Editorials

In many ways, the Village of Sag Harbor is worth emulating. It has retained much of its character through a fortuitous real estate market and strict rules about historic buildings. Regulations about what can be put where might vex property owners, but the result has been an enduring charm — one that property owners have been willing to pay dearly for. That message apparently did not penetrate the minds of the village’s fire wardens, a group who oversee the Fire Department, who voted in May to install a garish illuminated sign in front of the firehouse, on Brick Kiln Road.

Estonia’s Pakri Lighthouse showed up in a recent re-election campaign video for Representative Lee Zeldin as an inadvertent stand-in for the famous national landmark at Montauk Point. Democrats, including Mr. Zeldin’s opponent, Perry Gershon, quickly made fun of the campaign gaffe. Resistance Facebook and Twitter lit up with derisive posts.

The remnants of Hurricane Florence passed over East Hampton on Tuesday. Wind from the southwest, warm and heavy on the skin, whipped the flag above the village green. Leaves and tree limbs heaved and waved. Then came the rain, sudden and tropical, rivers running down the street to pool in low spots.

It should not have come as a surprise this week, and yet it did, when Christine Blasey Ford identified herself publicly as the person making a charge of attempted rape against Brett Kavanaugh, the Supreme Court nominee.

One, two, three: The Village of East Hampton took on paper waste, plastic straws, and smoking in public in a single morning. The proposed measures are ambitious and worthy of support, even if enforcement turns out to be a bit tricky.

A public vote on the East Hampton Library budget, which comes up once a year, should be supported on Saturday. Here’s why:

You can’t directly blame the big Montauk party spots for trouble like a recent car crash turned drug bust or a slashing at the 7-Eleven. However, these dramatic incidents, coming within hours of one another, do have, as they say, a way of focusing the mind. East Hampton Town officials are contemplating an approach to heading off new problems.

David Gruber, who is seeking the Democratic Party ballot line for East Hampton Town Board in a Thursday primary, spread a false claim then failed to apologize.

Democratic voters and members of minor parties across New York State will have a chance to make choices next Thursday in primaries for offices from town hall to the governor’s mansion. In East Hampton, the main event — between Councilman David Lys and David Gruber — is for the right to appear on the Democratic Party line in November’s general election.

A week after news broke publically about a confrontation that left East Hampton Village’s female lifeguards feeling harassed and subject to a hostile workplace, the village board remains mostly silent.

Fresh, line-caught tuna, a late-summer delight, has been coming across the Montauk docks lately. Looking through the photos on our Instagram feed lately, we have been thrilled by images from the fish markets of fat yellowfin and bigeyes lined up on ice or cut into sushi-grade slabs on stainless-steel tables.

Glenn Hall, the chairman of the East Hampton Town Disabilities Advisory Board, made a powerful point recently in reacting to a proposal from the developer of a Montauk commercial building to place a handicapped access entrance at the rear of the structure instead of the front.

From the start, East Hampton Village officials have mishandled a growing scandal stemming from women lifeguards’ official bathing suits. The unresolved matter has left several of the village’s seasonal employees feeling bullied and harassed, and left the impression that high-level village officials tried to keep the whole thing under a blanket.

A decrepit building on Montauk Highway in Wainscott that once thumped to the beat of the Star Room nightclub was reduced to rubble and carted away earlier this month. Last week, several unused structures on the Sag Harbor waterfront were removed and the site graded smooth. Both are to become parks.

A number of owners of Montauk resort properties have been speaking out recently for the right to tax themselves to pay for placing protective sand on the downtown beach. Their eagerness is understandable; we are entering the height of hurricane season with winter northeasters breathing down our necks not that far behind.

If you have not already done so, make a point of swinging by the East Hampton Village Green, where August is in full bloom. There, above a sinuous man-made dreen, recently planted pink and white marshmallow flowers wink at passers-by.

With the pending $2.1-million purchase of a parcel of land on Three Mile Harbor, East Hampton Town is moving ahead to consolidate its shellfish hatcheries in a single location. Right now, the Montauk hatchery occupies a site on Fort Pond Bay, where water conditions are less than ideal for breeding clams, oysters, and scallops.

Dialing 911 for police, a fire, or an ambulance is easy to do, but it may not always be the right call when the situation is less than urgent.

Locals here, as in similar places like Cape Cod or Nantucket, often view visitors “from away” with dread or derision, but this year we have been grateful that several South Fork cultural institutions have highlighted the work of artists from very far away indeed.

There are some places that people just shouldn’t go. This notion came to mind as we read about one man’s quest to assert public access on Cartwright Island, a low sliver of sand at the southern extremis of Gardiner’s Island.

A striking image of Montauk in the year 2100 made the online rounds this week. Produced by Scott Bluedorn, an artist and thinker, it showed the easternmost portion of the South Fork as it might appear after the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s worst-case projections for climate change-driven sea level rise. The image is stark and drew a lot of attention.

Southampton Supervisor Jay Schneiderman had seen enough. According to a press release, he was fed up with the proliferation of signs illegally posted along roads in Bridgehampton and Water Mill and ordered town workers to remove them.

East Hampton Town officials, having pulled a bait-and-switch on unsuspecting buyers of nonresident beach parking permits at Ditch Plain in Montauk now need to do the right thing and waive at least the first offense of anyone ticketed for using the main lot.

While not traditionally thought of as a flash point between conservationists and conservatives over threatened and endangered plants and animals, the East End has its own deep connections to the 1973 act of Congress that President Trump and his allies now seek to undermine.

In the sterile, dry gulch of corporate retail that has become the East Hampton Village business district, the East Hampton Chamber of Commerce’s ongoing push for a once-a-week farmers and makers market should be a priority, if for only one reason: It would provide a valuable outlet for local residents, whether in agriculture, handcrafts, or wellness products, to sell to their friends and neighbors while bettering their bottom lines.

On a recent evening drive on Scuttlehole Road in Bridgehampton, we noticed a woman in an imported sedan drop what appeared to be a cigarette butt out of her car window.

Word was out. More than 100 boats rocked on the water east and north of Montauk Point on Saturday morning, most, as best we could tell, seeking the trophy-size striped bass that suddenly appeared here in the preceding days.

On the surface, the $1.3 million state environmental grant for the Springs School to install an up-to-date septic system appears to be an important step toward improving the quality of nearby Accabonac Harbor. The school has long struggled with an old-fashioned and partially failed wastewater system. Recently, it has had to do costly pumping as often as every 10 days during the school year. There is no argument against updating the wastewater system. What is not entirely clear is whether newer technology will work at a school-size scale and if it will lead demonstrably to a cleaner harbor.

These are the times that try drivers’ souls. July on the South Fork brings far too many vehicles onto roads not configured to handle so much traffic, and ordinary, minor transgressions can end in white-knuckle rage — or at least unreasonable delays.

The recent attack at The Capital Gazette in Annapolis, Md., in which a man who had been nursing a grudge against the newspaper shot and killed two reporters, an editor, an editorial writer, and a young sales assistant, struck close to home in more ways than one. Several years ago, on a freezing winter’s night, somebody broke most of The Star’s front windows.