Editorials

Kathleen Cunningham’s appointment to the East Hampton Town Planning Board last week was notable in one respect that has drawn little notice. By replacing a male board member who moved away, she became the third woman on the seven-member panel. This makes the planning board the exception to the rule in East Hampton Town, where among the boards whose composition is determined by town board vote, men occupy more than three-quarters of the seats. And among all the boards, the vast majority are white and non-Latino.

News last month that the Springs School Board was beginning to work toward an overdue building project came as no surprise. Nor was the estimated cost of expansion of the district’s buildings, as much as $20 million depending on the options selected, surprising.

The East Hampton Village Board should go forward with the revision of its 10-year-old outdoor lighting rules despite an 11th-plus-hour ruffle. Excessive nighttime illumination is both an annoyance and an affront to a community that is proud of its ambience. The aspect of the proposal that some would like eliminated is the regulation of wasteful and unnecessary landscape lighting.

Without all that much fanfare and amid only perfunctory industry push-back the town boards in East Hampton and Southampton have just set in motion the rapid phase-out of thin plastic shopping bags of the sort used at supermarkets and convenience stores. Though some of these bags are made of compounds that can be readily recycled locally, many end up in the trash almost as soon as they are emptied of their contents.

Looking back at the year just ended provides insight into what might be called the to-do list for local officials, as well as an indication of successes worth celebrating.

The end of the year brings a plea from charities and nonprofits for donations, and as people really think about giving, it is worth remembering the organizations that do good but may not always be at the top of the list.

Week in, week out, State Assemblyman Fred W. Thiele Jr.’s office labors on with a gasoline price survey. With the Long Island average price for regular unleaded of $2.88 a gallon now, Mr. Thiele’s most recent report noted that the average price on the South Fork on Friday west of Amagansett was 11 cents higher. In Amagansett and Montauk, however, gas was a mind-boggling $3.39, or 51 cents more. As if to rub salt in our wounds, North Fork stations were well below the regional average, at about $2.69. All of this was, Mr.

A proposed revision to the East Hampton Town Code regarding large vehicles parked on house lots should be set aside to allow officials time to address the real issue: the entrenched and growing commercial use of residentially zoned property.

It was disheartening last week to learn of the Sag Harbor School Board’s decision to end video recordings for local public television broadcast and on-demand viewing of the public comment portion of its meetings.

East Hampton Town will soon undertake an in-depth study of this region’s precarious Atlantic Coast and how it can better manage risk to property and environment protection. But the real question is whether, when the work is done, it will lead to meaningful change.

Of all the possible outcomes for the much-ballyhooed agreement between Sag Harbor Village and the developers of the Watchcase condominiums on mandatory affordable housing, the deal now about to be completed is about as poorly realized as we could imagine.

Had New York’s State Senate passed a police reform bill, one that had been repeatedly approved by the Assembly, the officer most directly responsible for the death of Eric Garner on Staten Island last summer might now be facing criminal charges. Instead, by failing to change the rules, which would have required independent special prosecutors in cases when police kill civilians, the Senate left in place an inadequate and bad system.

East Hampton Town Supervisor Larry Cantwell and the Town Hall legal team are on the right track in looking at how to amend town law to head off further conversions of hotels and motels into hybrids that include nightclubs and accommodations. According to the town, there are some 70 hotels here whose owners might someday seek to expand into the lucrative bar trade, which could create traffic, crowds, noise, litter, and, in some cases, water pollution problems, which have already been the result.

A battle in Sagaponack about what should and should not be allowed on reserved farmland has pitted a developer against village officials. Although on first look it appears a very localized matter, it points to a greater and evolving problem.

Hard to believe that a few short years ago, people around here were wondering whether there would ever be enough scallops again for meaningful commercial harvest. Well, now East Hampton knows those fears were unfounded. A bumper crop has been found in the bays and harbors that is so plentiful that the retail price for a pound of the succulent, sweet meats has been around $20.

We hesitate to trot into the woods, so to speak, on the issue of deer, a subject that generates strong and conflicting emotions. Nevertheless, comment must be made about a pending change in state law that would allow weekend hunting here for deer in January.

East Hampton Town officials have their hands full of pressing matters these days, none more important perhaps than helping to assure places to live for those residents who are the backbone of the community — the work force. In a recent report, an appointed study committee told the town board in no uncertain terms that much more affordable housing is needed here and offered ideas for how it could be achieved.

