Editorials

Drivers passing the former East Hampton Bowl property on Montauk Highway have been doing double takes in recent days as the steel frame for a hulking new building was erected nearly atop the roadway. According to East Hampton Village, the structure is to be leased to CVS, the pharmacy chain, and meets all zoning requirements. Expect things to look even worse as the frame is sheathed and an approved 24-foot-long illuminated corporate sign goes up.

It was doomed from the start. Anything with the word reformulation, even in 1960, must have been unlikely to inspire confidence, much less beat back the sea. But carry on the Army Corps of Engineers did — and for 53 years. Its effort to build erosion control and hurricane protection structures between Fire Island and Montauk Point was never going to work for a variety of reasons — reasons that should have been understood then, but most certainly are now.

A plan being put forward by the East Hampton Town Board to possibly convert the Child Development Center of the Hamptons, a now-closed charter school, to a senior citizens center is interesting, but might not be as attractive as first thought.

Stuart Vorpahl, who died in January, used to talk a good bit and with great common sense about the rights of East Hampton residents. Among them was the free use of the beaches, as spelled out in the Dongan Patent, a Colonial-era agreement.

Americans are used by now to the too-fast-to-think ecosystem that is Twitter, the online forum in which posts are limited to 140 characters and in which the like-minded essentially echo one another in endless spirals of wit, while antagonists go for sharp rejoinders. Twitter is also a place where politicians sometimes lay bare their odder passing thoughts.

East Hampton Town Highway Superintendent Steve Lynch has quietly been doing a very good job since taking on the job in 2012. But one thing he should be more aggressive about is the cordoning off of public roadsides by private property owners.

For all the attention being paid to the hamlet studies being conducted about commercial centers in East Hampton Town, there is reason for worry that larger issues could be overlooked.

Election Day might seem a way off, but the deadline to register to vote is just about a month away, on Oct. 14. Perhaps the easiest way to get the registration process started is by phone. The New York State Board of Elections has a hotline, 800-FOR-VOTE, which takes requests for applications that are sent by mail.

And there you have it: Scarcely half a year since the downtown Montauk sandbag seawall was installed by the Army Corps of Engineers, a minor late-summer storm called Hermine underscored the recklessness of the effort.

If the striped bass population is in decline and what anglers, commercial harvesters, and regulators should do about it is a question worth asking as the fish head into their fall runs.

Aviation business owners, along with a number of pilots, have long insisted that the true agenda of anti-noise activists was to shut down East Hampton Airport. Less-excitable observers have acknowledged the danger of not responding to community concerns.

The practice when making community preservation fund deals is that the towns do not pay more than their commissioned appraisal indicates the property is worth. This might be sound procedure, but it also appears to hamstring officials in making purchases.

If there were one thing we wished regarding traffic on the South Fork it would be that state highway planners had spent the past week here just driving around. If they did, we are pretty darn sure things would be different quickly.

Only an insider could get terribly excited about recent East Hampton Town Trustee tension with regard to their so-called harbor management committee. Few town residents — some trustees among them — really know anything about the group or what it does. In fact, as far as we know, the committee has scarcely met since about the beginning of 2011.

Stories have proliferated this summer about odd encounters between a few surfing instructors and the public at Montauk’s Ditch Plain. There was a report of a fight involving a flip-flop slap to someone’s face. We have heard about teachers who suggest, sometimes aggressively, that regular surfers move away from their students.

There was alarm among environmental activists when the Long Island Power Authority failed to take a widely anticipated vote in July on a wind farm that, had it gone forward, would have been the largest in the United States. Perplexingly, LIPA explained that the delay was at the request of state officials, who, LIPA said, wanted to align the proposal with forthcoming offshore wind and clean energy plans. To some observers, this sounded more than a little suspicious, even for an industry that has been plagued by regulatory stalling and controversy.

