Amagansett residents told tales to the East Hampton Town Board on Tuesday about groups sharing summer rentals in their once-peaceful beachside neighborhood, and pleaded for the laws against “groupers” to be enforced.

    Diana Walker used to live in Hell’s Kitchen in Manhattan but now lives in the Amagansett dunes, quite a contrast, she told the board. “But imagine my surprise,” she said, describing a scene outside her yard, with a young man urinating on her hedge and vomiting. She took care of the situation with a well-aimed hose, she said, and later, “I received flowers and a note of contrition,” with an accompanying explanation that the offender had just passed the bar exam — apparently an occasion to get roaring drunk.

    Ms. Walker said that the “brats” she found on her lawn were from a nearby share house. “The landlord should be fined,” she said, “and the broker should lose their license.” As for the town, she said, it had a “history of condoning bratty behavior in the name of commerce.”

    “It must stop. It will stop. Action will be taken,” Ms. Walker said.

    June O’Reilly, a neighbor in the dunes, has already acted. Besides lodging complaints with the town code enforcers and police about the group house next door, she has hired a lawyer to mount a civil suit, and has taken the license plate numbers and identifying information on a dozen or so cars that park at the property in question every weekend.

    “The last two years have been pure hell,” Ms. O’Reilly, a dentist who practices at her residence, told the board, thanks to the nearby family that has rented its house “to a group of 11 to 14 20-something-year-olds.”

    “They party from 2:30 to 5 a.m. every Friday and Saturday night, and then they sleep it off,” she said. “So when the code enforcer comes by [in the daylight hours], all is quiet.”

    “I have complained and complained,” said Ms. O’Reilly.

    The town code says that single-family houses may not be shared by more than four unrelated people. The code also prohibits partial occupancy or rental, “excessive turnover” of tenancies, the selling of shares or rights to occupy a house on particular days or dates, and the overcrowding of bedrooms, with the number of occupants allowed based on square footage.

    “This is a townwide problem that certainly seems to have escalated this year,” Patrick Gunn, the head of the town’s Division of Public Safety, said in an e-mail yesterday. “The Ordinance Enforcement Department takes this problem very seriously and is working within its means to address the complaints that come in.” The department, he said, “is working closely with the police department this summer in an effort to contain these situations.”

    Ms. O’Reilly said she “partially blame[s]” the real estate agent who leased the property to the same group for a second year, even while aware of last summer’s problems. She named the broker and the agency.

    “I really believe that if the town puts stress on this owner and the [ . . . ] real estate agency, something will be done,” she said.

    According to the speakers at Tuesday’s meeting, it often happens that just one or two people sign a rental lease, but then they go on to sell shares to numerous others to stay in the house for varying periods of time.    

    Mr. Gunn wrote in his e-mail that he was “encouraged” by discussion at the meeting about “holding realtors more accountable for these situations.”

    “Clearly, current enforcement efforts alone are not stopping the problem,” he wrote, “so I am hopeful that some legislative steps can be taken to make a more effective deterrent to landlords, as well as any realtors who are feeding this problem.”

    “The share houses are a real big problem,” Rona Klopman, the president of the Amagansett East homeowners association, told the town board. Members of the group complain about litter, illegal parking, excessive noise, overcrowded houses, public intoxication, and public urination, she said. “There has to be more code enforcement at night,” Ms. Klopman said.

“You call code enforcement and nobody comes.”

    According to Mr. Gunn, residents with complaints should call the police after hours and on weekends, when the administrative office of the Ordinance Enforcement Department is closed.

    Scott Rodriguez, a senior ordinance inspector, is on duty for overnight shifts on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, he said, and two of the department’s four full-time officers work weekend days. Mr. Rodriguez is in “constant contact” with the police during his shifts, said Mr. Gunn, adding that he “responds to share house and house party complaints throughout the night, but is spread very thin,” as complaints come in after hours from all hamlets in the town.

    Mr. Rodriguez assigns further investigation of alleged share houses to daytime inspectors, Mr. Gunn said. During working hours, he encouraged the public to submit a standard complaint form at the Ordinance Enforcement Department office. 

    Noise complaints, Mr. Gunn noted, are handled exclusively by the police, and noise violation charges associated with share house complaints are routinely filed by the police. Several share house cases are currently in town justice court, he said, and “multiple investigations are ongoing.”

    Share house cases, he wrote, “are often difficult and labor-intensive to establish and prosecute,” as “access to these houses is often denied and tenants and their guests have become more savvy in denying access and answering questions. It is extremely difficult to obtain a copy of the lease, establish who is the actual tenant or tenants, and who is a guest. When a case is submitted to the Justice Court, it has been the policy of the department to charge both the tenant and the landlord initially and until compliance or accountability can be achieved.”

    “It’s a business,” Ms. Klopman told the town board on Tuesday. She read from an online ad for shares in a summer house that provided pricing, details, and policies, along with a photo of nearby Indian Wells beach. The ad offered half-shares and quarter-shares, along with customized packages of weekends, and a discount if a renter paid by a certain date. Her recitation prompted laughs from members of the audience at Town Hall. “It’s not laughable,” Ms. Klopman commented. “Because the community is affected by it.”

    Carl Hillmann, another Amagansett resident, said that though he is “lucky enough not to be a victim of a nearby share house,” he “see[s] the effects every day, and I hear all the anecdotes, and it’s nonstop. It’s obvious in the last few years it’s gotten much worse, and it’s not getting any better.”

