Editorials

   Most of our daughter Evvy’s Hanukkah presents were stolen Saturday night. The wrapped gifts had been in the back of her grandparents’ car, in a big box to be taken to New York City on Sunday for a party at an aunt and uncle’s place on Riverside Drive.

   If the East Hampton Town Board had set out to appoint a potentially unproductive committee to chart erosion policy for the future, it certainly succeeded at a meeting on Dec. 4.

    Among the group of 10 people, three run Montauk waterfront hotels, one sells real estate, and another operates an earth-moving business. Two are members of the town board: one a lawyer and property-rights stalwart, the other a builder. Two hail from local environmental groups. You get the picture.

   A story that appeared in this newspaper last week, detailing the frustrations two lawyers have had trying to pry public documents out of East Hampton Town Hall, tells only part of the story. Compliance locally with New York State’s Freedom of Information and Open Meetings Laws is spotty at best, and the town is hardly the only entity with trouble keeping up.

   Deer are changing East Hampton’s natural landscape, causing untold tens of thousands of dollars in property damage and endangering human health — and it is about to get a whole lot worse. Just think for a minute, if you will, about all the does and their young encountered here these days. If just half of those yearlings are female, and they begin to breed while their mothers are still in their reproductive prime, the local population is going to experience exponential growth.

   The Town of East Hampton’s sewage treatment plant, even back when it was operational, is hardly the sole — or even most important — source of groundwater pollution here. That distinction falls on the town’s roughly 20,000 private cesspools or septic systems. The Springs-Fireplace Road plant, however, is highly visible and has become a pawn in an ongoing political battle over property taxes.

   In an unfortunate reversal, the East Hampton Town Zoning Board of Appeals has given permission for Lazy Point property owners to build a sea wall in a zone where none are allowed under town law. What makes this bad decision all the worse is that the same board had denied an essentially identical request earlier this year. Complicating the situation was that the State Department of Environmental Conservation handed out approval for the sea wall in direct, but so far unexplained, violation of an agreement with the town that is supposed to make state agencies follow East Hampton’s rules.

   If you have not yet seen the new Parrish Art Museum from the inside, it should be high on your to-do list. The venerable institution has been reborn in a striking new home in Water Mill designed by a renowned Swiss firm. Long and deceptively low-slung in its farm field-like setting, the museum has been called “an unexpected monument” in New York magazine and “a triumph” in Architectural Record.

   Reports of a die-off elsewhere notwithstanding, this season’s East Hampton scallop harvest has been another for the record books. Not only are these succulent shellfish abundant here, some of the individuals are huge, with shucked meats exceeding an inch and a half in length. This is good news for local harvesters and gourmands, and a significant turnaround from the situation only a few years ago when scallops were so few and far between that the commercial harvest was essentially halted.

   Reading between the lines after taking a long, hard look, the East Hampton Town Budget and Finance Committee, an unpaid group of citizens with tons of business and accounting credibility, has concluded that the work of setting Town Hall to rights remains half done.

   Paul Sapienza, the father of soccer here, whose Springs School teams went undefeated in 13 of the 15 years he was here, used to wonder whatever happened to all the talent he was sending East Hampton High School’s way. One answer was that the kids, while they possessed fine individual skills, had not yet figured out how to play as a team, nor had they, in some cases, learned that being a team player meant you also had to keep your grades up.

   Some of the most enduring images of the days following Hurricane Sandy have been of citizen volunteers helping victims in the Rockaways, along the Jersey Shore, and elsewhere. On the other hand, the picture has been one of failure by the institutions in which many trusted. The Long Island Power Authority, for example, and nearly every level of authority were unprepared for the scale of devastation and disruption of normal, day-to-day life.

   The war on evidence-based policy-making being waged by some in the House of Representatives continued this week, with three members in the running to become chairman of the important Committee on Space, Science, and Technology. Each is deeply skeptical of the widely held belief that human activities are a cause of global warming. Barring an unexpected reversal, either Representative Dana Rohrabacher of California, F. James Sensenbrenner Jr.

   In a crucially important cover story on Friday about the Long Island Power Authority’s performance before and after Hurricane Sandy plowed into the region on Oct. 29, Newsday reported that the utility failed to prepare for a big storm despite having made repeated commitments to the state that it would do just that.

   An increasingly popular idea among the owners of oceanfront properties on Long Island has been to organize into tax districts to fund erosion-protection measures, such as pumping millions of tons of sand onto narrowed beaches. For these property owners, the districts may seem attractive, but they may well delay the day of reckoning along the coasts at a time when a more flexible response to rising sea level is needed — one that would not almost guarantee that United States taxpayers would be asked to pony up to protect coastal vacation properties.