Complain as we might about East Hampton Town’s long-term planning, a recent idea from Town Hall, about further restricting the size of houses, has merit. Early opposition from a few property owners and real estate agents should not derail what would be an important conversation.

Eastbound in bumper-to-bumper traffic on Tuesday just before noon this week, we wondered why East Hampton Town officials seem unwilling or unable to come up with a sensible, long-term approach to gaining a measure of control over summer crowds. Ask a member of the town board directly about this, and you get a polite, if vacant, stare.

Move over — that’s the least we can do for our ambulance and fire volunteers as they rush on the roads to a call — and now it’s the law, backed up by a $275 fine and points on your license.

We hoped that Representative Lee Zeldin, who endorsed Donald Trump for president, would have had a change of heart after hearing his inhumane reaction to the parents of a United States soldier who was killed in Iraq, Khizr and Ghazala Kahn, who appeared at the Democratic National Convention.

After seven appearances before the East Hampton Village Zoning Board of Appeals, Shahab Karmely had had enough. So, too, did Kenneth Kuchin, his neighbor and adversary in a bitter proceeding about a tennis court, who time and again since early this year went to a zoning board meeting for yet another continuation of what should have been an open-and-shut hearing. So-called continuations are the rule rather than the exception in East Hampton Village zoning matters. They should not be.

Too late to be included in an editorial in our print edition last week was the number of undeveloped parcels of land within the boundaries of East Hampton Town. Including vacant commercial and residential land in the two incorporated villages (Sag Harbor and East Hampton), there are approximately 2,580 lots classified as open.

In an attempt to keep the sands cleaner East Hampton Town mandated this year that all beach fires be made within metal containers. In several locations early this summer, the rule appears to have improved conditions a great deal. But compliance is not complete, and in some places, Atlantic Drive on Napeague for one and parts of downtown Montauk’s shoreline and Ditch Plain for others, problems with messy charred wood and blackened sand remain.

For all the attention being paid to water quality on the South Fork, surprisingly little is being done in the way of data collection by East Hampton Town itself. And, in the absence of regular town or county testing, the East Hampton Town Trustees and Concerned Citizens of Montauk, in partnership with the Surfrider Foundation, have had to fill the gap to the best of their abilities.

When East Hampton Village Mayor Paul F. Rickenbach Jr. abruptly demoted Barbara Borsack on July 5 from the position of deputy mayor in favor of a relative newcomer to the board, Village Hall’s normally decorous atmosphere was rattled. Calling the move a cabinet shuffle, the mayor declined to elaborate on his decision.

Elected officials on the East End, as well as many environmental advocates, are barreling ahead with a plan to seek voter approval to draw as much as 20 percent of future community preservation fund revenue for water quality improvement. However, in presenting the initiative as a good thing, they have failed to study its potential impacts in a meaningful way.

Everything looks great on the downtown Montauk ocean beach at the moment, but behind the scenes a massive economic disaster looms and what could be a major political embarrassment is unfolding. Meanwhile, objections are being heard to a United States Army Corps of Engineers plan to expand the stone bulwark at Montauk Point.

In the good news department, we are thinking, although a little belatedly, about an expanded effort by the Food Pantry Farm to get quality produce into the kitchens of East Hampton’s less well-off residents. Until now, membership in one of the area’s community-supported agriculture programs had been more or less limited by cost to those in the upper strata of household income. Now, in a first-year effort, the Food Pantry Farm, which is on Long Lane, has 25 members receiving ample portions of vegetables, flowers, and herbs for a fraction of the cost per week of the better-known and established C.S.A.s.

“Welcome to New York,” two billboards set up overnight by state workers read, along with six others with similar messages. And Montauk went nuts. To understand why the easternmost hamlet was alarmed, you need to know a little of its history and why the idea of a port of entry there is not all that far-fetched.

A number of changes at Amagansett’s Indian Wells Beach have corrected what had seemed a permanently bad situation, and East Hampton Town officials deserve a great deal of credit.