    The residents addressed the board during the public comment section of  its work session this week, and their comments were not further discussed during the meeting. The board did, however, talk about the possibility of establishing a rental registry, which could assist in housing code enforcement efforts, as well as other issues regarding the proper use of residential properties. Those discussions are reported on separately in today’s Star.

    Is bigger better? Not if you’re a local official trying to restrict house sizes on the East End. Despite an apparent small house movement taking hold in other parts of the country, builders and local officials say people here are still building to the maximum their property will allow.

    “You can understand why they’d want to max it out,” said Frank Newbold, the East Hampton Village Zoning Board of Appeals chairman. “There’s such expensive inventory here.”

    There is a constant struggle, Mr. Newbold said, between homeowners and their architects and those on the  review boards. Every municipality on the South Fork has zoning regulations and they are so numerous and so specific to each locale that it takes experts to keep them straight.

    Each governing body does its best to see that construction meets the formulas in their town or village ordinances, some of which are restrictions on the amount of a lot that can be covered (its building envelope), setbacks (distances from a structure to property lines), and pyramid laws (the height of a building in relation to property lines).

    Perhaps the village most concerned about downsizing houses is Sagaponack. Blame Ira Rennert. After the junk bond mogul built his 64,389-square-foot mini Versailles there, residents of the then-hamlet became alarmed. “That’s part of the reason they formed a village,” said Paul Brennan, the regional manager of Douglas Elliman, based in Bridgehampton.

    Once Sagaponack was incorporated, in 2005, one of its first orders of business was to put a floor area ratio (FAR) into its zoning code, which stipulates the square footage of a house in relation to the size of its lot. The intention was to curtail the invasion of McMansions into a bucolic area whose ZIP code was deemed to have the most expensive housing in the country, with a median sale price of $4,421,458 in 2009.

“The houses were getting bigger and bigger,” said Mr. Brennan, whose family once owned 100 acres of farmland in the former agrarian hamlet. “It was a sleepy little village that everyone loved because it was a sleepy little village.” With the regulations, the village and homeowners “reached a happy medium,” he said.

    “If you could build an 8,000-square-foot house in Bridgehampton, it would be 6,500 square feet in Sagaponack,” Mr. Brennan said. Bridgehampton is not incorporated as a village and building there is based on the Southampton Town zoning code.

    “The Sagaponack FAR was designed to limit mass and does so by restricting the size of a building under roof to the size of a specific lot that the building is going on,” Donald Louchheim, the village mayor, said. “At the time it was written, most zoning laws only dealt with size within a specific zoning district or else a simple maximum size for any lot.”

    There had been “a congregation of homes that didn’t have room to breathe; they were cheek by jowl with their neighbors,” said Jose Enrique Arandia, an agent with Corcoran in Bridgehampton. Because there seems to be a trend to smaller houses, “it appears that lot sizes are bigger,” he said.

    The Sagaponack Village Board actually copied FAR from the Village of North Haven, which instituted it in 2004.  “I think honestly it was generated from the Rennert thing,” said Albert Daniels, North Haven’s building inspector. “That got a lot of people to look, hold public hearings, kick it around, and try to come up with a solution that was fair to everyone.”

    The issue on North Haven, he said, was that there are a significant number of two-acre lots and under the previous code that allowed for gargantuan edifices. Sagaponack is zoned mostly for three and two-acre lots.

    “It’s working out fine,” in Mr. Daniels’s opinion. “It’s not hindering anyone from doing what they want.”    

    Tom Preiato, the East Hampton Town chief building inspector, said the town “used to just go by coverage on the lot,” allowing “20 percent roofed over.” Changes were made, he said, mostly due to half-acre zoning in areas like Amagansett, where houses were getting too big for their lots. Five years ago the town, like East Hampton Village, adopted a provision similar to FAR, G.F.A., or gross floor area. Both use formulas to arrive at maximum square footage.

    “Part of it in the [East Hampton] Village code dates back to 1925, but it really got formally codified almost exactly 10 years ago, in July 2003,” Mr. Newbold said. The maximum allowable gross area of a house is limited to 10 percent of the lot area plus 1,000 square feet or 20,000 square feet, whichever is less. So, the maximum size of a house in the village, no matter the size of the lot, is 20,000 square feet. If, for example, someone wants to build on a one-acre lot, which is roughly 40,000 square feet, the maximum size of the house would be 5,000 square feet, excluding any basement, attic, or spaces with ceilings lower than five feet.

    Just when you think you’re beginning to get a handle on the rules — hold on — they are probably being tweaked. In order to reduce a structure’s mass as seen from the street, the village this year amended its code to count rooms whose height exceeds 15 square feet twice.

    “In the village, where lots are so small, it keeps them in proportion,” Mr. Newbold said.

    All of these restrictions, according to Mr. Brennan, are “counterintuitive to the market,” but they are “also beneficial in the long run.” However, he said, “the spec builders all complain.”

    Michael Davis, a builder who lives and works in Sagaponack, is not one. “I would say, as a Sagaponack resident, it [FAR] was really needed. . . . People were tearing down and putting too much house on the lot.” However, he’s not particularly pleased with all the restrictions. Mentioning enclosed porches, Mr. Davis said, “They were always considered attractive,” but now that they are considered part of the square footage, homeowners have to “decide between a porch and a bedroom. It encourages them to build boxes.”

    Meanwhile, Mr. Arandia believes that homeowners are getting accustomed to downsizing. “Smaller houses are more comfortable. Rooms flow better, there’s less hall space, and they’re abandoning formal living rooms.”

