Tone Down The Trash Talk

A trash-talk war over trash on the beaches has heated up among some members of the East Hampton Town Trustees, the East Hampton Village Board, several village employees, and assorted members of the public. At issue is whether, as the trustees contend, the village’s placing waste bins on the sand for the convenience of beachgoers actually leads to messier beaches.

The fact is that, at least in the early morning, before crews can get there to clean up, rings of scattered waste more or less encircle the bins, with everything thrown this way and that by gulls and other animals looking for an easy meal. It is a disturbing sight, one that early morning visitors seeking a little peace and solitude should not have to encounter.

Now all sides have dug in, with an official blithely saying that the village board traditionally takes up the subject of the beaches in October. If that is responsive government, we’ll eat that pizza box we saw flapping in the wind in the Georgica Beach parking lot the other day. Others, speaking for the village, have insisted it has not heard any complaints. Here’s an idea: Maybe they should get up a little earlier and have a look for themselves. For anyone to pretend that there isn’t a problem is just silly.

On the other side, the trustees’ tone of high dudgeon about all this is counterproductive. Village officials must surely be smarting from the village’s defeat in a lawsuit brought by the trustees that overturned an approval by the zoning board, but any presumed enmity only deepened when a town trustee took it upon herself to affix warning tags to beach garbage bins, threatening their removal.

All concerned need to take it down a few notches. Our suggestion is that an ad hoc committee made up of the most dispassionate trustees and village representatives break bread and come up with a short-term solution — before Labor Day, not in October. Loose garbage on the village beaches, no matter if it is there for only a few hours before the staff arrives to pick it up, should never be tolerated.