Denise Civiletti

Stuck with the unintended consequences of Facebook's profanity filter algorithm.

The state comptroller says budget documents should show a few years’ worth of budget data. Not in Riverhead, where the budget shows no actual numbers for the prior year or year-to-date.

This year marks the 20th anniversary of the “Great Grumman Giveaway” election campaign of Republicans running for town board in 1999 on the platform that the Democratic majority in office had sold off the town’s most valuable asset for a song.

Americans are armed to the teeth. Hate flows through the veins of some of us. Mental illness affects others. The combination of weapons, hate and depravity is deadly. The resulting lawlessness is terrifying. This is the real “American carnage.”

Allowing all residents to lawfully obtain a driver’s license will make our roads safer, reduce the number of unlicensed and uninsured drivers, reduce insurance premiums, add millions to the state treasury and cut enforcement and court costs.

There are a number of troubling questions that the town board should get answered as quickly as possible about the pending sale to Calverton Aviation and Technology.

According to academic studies of communities that lost their local newspapers, government became more inefficient, civic engagement and voter turnout declined and — get this — the cost of municipal borrowing went up. That’s what happens when the press isn’t around to fulfill its role as government watchdog.

The town needs a more comprehensive code of ethics as well as rules to govern the conduct of public officials presiding over adjudicatory hearings. These are steps that will institutionalize transparency and act as guardrails to protect the public interest.

It's hard to have confidence in the crime reports you compile when the information provided by police is inconsistent and incomplete.

Public notices are a basic building block of government transparency, yet an archaic state law mandates their publication in a medium that fewer and fewer people are using: print newspapers. The result is a big problem for government transparency.