    The irony may be that, because Mr. Rennert’s palace is on 63 acres, it undoubtedly complies with FAR regulations. And yet, in June, the billionaire filed for a zoning variance. It seems that his house, touted as bigger than the White House, needs more room — for a Pilates studio, spa bath, sauna and steam shower, and three bathrooms. Stay tuned. 

   My first job in food service was as a dishwasher at a deli-cafe-catering company. It was the summer of my junior year in high school.

    Due to the lack of staffing, I did a little bit of everything: took orders, delivered food, spread cream cheese on bagels, wrapped thousands of figs (cut in half, with a dab of goat cheese) in thin strips of salty prosciutto to be later served as hors d’oeuvres by me at a 200-person wedding in the August heat. And after the wedding was over we walked around the tables stacking plates, collecting wine and champagne glasses, each of us with Dixie cups into which we’d pour leftover alcohol and drink it behind the catering tent before we went home for the night.

    I’ve worked in the kitchen at a summer camp, cooking, serving, and cleaning for 300 campers and counselors. The head chef was a Jamaican lady who kept a two-gallon jar of pickled Scotch Bonnets she used to season the jerk chicken and to scare us into submission by threatening to slip them into our food.

    In college I became a hostess and bartender, and then a waitress. The first time I walked up to greet a table, I felt like I was onstage. There I was, talking to a strange, captive audience, all eyes on me, my stomach full of opening-night butterflies.

    I’ve been told to speak louder, smile more, be more confident, take as many drink orders as you can, always assume the guest needs change, don’t talk about tips on the floor, don’t paint your nails, smile more, warn the parents that the plates are hot, ask if they would like their children’s food to come out first, try everything on the menu so you can give an honest opinion, learn the menu backward and forward, be able to recite the menu in your sleep, smile more.

    Sometimes I’m awkward. When the restaurant fills up and there’s background noise and I can’t hear what guests are saying to me, I smile and nod and repeat out loud everything:

    “You’ll have the cod, great!”

    “No, the Cobb.”

    “The cod?”

    “The Cobb salad.”

    “Oh. My hearing,” I cup my left hand behind my ear. “I must be getting old,” and as I’m speaking I realize the woman is in her 80s at least, and then I blush and stammer out a “thank you’” and walk quickly away from the table.

    As far as making mistakes, a little bit of awkwardness never hurt anyone. It’s not as bad as dropping something or spilling a drink, all of which I’ve done.

    The time I tipped a tray and a Sam Adams spilled all over a woman’s lap. “I’m so sorry!”

    “Well,” said the woman to her friends. “I guess this night could get worse.” And then I melted into a puddle on the floor.

    The time a plate slipped out of my hand as I was clearing off a table and crushed a man’s glasses. “I’m so sorry!”

    “It’s okay,” he said, “I needed a new pair.”

    But nothing is quite so awful as realizing you’ve forgotten to put in someone’s order. I’ve never met a server who hasn’t experienced the frightening drop of their stomach, felt the hot flush of panic rise up through their neck and spread out across their face. It’s a sudden overwhelming rush of adrenaline, dread, and hysteria when you figure out the reason why Table 40 has not received their appetizers. Then you have to deal with the kitchen, which is simultaneously pissed off and gleeful at your screw-up.

    I’ve always enjoyed being around kitchens, enjoyed the anonymity of being a pair of hands delivering food, moving between tables to answer someone’s beckoning. Though sometimes it bothers me when people don’t make eye contact, I take pleasure in being able to slip a glass off a table, fill it with water, and replace it without disturbing the conversation.

    A good waitress is like air, someone once told me. She will be indispensable to the table, but the table won’t even notice they need her. This is my job; this is why I’m here.

     Although East Hampton Town police have not yet released an arrest report, the stalker who was arrested at Sean Combs’s house in East Hampton last year after convincing police and a local security company that he was a relative of the music mogul, was arrested again by East Hampton Town police on Friday evening either on or near Mr. Combs’s property.

     According to the police arrest and event reports for the week, police received a report of a “suspicious person” on Hedges Banks Road near North Hollow Drive, which is where Mr. Combs's residence is, at just before 8 p.m. on Friday.

     Twenty-six minutes later, Quamine T. Taylor was placed under arrest. Police have not yet responded to requests for more information, nor have they said what the specific charge or charges against Mr. Taylor are. It was an apparently minor charge.

     He was released from police headquarters last Friday with an appearance ticket for late in August.

     Mr. Taylor told the court after his arrest on April 1, 2012, that he was from Queens and was 30 years old. He had taken a train from the Jamaica station on March 31, 2012, then a taxi from East Hampton train station to Mr. Combs’s house, he said, and broke in through an unlocked door to the basement. Mr. Combs was away, and there was nobody in the house at the time.

     When he broke in, he unwittingly set off an alarm, alerting a private security company that something was amiss.

     When a guard from the company showed up at the door, accompanied by an East Hampton police officer, Mr. Taylor convinced the guard that he was related to Mr. Combs and had permission to be on the property.

     It was not until 24 hours later that a caretaker for Mr. Combs arrived at the house and alerted police that Mr. Taylor was an intruder.

     Police returned and knocked on the door. Mr. Taylor was apparently wearing Mr. Combs’s bathrobe and was described as “partially dressed.” As police walked through the house, it was clear, according to the report released after that arrest, that Mr. Taylor had consumed a quantity of liquor and beverages and had helped himself to the food in Mr. Combs’s refrigerator.

     On April 2, 2012, East Hampton Town Justice Lisa R. Rana set Mr. Taylor’s bail at $2,000, an amount Mr. Taylor never posted.

