Kamper Named New North Haven Village Clerk

Former Sag Harbor Village Clerk and Administrator Beth Kamper has been lured out of retirement to serve as clerk/treasurer for Village of North Haven. The Village Board approved Mayor Chris Fiore’s appointment unanimously on November 15.

“She will bring a level of talent and experience to this job that we really need,” said Fiore.

The village has been without a permanent clerk/treasurer since the death of Eileen Tuohy in August. Former Village Clerk Ed Deyermond has been filling in on a part-time basis since Tuohy became ill in June.

Kamper, who joined Sag Harbor village government as the secretary to the mayor and a clerk/typist in 2003, was named clerk in 2010 and added the administrator title in 2015. She retired in September 2021.

Kamper will be paid $125,000. As part of the arrangement, she will freeze her retirement benefits while she works, a step that requires the approval of Suffolk County Civil Service.

Fiore also praised Deyermond for “keeping the trains going” until the village could find a permanent replacement for Tuohy. “We would be completely lost without Ed’s contributions,” he said.

At the end of a quiet meeting, James Vos, who has opposed Fiore’s handling of the development of a village park on the former Lovelady Powell property and who charged the mayor with illegal clearing on his property, appeared via Zoom to inquire if anything had been done about the matter.

Vos said he had not received responses to emails he sent to Deyermond and Building Inspector George Butts in early September after charging at an August 24 hearing on the park plans that Fiore had illegally cleared about 4,000 square feet of property bordering a freshwater pond that leads to Genet Creek. Vos said he had uncovered the violation by flying a drone over the mayor’s property and comparing the photographs it took to the clearing map approved by the Village Planning Board for the property.

He asked if the mayor’s property had been inspected by code enforcement officers, if there had been any resolution to the issue, and if the board was comfortable that “there is no appearance of a conflict of interest, given that it is the mayor’s property.”

Fiore, who bristled when Vos made his initial complaint in August, saying that he had violated his privacy by flying a drone over his property, refused to respond to Vos’s questions, saying he was not included in Vos’s emails. Other board members also refused to discuss the issue.

Last week, though, Fiore said he had spoken with Butts about the clearing and been informed that his landscaper had been mowing too close to the wetland and that he would have to allow it to grow back. He said was doing just that and had staked out the border to delineate where the wetland buffer begins.

Butts did not return calls seeking comment.