beaches, and the loss of electricity by thousands in East Hampton Town, someone nailed it: “This was a miss,” he said.

    East Hampton Town may well be on its way to revisiting a lengthy discussion about the outdoor lighting code, but just why is the first question the members of the town board — and the public — should be asking.

    As expected, samples taken at South Lake Beach in Montauk after Monday’s rain showed the presence of human waste. The water would be clean enough to swim in by Thursday, at least according to Suffolk Health Department standards, but, frankly, we doubt many people — if they knew about the test results — would want to. The question for East Hampton Town is how officials should respond now that they have been reminded of the problem.

    If buck-passing were an Olympic sport, East Hampton Town would get the gold. That, at least, is the consensus of an increasing number of Montauk residents and others irked by the wild popularity of several restaurants and watering holes and all that comes along with them.

    The joint East Hampton Town and Village Disabilities Advisory Board has issued a call for the public to help it develop a list of spots where access by the disabled is a problem. Civic-minded citizens and officials should make it a priority. The committee has only met irregularly, but its chairman, Glenn Hall of Amagansett, is eager to take problems with accessibility, whether to public or business places, to the right officials.

    East Hampton Village took a small but significant step late last month in banning the use of certain plastic bags by retailers and restaurants. It is only the second local government in the State of New York to enact such a measure, after Southampton Village. Following the village board’s sensible decision, we hope that the Town of East Hampton will put similar restrictions in place.

    A war for the future of Lake Montauk is on, and the battle going on right now is about docks. No sooner did the East Hampton Town Zoning Board of Appeals allow one property owner to extend his pier farther into the lake, than another decided to take his chance. If this second applicant manages to convince the Z.B.A. of his case, expect more to follow.

    The sperm whale calf that died on a rocky Montauk beach on July 30 did more than tell darkly of the mysteries of the deep. It brought to mind the awful time in April 2010, when a young humpback whale languished in the East Hampton surf. This time, the Montauk calf died relatively quickly, unlike 2010 when the larger humpback hung on for the better part of three days before succumbing to a shot from a high-powered rifle and a dose of phenobarbital.

    Tucked away in a recent report on the quality of Suffolk’s water is a striking image: a map showing in years how much time it takes for rainwater to get in the ground and reach eastern Long Island’s bays, streams, and harbors. The graphic is meaningful in that it illustrates just how long it takes for contaminants to move from one point to another, as well as the time it takes for pollution-reduction efforts to be reflected in surface water quality.

    The Napeague homeowners who sued the East Hampton Town Trustees and Town Board, claiming they own the beach in front of their houses from the high tide line down to the surf, and that they can, therefore, deny its use by the public, have incited an opinion hurricane, as might have been expected. They also seem to have raised more legal questions than they might have anticipated.

    Eighteen years ago, a few months after my grandmother on my father’s side celebrated a milestone birthday, she and my stepgrandfather, Milt, took the entire family on a weekend getaway to the Catskills.

    There were 16 of us then and our destination was the Concord, the largest resort in the Borscht Belt, and at the time one of the last of its kind. According to Wikipedia, it had some 1,500 rooms and a dining room that seated 3,000. The food was kosher, to cater to what had historically been a Jewish clientele.

    In the early 1980s, the East Hampton Town Board disbanded the Planning Department. While that does not seem to be the goal of today’s Town Hall leaders, a continued push to change the way the department operates should have those who favor environmental protection and solid land-use management concerned.

    Composting household kitchen waste is among the easiest of the so-called green measures that ordinary citizens can undertake, and it requires the least investment of time and cash. For East Hampton residents, there is an added incentive — helping the town save money. Gardeners have long known the advantages of compost as a soil conditioner and source of nutrients for vegetables and flowers, but there is a compelling dollars-and-cents reason why more of us should compost.

    East Hampton Town Planning Board members could make no mistake about where Supervisor Bill Wilkinson and Councilwoman Theresa Quigley, the deputy supervisor, stood when they walked into the meeting room on July 13 and sat down in the audience next to the applicant in a matter before the board. In past practice, there has been a studious separation between the appointed boards and the elected officials who appoint them; this should be maintained.    

    No one would have designed it this way — 100 trucks lined up on the beach at Napeague. But they are there now, and figuring out what to do about it is the difficult question.