     He eventually pled guilty to criminal trespass in the second degree and was sentenced to 120 days in jail. He had already served 90 days of that sentence, while awaiting the outcome of the court proceedings.

     During the sentencing, Justice Rana issued an order of protection prohibiting Mr. Taylor from going to Mr. Combs’s property or near his person for the next five years.

     Mr. Taylor had been arrested on the same charge 11 years earlier. He tried to convince police at that time that he was a relative of Mr. Combs.

    A sign on the Montauk Highway in Bridgehampton reading “We Need Fire Fighters & EMS Volunteers” tells the story succinctly and explains why four of the South Fork’s fire departments have teamed up to do something about its having become harder and harder for its ambulance squads to respond to emergency medical calls in a timely way, while two other departments have worked independently to bolster services.

    The East End Ambulance Coalition, a consortium that has met for over 20 years, is meeting the challenge as ambulance calls have reached record highs this summer, creating what Robert Delagi, the Suffolk County emergency medical system coordinator, described as a “financially feasible system” of “tactical” ambulances. Four of the six departments in the coalition have agreed to designate emergency medical technicians on a rotating basis, allowing so-called “tac” ambulances to respond to calls when the individual departments have difficulty doing so.

    “Essentially, the tactical ambulances are a form of mutual aid,” said Jeff White, the second assistant chief of the Bridgehampton Fire Department. “It’s a backup crew on a daily basis, where everyone always has someone covering them.” The tac ambulance system went into effect on July 1, with Bridgehampton, Sag Harbor, East Hampton, and Springs taking part. Amagansett has been unable to participate due to scheduling problems, and Montauk has declined because it has new paid paramedics to augment its volunteers.

    Mr. Delagi reported that, in addition to the Montauk department, Southampton is among several others in the county that are combining paid and volunteer crews. “These departments offer salaries to always make sure that there are human resources available,” he said.

      Phil Cammann, founding chief of the Southampton’s ambulance corps and a volunteer with the Bridgehampton department, and Ed Downes, president of the Sag Harbor Volunteer Ambulance Corps, worked last year to help the coalition come up with short and long-term goals to improve ambulance response times. They have “longevity in their departments,” Mr. Delagi said. “The tac ambulances have not only drastically improved response time,” Mr. Cammon said, “but we’ve also gotten phenomenal commentary from chiefs and public officials on how well they are working.”

    According to Mary Mott, an East Hampton Village volunteer and an emergency medical technician instructor, the tac ambulances have created “a win-win situation. . . .  It’s a piece that will make the system stronger.”

    The East End Ambulance Coalition’s long-term goal, which would, volunteers believe, help improve response time enormously, is to establish a paid interagency first-responder program that would make five daytime paramedics available at all times. Coalition officials are reported to be budgeting for the program in the hope that it can be initiated in the summer of 2014.

    That new ways of meeting the need for skilled ambulance crews were necessary became clearer than ever this summer, although Ms. Mott said that “historically, all of the departments have always been looking for new members.” But the numbers are telling. By the end of July, the East Hampton Village Ambulance Association will be nearing 800 calls, Ms. Mott said, in comparison to a total of 1,300 calls in all of 2012.

    The volume of calls has continued to go up for several reasons, including worse traffic, more training requirements, and, of course, the fact that the population of the South Fork increases exponentially at this time of the year. “The seasonal population here has just exploded,” Mr. Cammann said. He estimated that there are now between 4,500 and 5,000 calls a year among the six coalition departments.

    An increasing problem for volunteers is the amount of false alarm calls, Ms. Mott said. “False alarms hurt the system,” she said. Unnecessary calls will sometimes take two hours of driving to complete, which sometimes means several core crew members are obligated to respond to the call and are unavailable when a real emergency strikes.

    Becoming an E.M.T. requires 160 hours of basic life support training. To become a critical care, or advanced, E.M.T., the training takes two years, with 1,500 hours required. It has been reported that there aren’t as many  advanced E.M.T.s as the departments would like.

    Mr. White, of the Bridgehampton department, said it had started actively recruiting volunteers recently, using radio announcements, fliers, and word of mouth in addition to the highway sign. “Membership is now on the uptick,” he said, reporting that the department has five or six additional volunteers expected to join by fall. In the meantime, he said, “People fill in where they can.”

    In London and New York this week, the tabloids were agog with news of “the Hamptons,” which is not at all unusual for July, when everyone who’s usually there is here instead, except that the man at the hub of the hubbub has been dead for almost five years.

    That would be the financier Bruce Wasserstein, whose death at 61 left five of his six children — three by his second wife, two by his third — in possession of a 27.6-acre compound off Further Lane in Amagansett. It seems safe to say that Mr. Wasserstein, whose erstwhile partner Joseph Perella once described him as a “secretive” man whose intimates knew almost nothing of his personal life, would have been horrified by the current headlines.

    According to The Daily Mail and The Daily News, the mother of Mr. Wasserstein’s sixth child, whose affair with the mogul ended soon after the birth of a girl who was named Sky Wasserstein, has sued the older children for access to the estate, known as Cranberry Dune.  Erin McCarthy, a 41-year-old business school graduate, claims in her lawsuit, filed in April 2012 in Manhattan Surrogate Court, that a child psychologist told her Sky, now 5, should be “exposed to concrete representations of the lost parent” and that she would find visits to the compound “therapeutic.”

    The five older siblings, two of whom have law degrees, have allegedly refused to allow Ms. McCarthy and their half-sister on the property, not because of the child — whom they reportedly offered a choice of their father’s sprawling ranch in Santa Barbara, Calif., or his regal apartment in Paris if she would surrender rights to Cranberry Dune — but because of her mother. They blame Ms. McCarthy, according to published reports, for the breakup of Mr. Wasserstein’s 12-year marriage to his third wife, the former Claude Becker.

