Editorials

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.

Try as one might, it is almost impossible to find any substantial, factual basis in the recent statements withdrawing support for the Orsted-Deepwater Wind South Fork Wind Farm by State Assemblyman Fred W. Thiele Jr.

That the Wainscott School District could absorb more students without compromising educational quality should be obvious, but, sadly, it is not to a handful of the hamlet’s residents who are stirring up opposition to modest affordable housing for a site on Route 114.

Art matters. Educators say over and over again that such creative activities are not simply a luxury for the most well-off districts, they are an essential building block of many of the qualities needed in adulthood for success and satisfaction.

Unless you are a person who thinks the Apollo Moon landings were faked, perhaps, or that the Earth is flat, it is impossible to argue with NASA’s observations of sea level rise. Satellites tracking the oceans’ surface since 1993 have measured a steady increase, now nearly three and a half inches since Bill Clinton’s first year as president.

Explanations vary about the cause of a storm of dust that flowed on and off in the past week into downtown Amagansett. The known source was a large farm field just beyond the north side of the municipal parking lot. According to the most common account, late rains messed up this year’s harvest on the field. Then the farmer who rents it was delayed in getting a cover crop down and geese gobbled up the seedlings.

New York State’s junior senator, Kirsten Gillibrand, made public her bid for the Democratic presidential nomination this week in an appearance on “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert.” This made national news, but in East Hampton, the announcement seemed to draw little notice.

Watching the confirmation hearing this week for William Barr as attorney general, we were struck that for the most part the senators stuck to their four-minute limits, often making note of the remaining seconds. This is in particular contrast to regularly held hearings in East Hampton Town Hall, where the three-minute countdown clock for individual speakers is mostly ignored. We have an idea that might help.

“This is the way the world ends, not with a bang but a whimper,” T.S. Eliot said, and in a sense, his doomsday poem predicted the incremental changes we now see. It is as simple as storm tides’ exceeding their usual bounds and as complex as doing something to end it.

If President Trump managed one thing with his televised pitch on Tuesday — ostensibly for his signature border wall — he pushed the Russian election-interference investigation out of the top news for a couple of days.

Montauk residents rose up at Town Hall this week, alarmed that new, long-term planning for the hamlet was about to become law. More than a few of those who spoke complained they had not been told anything about the multiyear project now nearing completion. Ah, the information age.

East Hampton Town has begun soliciting proposals from organizations that seek to occupy the former Child Development Center of the Hamptons charter school off Stephen Hand’s Path in East Hampton, but at the outset, no consensus on how the building should be used has emerged.

One of the good things here in 2018 could just as easily have turned out to be a tangled mess. After chemicals known to be harmful to health and the environment were found in groundwater in Wainscott, East Hampton Town, county officials, and the Suffolk Water Authority moved with remarkable speed to protect residents.

Right in time for New Year’s Eve, Utah police took zero tolerance for drunken driving to a new low — .05 percent blood-alcohol level. The message is clear: The state’s legislature and governor believe that drinking and driving in any amount is a threat to public safety. Utah is backed in this by the National Transportation Safety Board, which also has advocated a 0.05 percent impairment threshold.

There is a sharp-edged irony about affordable work-force housing on the South Fork: The sector of the local economy most responsible for rent escalation — and the one with the most power to do something to counteract it — has done little or nothing to ease the situation.

Having demonstrated by his surprise victory that the electorate as a whole is not able to ensure that a president is up to the task, it now is Congress’s job to rein in presidential power, if it can.

East Hampton Village is about to jump on the water-quality train in a big way. After a discussion early this month, it was clear that the village board’s wait-and-see position on wastewater had gone on long enough and that it was ready to mandate low-nitrogen septic systems.

Six high-priority areas have been identified in Montauk for immediate water quality correction. Early this month, the East Hampton Town Board heard from its water quality advisory committee about projects to limit pollution in Lake Montauk and along the downtown ocean shore. These are welcome, important efforts.

It is little surprise that the Trump administration is giving the go-ahead to renewed fossil fuel exploration in the Atlantic. What is hard to imagine is the potential environmental cost from both drilling and the seismic tests to determine where to drill.

What explains the criminal forgeries alleged last week against the former East Hampton Town Republican chairman and a leader of the local Independence Party is hard to pin down, but amid an atmosphere of overheated partisanship the matter is, sadly, not that much of a surprise.

Word that whales had been spotted off Amagansett and East Hampton earlier this week sent those who felt the magic to the beach. At Indian Wells shortly after dawn on Tuesday, cloudlike spouts could just be seen near the horizon.

This evening at about 6:30, the East Hampton Town Board will hold a hearing on a more than two-year effort to write a new master plan for Montauk, the culmination of a hamlet study by consultants whose goal was to create more attractive, walk-able, and economically vibrant commercial centers.

With the fast approach of a planning deadline for Suffolk County’s mosquito control effort for 2019, there is a renewed call for a stricter limit, if not a total ban, on a chemical used to control the stinging menace’s populations.

The report was at the top of news websites and on front pages everywhere by Saturday morning. But if you were anything like us, with our copy of The Times languishing in the driveway, you might have missed it. Burying bad news is nothing new; the government joke from Albany to Sacramento is to announce something on Friday afternoon before a long weekend if you want to be sure to get it ignored.

Reaction to the online giant Amazon’s announcement last week that it would develop one of two new East Coast headquarters in Long Island City has largely been along two lines of thought: What would it do to Queens, and did the city and state give away too much in tax breaks to reel in the company. A lot has been said about New York City’s deep pool of professional and tech talent, as well as the cultural attractions that might keep Amazon’s staff happy.

Despite the ease of online shopping, there is still reason to buy locally, especially during the December holidays, when seeing, feeling, and, in some cases, tasting or smelling something nice for a friend or loved one can’t be topped. To fill your list, we want to suggest some of the East End’s many bazaars and gift fairs organized by charities and churches.

At some point in the last few years the traffic on South Fork roads passed a critical point: Nightmare drives are no longer just in summer; they can occur almost any time of year.

Public conversations about climate change tend to focus on extremes. There are those who understand the science and those for whom no amount of evidence will be enough. There is also an insidious middle ground.

In what has been a quiet tradition for many years, the East Hampton Presbyterian Church has put on a free Thanksgiving dinner for anyone who wants to attend. This volunteer effort is but one of the good things that happen year round and give us a strong sense of pride in our community.