Editorials

Why should some residents hate summer here? We think this is a shame, and that it is the responsibility of the East Hampton Town Board and political challengers to consider a recalibration.

Albany could make New York’s roads safer with one simple measure: reinstating rules that allowed people who are not in the United States legally to apply for driver’s licenses.

We can understand how the people and groups asking to limit hunting on East Hampton Town’s lands to just one day per weekend feel. But that does not mean we agree.

The unfortunate reappearance of measles in this country should send a clear message that science works. It also has a bearing on several other controveries that actually should be nonissues — climate science, for one.

A bill signed by Governor Cuomo sends an important message that New York wants no part of the White House’s push to reopen offshore federal waters to oil drilling.

This is hogwash, but that nearly everyone now in federal government — elected, unelected, and seeking the Democratic nomination to run for president — has so far gone along with it is the genuine crisis.

East Hampton Town officials should tell Tesla to take a hike. The company recently renewed a pitch to install a charging station for its cars on public property in Montauk.

In the absence of a meaningful top-of-the-ticket campaign for East Hampton Town Board this year, the time is right for voters to focus their attention on how the town trustees are chosen.

About every expert on coastal erosion and sea level rise will tell you that the only solution for at-risk areas is to retreat. But right now, the only significant retreat appears to be by the East Hampton Town Board, which collapsed notably amid ill-informed pressure from some Montauk residents and resort owners who objected to a part of a long-range planning study.

In the Notre Dame Cathedral fire, there is a reminder of how buildings can hold a community together. Churches, old houses, beloved places provide a feeling of permanence in an impermanent world. They give us a sense of who we are, simply because they are an icon we can call our own. For France and for much of the world, as one man on a Paris street told The New York Times this week, the Notre Dame tragedy was like losing a member of the family.

The East Hampton Town Trustees appear close to drastically changing the way they manage the rented sites of the old fishing cottages at Lazy Point.

The Long Island Rail Road’s South Fork shuttle train service was launched with high hopes in March. The experiment was years in the coming. Public-transportation advocates and elected officials had long considered trains to be the most likely solution to the hellish trials of the morning and evening commute along our east-west highways.

With the passage of its 2019 budget bill, New York State will become the second in the nation to prohibit so-called single-use shopping bags.

There will never be room enough in East Hampton for all the tradespeople who stream in every morning from the west.

Suffolk’s 10 towns are right to ask for a portion of the proposed internet sales tax now being considered in Albany.

By Hamptons standards, it is a good deal. Bookings opened this week for new luxury tent accommodations at Cedar Point County Park in East Hampton, starting at $300 a night, and, from where we sit, there is every reason to think the venture will be successful.

According to The Los Angeles Times, in the two-plus years that recreational marijuana use was made broadly legal, an expected tax windfall has not materialized.

East Hampton Town, having made its bed as far as overdevelopment of Montauk is concerned, will now have to sleep in it.

The State of New York is barreling fast toward the anticipated legalization of the sale and possession of marijuana as a way to increase tax receipts and reduce the impact of arrests for possession and sale, which fall disproportionately on people of color and the poor.

What to do about weekend hunting?

Well, well. If nothing else, the 2019 campaign season will be lively. Thank the East Hampton Town Republican Committee for stirring things up with an announcement this week of its candidates for town board, supervisor, and trustees.

A decision last month by the East Hampton Town Board to toughen the rules about outdoor lighting, in particular to end the use of strings of bulbs to create outdoor gathering spaces at restaurants and nightclubs, is a good one. But whether it will be enforced is another question.

East Hampton is far from alone in dealing with the emerging health threat from a class of industrial chemicals used in firefighting and many other projects.

More people are growing oysters these days, and that’s a good thing.

Creating affordable housing and providing financial help for first-time homebuyers have been among the major goals of leaders on the East End for decades.

There are plenty of practical reasons for issuing driver’s licenses to noncitizens, but one of the most important is mostly overlooked: vision tests.

What’s up with Lee Zeldin? Once a decent young politician and Army vet making his way up through the Republican ranks, he has become an irresponsible pot-shooter for the right.

A recent fuss over the membership of the Amagansett Citizens Advisory Committee once again brings up the question of precisely what is the purpose of these groups.

Like Gov. Ralph Northam’s racial insensitivity in Virginia, an elected official in upstate New York was recently caught using slurs. Mark McGrath resigned from the Troy City Council on Monday, after a three-year-old voice-mail message that contained two highly offensive anti-black terms was reported in The Albany Times-Union.

It has long bothered those fascinated by East Hampton’s past that the small workshops of the Dominy family craftsmen, as well as nearly all of their contents, were no longer easily accessible.