     In late 2008, after Mr. Wasserstein ended the affair and began a new relationship, Ms. McCarthy is reported to have broken into the estate, carrying the infant Sky and screaming obscenities, and to have “terrorized” Claude Becker Wasserstein’s  two boys, then 9 and 8, who were in the main house along with their father’s soon-to-be fourth wife. Ms. McCarthy has acknowledged that incident, saying in court documents that she was suffering from postpartum depression at the time. 

    Mr. Wasserstein, who at his death was the president and chief executive officer of Lazard Ltd. and the owner of New York magazine, left an estate estimated by Forbes magazine at $2.3 billion. Sky Wasserstein, who reportedly was left $75 million, lives with her mother, who received substantial child support, in a Manhattan apartment paid for by the estate.

    If their father’s example is any indicator, the court dispute between Ms. McCarthy and his adult children seems unlikely to be concluded any time soon. In October 1991 Mr. Wasserstein began what was to be a tenacious five-year legal battle with East Hampton Town over his plan to subdivide Cranberry Dune into five residential lots, one of which would contain an existing seven-bedroom family home. The proposal ran up against the town’s open space regulations, under which half the land and 70 percent of its prime soils was to be put into an agricultural preserve. The planning board, which also wanted the four proposed new houses clustered on smaller lots, turned down the subdivision, reasoning in part that the point of preserving farmland was to have it farmed, and that it would be too difficult for a farmer to have to negotiate with so many landowners.

    Two years later, as the case was snailing its way through the justice system, the billionaire dropped his suit and submitted a new subdivision map, including a conservation easement covering 10 acres that are part of the Atlantic Double Dune system. That proposal went back and forth before it was finally approved, in November 1994, on one condition: that Mr. Wasserstein create a reserved area and deed it to a third party, perhaps the Peconic Land Trust or Nature Conservancy, to ensure its preservation as open space. He refused, calling the demand a “taking,” and sued again, this time challenging the constitutionality of the open-space law.

    Finally, in early 1996, he modified his second plan, asking this time for four lots rather than five, which changed its classification  from a major subdivision to a minor one, obviating the open-space requirement. That proposal was okayed, to the relief of officials and environmentalists who had feared that the courts might overturn East Hampton Town’s open-space law.

    Two years later, in the summer of 1998, the zoning board of appeals granted Mr. Wasserstein a variance allowing him to build a tennis court closer to a side yard than required by the town code.

    The Star reported that the property in question would be owned by one of his (then) three children, taking note that it was in an agricultural district.

    The East Hampton Town Trustees got an earful Tuesday evening from residents of Springs, who aired their dismay over crowds and their attendant litter, lack of enforcement of local laws, and, especially, trucks parked on the beach at Maidstone Park.

    Loring Bolger, chairwoman of the Springs Citizens Advisory Committee, told the trustees of multiple complaints about trucks parked on the sand near the mouth of Three Mile Harbor. “As you are the body that oversees that,” she said, “I brought it to everyone on my mailing list that you are the people to see if people have a problem.” To Ms. Bolger’s surprise, however, “as vocal as everyone has been about their dissatisfaction with trucks on the beach, not one is here.”

    In fact, two residents had come to make their views known, and some of the ensuing verbal exchanges were fraught. “[Maidstone Beach] is a disgrace,” said a woman who declined to identify herself. “I’ve been going there since 1965 when I was 6 years old.”

    “Can I allow [Ms. Bolger] to finish first?” Diane McNally, the trustees’ clerk, asked.

    “I’m just saying the garbage on the beach, the trucks on the beach . . . it’s a disgrace.”

    “My concern as a private citizen is, we have the trucks there,” Ms. Bolger continued. “They’re not driving on the beach, they’re parking on the beach. And you have this wonderful crescent area where these little kids love to go.” She asked the trustees if trucks could be restricted to the bay side, opposite what has come to be called baby beach.

    “I thought, just in terms of safety, you might go down there and see if there could be a demarcation so the baby beach could stay the baby beach and the truck area could stay the truck area,” she said.

    Timothy Bock, a trustee, said he swims at Maidstone regularly and saw no problem with vehicles parked on the beach.

    “Many times there’s no problem, but sometimes there is,” Ms. Bolger replied. “Sometimes, that beach gets very, very crowded.”

    “Every beach in East Hampton is sometimes very crowded,” said Nat Miller, a trustee.

    “Don’t shoot the messenger!” Ms. Bolger pleaded. “I’m just relaying to you what I have heard.” She said that while she was “not thrilled” with the trucks on the beach, she recognized their right to be there. “But if there could be some accommodation for that one little crescent  . . . God forbid somebody shoots in there and a little kid is wandering.”

    “It’s a disgrace,” the unidentified woman repeated. “The trucks on the beach, leaking oil, the music . . . they shouldn’t be there, end of story. This is going to turn into where I came from, in Nassau County. One thing is going to lead to another, and then it’s going to turn into Nassau County. I can see it happening already.” She complained of garbage and bottles on the beach.

    “Every beach has bottles and garbage,” Mr. Miller said.

    “It’s going to turn into Nassau County,” the woman repeated.

    “It already has,” Mr. Miller said.

    “If you make a concerted effort and keep it the way it should be, then it won’t,” she said.

    “We are making an effort to keep it the way it should be,” Mr. Miller and Debbie Klughers, a trustee, replied in unison.

