Letters

In his June 10 Letter to the Editor [“Broken Trust”], former Mayor Jesse Warren describes as “troubling” the lack of a public resolution authorizing the hiring of an outside ethics attorney to explain to the Board of Trustees which section of code was or was not violated by Trustee Robin Brown’s actions. He goes on to say that the village labor attorney billed the village in connection with his time on this assignment.

Incredibly, the former mayor is ignoring his own behavior that resulted in substantial village-incurred legal costs for answering harassment charges against him by two female village employees, direct reports to him. My recollection is that these legal fees are in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. No public resolutions during his tenure.

Incredibly, his own refusal to follow appropriate and legally mandated processes for village procurements have required current village employees to double back and correct the processes that he refused to follow. No mention of those facts in his letter.

In his letter, he defines these actions as not “merely “lapses in transparency, but a failure of basic government.”

Warren is playing the Southampton Village government and its citizens for fools. If he really cared about what residents deserve, he should publicly apologize for the human and financial costs he inflicted during his four years in office. The very real human suffering he caused and his complete disregard for village legal expenditures is his legacy.

Patrick O’Connor

Southampton