   A debate about how to respond to storm damage like that seen in Hurricane Sandy’s glancing blow on the South Fork is sure to go on for some time. A more immediate concern for East Hampton is whether Town Hall officials follow the rule of law when properties are left at risk by the inevitable natural onslaughts. The record in the last few years is not good.

   Sunday is Veteran’s Day, traditionally a time when organizations that aid those who have served in the United States armed forces are beneficiaries of increased charitable giving. This year, as the region’s attention is centered on communities reeling from Hurricane Sandy’s flood waters and prolonged power outages, there is a fear that veterans groups might see a dip in what they receive.

   Representative Tim Bishop’s victory over Randy Altschuler Tuesday despite the astounding amount of super PAC money — $3.4 million — that fell upon the First Congressional District, gives testimony to the voters’ ability to think for themselves. Everywhere you turned in the last few weeks, you saw or heard the attack ads paid for by a seemingly bottomless pool of dollars — radio, television, the Internet.

   Pity the poor New York voter confronted with Tuesday’s ballot and a top of the ticket that really was not in play here. New York has been a reliably “blue” state, going for the Democratic presidential candidate most of the time since the Great Depression, and in an unbroken streak since 1988.

   For the first time in a long while, State Senator Kenneth P. LaValle, who has been a fixture on the political scene for a generation, has a challenger with a real shot.

   What difference a hundred miles makes. Hurricane Sandy made its landfall on the New Jersey shore, wiping away whole beachside communities. Damage was massive in the New York Bight, on Staten Island, in Manhattan, the Rockaways, Long Beach, and Fire Island, lessening to the east and north, farther from the storm’s highest winds.

    Our sympathies first are for those who lost family or friends. Locally, we mourn Edith Wright, a Montauk woman whose body was found at Georgica Beach.

   The contest between Randy Altschuler, a wealthy St. James businessman, and Representative Tim Bishop went from just plain bad in 2010 to downright disgusting this year. From the Democratic side, accusations were made — then and in recent weeks — that Mr. Altschuler’s career as an outsourcing executive was bad for America. The Republicans countered — backed by millions in unregulated super-PAC money — that a routine constituent service effort by Mr. Bishop’s office was an inappropriate quid pro quo.

   A well-intentioned but irredeemably flawed law recently signed by Suffolk Executive Steve Bellone would require nearly all residents to earn a certificate by taking a safety course and passing an exam in order to operate a power boat. Those who head out on the water without a certificate would be fined $250 for a first offense.

   The Wilkinson administration in East Hampton Town Hall is proud of having set the town’s financial condition to rights on the heels of former Supervisor Bill McGintee’s irregular manipulation of funds, which left the town with a huge internal deficit. But there is a flaw in the proceedings of the town budget office that warrants attention.

    If Len Bernard, the budget office director, is good at one thing, it is fiddling with the books to leave the next, presumably opposing-party, town board majority with the prospect of a tax hike two or four years hence.

    At the doctor’s office the other day filling out a questionnaire, I hesitated when asked anent religious preference if I were an atheist.

    I put a couple of question marks after the word, and was thinking how to elaborate, when Mary scratched out “atheist” and put in “agnostic.”

    Now, today, I find in looking at Newsday that I have some company: “For the first time in its history the United States does not have a Protestant majority. . . . About 20 percent of Americans say they have no religious affiliation.”

    At the urging of residents of Soundview Drive and Captain Kidd’s Path in Montauk, the Town of East Hampton has agreed to a Montauk Inlet dredging project that is expected to provide some relief to the chronic erosion there. But in backing the Army Corps of Engineers’ $26 million plan, the town and affected homeowners may, in the long run, be leaving the waterfront neighborhood in harm’s way.

    With the support of the East Hampton Town Planning Board, the Montauk Highway in Wainscott is fast on its way to being further commercialized. Already, this “gateway” to our beautiful town is a visual hodgepodge of ill-thought buildings — and an increasing four-season traffic nightmare.

    In the last year the board approved a major expansion of the use of the former Plitt Ford property, without taking time for a clear-eyed and honest review of its implications. Now, the board is sounding satisfied with the conversion of the onetime Star Room nightclub to a car wash.

   Like long-suffering residents of many parts of the South Fork, people who live in a section of East Hampton centered on Miller Lanes East and West have experienced mounting frustration with drivers using the streets in their neighborhood to skirt traffic. In this case, cars and trucks wend their way through the narrow lanes as an alternative to the North Main and Cedar Street intersection. Residents have turned to the East Hampton Town Board for a solution, citing safety concerns.

   Aside from the Hamptons International Film Festival, which drew crowds to East Hampton Village last weekend, the South Fork has had plenty of other events in the last few weeks — and their popularity is raising questions about official oversight, or really the lack thereof.