    The woman insisted that no vehicles were allowed on beaches in 1965, an assertion Mr. Miller disputed. “What year were you born?” she demanded of Mr. Miller. Nineteen seventy-nine was the answer, but Mr. Miller added that his family had lived in East Hampton for generations predating his great-grandfather’s.

    Frustrated, the woman repeated that the beach in question is “a disgrace,” referred to trucks and litter, and said that in the future she would go to an ocean beach instead.

    “We appreciate you coming in here,” Ms. McNally said as the woman stood to leave.

    “I think the issue is really about neighborliness,” said Ira Barocas of Springs, who is running for trustee in the November election. “People are taking advantage of the right they don’t necessarily need to take advantage of, all the time, but have. They’re exercising that right . . . and sometimes it gets on other people’s nerves. But they have their perfect right, and I don’t think anybody has the ability to say anything.”

    Ms. McNally told Ms. Bolger that the trustees have heard complaints about parking on vegetation, as well as litter. “These are all enforcement issues,” she said. Ms. Bolger said she had spoken with the town board about the lack of signage at the Maidstone parking area. John Courtney, the trustees’ attorney, explained that the town had erected signs with incorrect information in Springs, having neglected to confer with the trustees about regulations. “They had to be taken down,” he said. “They never put any back up.”

    Ms. McNally told Ms. Bolger that the trustees have given town officials correct verbiage for the signs, but subsequent correspondence between the two bodies has had no result. “No one has come to pick them up, no one has contacted us,” she said. “And those signs that have not yet been taken down, every sign along the ocean beach and bay beach, is wrong.”

    A larger concern, Ms. McNally said, is that “if you start with one area and make an accommodation, that is the tip of the iceberg. Barnes Landing, then Napeague stretch, then the [Amagansett Beach Association], then Georgica: ‘Why can’t we have special consideration?’ ”

    What is needed, Ms. McNally said, is enforcement, along with proper signage. “And we have to work on public education to ensure that the user groups understand each user group is restricted from somewhere, and where they all are allowed, they need to get along.”

    “It’s about being neighbors,” Mr. Barocas repeated. “The rules are the rules.”

    Seeking to end the discussion on a positive note, Stephanie Forsberg, a trustee, told Ms. Bolger she had received more than 25 e-mails or phone calls from residents saying they had enjoyed a “perfect experience” at Maidstone Park over the previous weekend, during which the Great Bonac Fireworks show was held.

    “Marine Patrol came down twice and checked everyone’s four-wheel-drive sticker,” she said, “just to give you the flip side of it, how many residents are enjoying it. I believe that section was incident-free that evening. It was one evening, but it was a very busy evening.”

    Ten years ago, East Hampton Town was inundated with complaints from residents of neighborhoods where backyard volleyball games were taking place regularly. Held primarily by Latino residents in Springs, the games, they said, drew large crowds every weekend, along with traffic, noise, and litter. There were allegations of illegal sales of food and drink, gambling, public drunkenness and urination, and even prostitution.

    The town board discussed changing the mass gathering law, which requires a permit if more than 50 people are expected, setting 25 as the number for which permits would be necessary. Board members also proposed an automatic review if anyone applied for more than three permits in a month. After much discussion, those ideas were dropped. Instead, the town set up two public volleyball courts to provide places for volleyball outside of backyards.

    Now the issue has arisen again. Speaking at a town board meeting last Thursday, Connie Kenney, a Springs resident, said that games on Gardiner’s Lane and near Harbor Boulevard and President Street were disrupting the area, with large numbers of participants and accompanying noise, traffic, and litter. According to Ms. Kenney, games take place two or three nights a week from March through November, “with attendance just shy” of the 50-person threshold that would trigger a permit.

    Ms. Kenney said the problem had been taken to Justice Court, where neigborhood property owners were advised the games were legal as long as volleyball nets were taken down after the games.

    “Why are these weekly games allowed in a residential neighborhood?” Ms. Kenney asked the town board on Thursday. The town, she noted, has limits on the number of yard sales a resident can have each year, or the number of times artists can open their studios to the public. “I’ve read that Southampton Town has passed an ordinance to protect its residents. It’s time for East Hampton Town to do the same,” she said. “Please, do something so that it’s a peaceable existence for everyone.”

    Councilwoman Theresa Quigley promised to bring up the matter at a forthcoming board work session. “If this has gone to Justice Court and there’s no way to prevent it, then it’s time for us to draft a law to prevent it,” she said.

    Nothing in the town code limits the number of times residents can host gatherings of fewer than 50 people, John Jilnicki, the town attorney, said. Citations could be issued, he said, if a permanent playing court were built without permission, or if there were evidence of the sale of food and alcohol or other beverages.

    Ms. Quigley asked the attorney to look into what laws other municipalities may have enacted to limit the frequency of organized games at residences. 

   I remember a man, slicked-back hair, wire-rimmed glasses. He wore ironed blue button-down shirts with white collars and cuffs and a pink tie, pressed slacks, shining black shoes. He often carried a briefcase and he always kept his hand on his mother’s elbow, gently guiding her into her seat at their usual table in my section for their usual Thursday night dinner.

    They ordered the same drinks — Bacardi with cranberry and pineapple, heavier on the pineapple, shaken until chilled, in an up glass for him, Absolut and tonic for her — and the same food, nearly always. I learned I should wait until the man had drunk his first drink before taking their order. Both mother and son took their time eating, absorbed in conversation and each other’s company. After enough weeks, when I began to say, “Lovely to see you again,” and mean it, they asked me about myself, where I went to school, how I ended up out here. On weeks they did not come, I worried.