That the state of protections for the environment is broken is obvious from a recent notice from the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation on the proposed Army Corps of Engineers project to bolster the downtown Montauk oceanfront.

One of the most fascinating aspects of the new approach to regulating noise from aircraft that use East Hampton Airport is that it is not really new. Ken Lipper and Peter Wolf, who took it on their own initiative to propose ways of curbing air traffic, identified a portion of the town’s comprehensive plan in advocating a community-first vision of the airport.

As the East Hampton Town Board tries to figure out what to do in the face of vocal complaints about a proposed registration requirement for rental properties, its members would do well to consider a recent report by the New York State attorney general about one fast-growing aspect: short-term accommodations booked online.

Eric Schneiderman, who was just re-elected, made news last month when he released the results of a study that found nearly three-quarters of all New York City

Related Story: Stepping Back on Rental Registry

On the first full day of fall this year, at the very height of the hurricane season, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo signed a landmark bill on climate change that could have significant impact here. The Community Risk and Resiliency Law, which takes effect in April, is intended to help prepare New York for environmental changes and protect against increasingly severe weather and sea level rise.

Facebook woke up this week to the yawning monstrosity in Wainscott that is the new commercial building on the former Plitt Ford site on Montauk Highway. One commenter quipped that the town was “one step closer to looking like Centereach.” Another person summed it up this way: “It makes me sad every time I drive by. It looks terrible and is so big it blocks the sky.”

Two recent news reports about New York Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo are worth noting, especially in light of his easy trot to re-election on Nov. 6. A detailed account in The New York Times that should be of special interest to those angered by the ongoing electric pole debacle in East Hampton explained how Mr. Cuomo manipulated a report from a commission looking at utility performance during and after Hurricane Sandy.

A plan by the Village of East Hampton and New York State to spend $1.4 million on traffic changes at the intersection of Route 114 and Toilsome Lane is puzzling, but even more puzzling are the reasons behind it. A call to the engineer who came up with the series of roadway “islands” and a roundabout referred our request for an explanation to a village official, who was only able to produce a few words of meaningless boilerplate.

A homeowner sees her house threatened by erosion, and public officials do what they can to help. Not the newest story, but the most recent example of this narrative comes with an interesting twist.

As it turns out, a rapidly shrinking lot on Shore Road at Lazy Point belongs to the East Hampton Town Trustees, while the house on it belongs to someone who leases the site for a modest fee. This arrangement, while unusual elsewhere in town, is the norm at Lazy Point, where an occasional near-million-dollar purchase takes place on what is actually leased public land.

East Hampton officials are reported to be thinking about seeking state authorization to tap the community preservation fund for wastewater projects. This potential funding source should be a last resort.

A yes vote would appear assured on Proposal Two, which would allow the New York State Legislature to forgo printing materials that cost some $325,000 a year by distributing them in electronic form. This averages out to about 9 million pages every year and tons of waste. Lawmakers barely read most bills anyway; getting them into a format that they can access via their tablets or smartphones while on the move might actually improve the legislative process. Saving money and reducing waste makes this worthy of the public’s support. Vote yes.

Suffolk voters will be asked on Tuesday to consider a law intended to tighten financial aspects of the county’s Drinking Water Protection Program, which is funded by a quarter-percent sales tax. It should be approved.

Voters will decide on Tuesday whether Suffolk will continue to have both a county treasurer and a county comptroller. Both are elected positions. This should settle a lengthy dispute between Angie Carpenter, the longtime treasurer, and County Executive Steve Bellone. Mr. Bellone has sought to eliminate the treasurer’s post to streamline government and reduce the cost to taxpayers by as much as $800,000 a year in departmental salaries and related expenses. If approved, the comptroller would assume the duties of the treasurer, which for the most part are paying the bills.

One is predisposed to like State Senator Lee Zeldin, an affable Army veteran who is seeking for the second time to take Representative Tim Bishop’s seat in Congress. However, even though he ran for the First District post in 2008, won a seat in the New York Legislature in 2010, and then beat back a Republican primary challenge this year, Mr. Zeldin has very little to say for himself, which is perplexing. Instead of presenting his own ideas he repeats party positions on school vouchers, weak gun laws, and the eventual privatization of Social Security.