Editorials

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.

David Lys’s sweep of East Hampton Town’s 19 election districts in the unofficial results in Tuesday’s vote can be attributed to several factors. Top among them are his strong friendships and how active he has been both inside and outside of town government.

You know the feeling. You are walking along Main Street or Newtown Lane in East Hampton Village on a hot summer day and a cold blast of air slaps you in the face as you pass a boutique’s open door. Do you shiver and keep moving or are you drawn inside by the icy come-on?

If candidates can be judged by the company they keep, David Lys will be difficult to beat. Aside from winning a lopsided victory over David Gruber in a September primary, he has been vouched for by, among others, Perry B. Duryea III, former town Republican chairman; Alex Walter, a former zoning board chairman who was Supervisor Larry Cantwell’s assistant; Zachary Cohen, a former town supervisor candidate; Tim Taylor, the head of Citizens for Access Rights, and nearly the entire town Democratic power structure and many Republicans alike.

At this point there is little to add to the reasons why Perry Gershon is the better choice for the East End in Congress than Lee Zeldin — but Mr. Gershon is better for the country as well.

One of the most disheartening aspects of the 2018 election cycle has been a coordinated, deliberate effort to take the vote away from hundreds of thousands of United States citizens.

The first chilly days of October might seem an odd time to remind readers about a program offered by the region’s electric utility to reduce demand on the hottest days of summer, but stick with us. PSEG Long Island has been giving away programmable thermostats to residential customers with central air-conditioning through its South Fork Peak Savers incentive.

For more than 40 years, power plants were the largest source of greenhouse gases in the United States. But since the early 2000s, generation of electricity has become less carbon-intensive with the growth of wind and solar and a switch to natural gas. Despite this switch in the sources of emission, the situation is not good.

A powerful sense of community was evident on Sunday when more than 100 people gathered in the hope of saving the Springs Historical Society from dissolution. As with many organizations run by volunteers, maintaining forward motion as the heavy-lifters age, move away, or become interested in other things can be an existential challenge.

For whatever reason — maybe just dumb luck — the East Hampton Fire Department has had a relatively quiet couple of years, that is, up to the past few weeks. Most notable was the late September blaze at Ronald Perelman’s Creeks estate on Georgica Pond.

Montaukers and those who love the easternmost point in New York State are highly skeptical about an idea to allow camping and related concessions in Camp Hero. They are right to be ringing the alarm. Camping should not be permitted there.

A New York State grant of $9.7 million for water mains in Wainscott is good news indeed for more than 500 households. After potentially harmful chemicals were found in drinking water in the area, town and state officials, as well as the Suffolk County Water Authority, acted quickly. About eight and a half miles of underground pipe is almost half completed.

The Hamptons International Film Festival opens today with late-afternoon and evening movies running at the East Hampton Regal Cinema and Guild Hall.

A movie theater question of another sort has been in the news lately. After the Sag Harbor Cinema was destroyed in a fire almost two years ago, there were doubts that films would ever be shown there again.