    One night I found myself by the door next to the man while he waited for his mother to exit the restroom. He revealed that his father had died in the fall and his mother had begun to deteriorate. He told me his parents had moved out here from the city permanently after they retired, but now with his father gone and his mother’s mental state not doing so well, he thought he and his wife would have to sell the house and bring his mother to the city to live with them.

    I thought it was sweet and sad and his words made me think, for a moment, there by the door, about a future where I might have to make choices and sacrifices like this man, where I might go to a restaurant every week with my mother, holding her frail arm in mine as I lead her to our regular table.

    After the food is eaten and the white plates gleam brightly on the tables, the puddles of moisture around the half-empty water glasses forming damp circles on the table cloth. After the conversation has died down. After the bitter coffee, empty packets of sweetener — the white, the blue, the pink, and the yellow.

    After you’ve wiped your mouth and thrown down your napkin, after you’ve paid the bill, pushed back your chair, groaning softly at your fullness. After you’ve left the restaurant, only the waiters remain, sweeping crumbs into our cupped hands, wiping down the tables, placing polished silverware onto starched white cloth.

    After you go, there is another and another. You are repeated too many times to count over the course of a night, a weekend, a month. In the heat of the summer one shift blurs into the next, a stream of repeated motion: now I scoop the ice, now I pour the soda, now I write down the order, now I pick up the plate.

    After the last guest is gone, we put up the chairs, empty the coffees, turn off the ice machine. We return everything to its place, wrap condiments and citrus and sauces in thin films of plastic. We take the salts and peppers off the tables, we place the rollups in their bin, we take down racks of glasses and put them onto shelves in straight lines.

    After you’ve eased your mother into the passenger seat and gently shut the door, driven to your cedar-shingled house on a quiet street, helped her up the front steps and through the front door — the hinges squeak and you think tomorrow you’ll WD-40 them for her — the waiters remain, counting the money, dividing it up according to percentages and hours worked. After you’ve placed a glass of water on your bedside table and switched off the light, we sit down for the first time in eight hours. We sigh and feel the tiredness seep up through our feet and into our legs.

    Sometimes in the night, we are startled away by a singular thought, “I forgot to bring Table 8 a side of mustard.” Sometimes we dream about work, about having a full section and no hands, about taking an order but not being able to write. Nightmarish things.

    After July comes August. A year’s worth of sweat in 31 days. The stifling, still month holds us in its hot mouth. The exhale won’t come until September.

    The man and his mother have not been to the restaurant in a long time. I like to think they’re in air-conditioned rooms. I like to think the man guides his mother gently to a different table in a different city where a different waitress takes their order, smiles at them, treats them kindly.

    After they’re gone, after August is over, I remain. Through the fall and winter and into another season, here I am.

    In East Hampton Town, campaign contributions and campaign spending so far this year may be most notable not for what there is to report on, but for what there is not.

    What’s missing are a Republican candidate for supervisor and, according to dueling complaints filed with the New York State Board of Elections late last month, an accurate accounting of campaign spending as of July 11 from one candidate and one political committee.

    Campaign finance disclosure reports for the period ending July 11 were due with the board of elections on July 15.

    Of the candidates for top posts, only Larry Cantwell, who has the town Democratic and Independence Party lines for supervisor, and Fred Overton, a Republican, Independence, and Conservative candidate for town board, filed detailed reports for the first half of the year. Mr. Overton’s running mate Councilman Dominick Stanzione filed a “no activity statement” for the period ending July 11, and both Kathee Burke-Gonzalez and Job Potter, the Democratic candidates for town board, reported no activity for the first half of 2013.

    Christopher Kelley, the chairman of the Democrats’ campaign committee, Campaign 2013, has charged that Mr. Stanzione filed a false report because he failed to disclose contributions for the first half of the year and spending on ads that ran in local newspapers and on the Patch Web site in March, April, and June. “I guess he just abstained from filing,” Mr. Kelley joked. The councilman has come under frequent fire from his fellow G.O.P. board members as well as his Democratic opponents for too often abstaining on controversial votes.

    Meanwhile, Carole Campolo, a Republican Committee member from Springs, has complained to the board of elections that Campaign 2013 failed to disclose spending on its own “numerous” print and radio ads.

    Campaign 2013, the East Hampton Town Republican Committee, Pro East Hampton, another G.O.P. committee, and even the East Hampton Conservators, a deep-pocketed pro-Democratic political action committee, all reported negligible spending as of July 11.

    Both Mr. Kelley and Mr. Stanzione, who was his own campaign treasurer, offered explanations. In Mr. Stanzione’s case, it was a mea culpa. “My bad,” he said in a release issued on Monday. He “acknowledged . . . that he made an honest mistake on his campaign report,” according to the release, and that the report “should have listed expenses associated with recent advertisements.” He has since hired a “professional treasurer” with the firm Campaigns Unlimited who is “making appropriate adjustments.”

    “I’m not a campaign finance professional, that’s why I now have a professional handling the committee’s filings and finances,” Mr. Stanzione said. “I really appreciate that campaign finance and technical reporting is all best left to campaign professionals. Done well, it is time-consuming; done incorrectly it can be an unnecessary distraction from serving the people of our community — and that’s what I honestly believe I do best — serve.”

    As of yesterday, a new report had not been filed. Mr. Stanzione is no longer the treasurer of his campaign committee.

    In the Democrats’ case, Mr. Kelley said, the committee had not reported spending on the ads because it had not yet paid for them or been billed as of July 11. The East Hampton Star’s advertising manager, Min Spear, confirmed Tuesday that Campaign 2013 had not paid its advertising bill with this newspaper as of July 11.

    As for the contributions and spending that were reported to the board of elections for the period ending July 11, Mr. Cantwell’s disclosure statement offered a glimpse at the range of his supporters.

    Despite having no foreseeable opponent, he had brought in a hefty $62,999 since declaring his candidacy in mid-April and had spent $21,262 as of July 11.

    The only other town candidate to raise more than $1,500, according to the disclosure reports, was Mr. Overton, the current town clerk, whose committee, Friends of Fred Overton, raised $11,490 as of July 11.

    Mr. Cantwell got $1,000 contributions from 27 individuals and 2 corporations, and $500 contributions from 23 individuals and 4 corporations. Among his $1,000 backers are some, like Andy Sabin of Amagansett, who have traditionally thrown most of their contributions behind G.O.P. candidates. Mr. Cantwell, the recently retired East Hampton Village administrator, also had a number of prominent East Hampton Village homeowners among his top-dollar contributors. They included Donald Zucker and Barbara Zucker, Joanna Rose, Katharine J. Rayner, and Ina Garten.

    Also contributing at the $1,000 level were Harvey J. Horowitz, Ralph Gibson, George Yates, Richard Michael Moran, Barbara H. Scheerer, and Patricia R. Handal, all of East Hampton; Janet C. Ross, Herbert S. Podell, Alexander M. Laughlin, and Judith W. Laughlin, all of East Hampton and New York, and Carl Vernick of Seaford and East Hampton. The big money also came from David N. Kelley of Sag Harbor, David Seeler of Amagansett, Michael Nuti, who lists a St. James address, Anthony A. Manheim of Brooklyn and Sagaponack, Annette P. Cumming and Ian M. Cumming of Jackson, Wyo., and East Hampton, Nicholas H. Racanelli of Brightwaters and Montauk, and Stanley Harris, Michael T. Bebon, and Thomas H. Lee, all listed with New York addresses.

    He received $1,000 donations from two corporations — the law firm of Ackerman, O’Brien, Pachman, and Brown and Steven E. North P.C.

    Mr. Cantwell’s $500 supporters included Rick White of Montauk, Harold McMahon of Amagansett, Augusta R. Folks of Shelter Island, and Kenneth M. Ferrin and Thaddeus J. Walkowicz of East Hampton. Those with East Hampton and New York addresses included Edward Bleier, Ron Delsener, Bruce Bozzi, Melville Straus, Alan Patricof, Joanna Grossman, David W. Laughlin, Suzanne Driscoll, Nancy Halis, and Andrew C. Right. Mr. Cantwell also got $500 contributions from Stuart Frankel of Boca Raton and East Hampton, Lawrence F. DiGiovanna of Brooklyn, George C. Bengston of Jupiter, Fla., and East Hampton, Frank Dalene of Wainscott, Maria E. Guercio of Farmingdale, and Harry Katz and Avron I. Brog, both of New York and Amagansett.

    On the corporate side, his $500 backers were Keith Grimes Inc. of Montauk, Ironman Realty L.L.C. of New York, and D. Saatchi L.L.C.

    His contributors, Mr. Cantwell said Monday, “represent a broad range of political views — Republicans, Democrats, businesspeople, environmentalists, people who just want a well-run town government.”

    Friends of Larry Cantwell spent $21,262 as of July 11. Among that spending was $4,500 on polling with L.B.L. Consulting of East Hampton in March. He also paid L.B.L. another $5,500 for consulting, spent $3,923 on campaign literature, and paid Mullen and McCaffrey, a Springs communications firm, $4,500 for professional services.

    He lent his campaign committee $5,000.

    Andy Sabin was the biggest contributor to Friends of Fred Overton, contributing $1,000 to his campaign for town board. Mr. Overton received $500 contributions from Todd Sarris, a former East Hampton Town police chief, and Patrick G. Schutte and Stanley J. Arkin, both of Amagansett, Joe Bloecker and Ed Ecker Jr., the current police chief, both of Montauk, and from Wilkinson for Supervisor (Supervisor Bill Wilkinson’s campaign committee), and George Waldbridge Surveyors of East Hampton. He spent $3,171 as of July 11, mainly on a fund-raiser, radio ads, and a political consultant.

    The Democrats’ Campaign 2013 raised $6,100 as of July 11, but reported as its only spending a $375 “in kind” contribution from David Gruber for radio ad production.

    Patrick Bistrian Jr. Inc. and Bistrian Materials, both of East Hampton, were the only contributors to give $1,000 to Campaign 2013 during that period. The committee got $500 contributions from Richard Madan of East Hampton and Elizabeth de Cuevas of Amagansett and New York, and received a $1,500 transfer from the East Hampton Town Democratic Committee.

    The Democratic Committee itself reported $14,472 in contributions for the first half of the year and $19,120 in spending. Clorinda Gorman of East Hampton, David Doty, and John Mullen each gave $1,000 to the committee. Mr. Cantwell gave $1,250. Janet C. Ross, Katherine J. Rayner, and David Gruber gave $500.

    The committee repaid Zachary Cohen for loans in January ($3,000), April ($1,000), and May ($1,000). The committee also spent $4,070 on literature.

    The East Hampton Town Republican Committee and East Hampton Independence Party did not file financial disclosure reports for the first half of the year.

    The East Hampton Conservators reported little activity of interest in the first half of the year. It received $5,000 from Alec Baldwin and $2,500 from Marders Nursery in January, and spent $3,027. As of July 11, the Conservators had $30,974 in their account.