Southampton Village and Suffolk County Civil Service Still Disagree About Acting Chief Role, but Are Working To Resolve the Issue

When it comes to whether Southampton Village Police Captain Suzanne Hurteau is eligible to be serving as acting police chief for the village — a role she has held since September 2021, as the village has been on a lengthy search for a new permanent chief — village officials and the Suffolk County Civil Service Department are not in agreement.

But they are working to resolve the issue, possibly by assigning a new person to officially fill the role of acting chief.

Southampton Village Administrator Charlene Kagel-Betts said earlier this week that the village was scheduled to have a conference call on Wednesday afternoon, March 1, that would include members of the civil service leadership, as well as Southampton Village labor attorney Vince Toomey.

In an email sent on Tuesday morning, Philip Cohen, the director of classification for Suffolk County’s Civil Service Department, wrote, “According to the village, a different employee will now be ‘acting’ as the police chief while they continue to try to fill the position on a permanent basis. They will be submitting a request for authorization of a temporary appointment.”

But Kagel-Betts pushed back on that assertion on Tuesday afternoon, saying that Toomey’s position has been that the Civil Service Department has no jurisdiction over whom the village names as acting chief. “He believes they’re overstepping their authority,” she said.

The village’s point person at the county has been principal personnel analyst Virginia Kuzemchak, who wrote to Kagel-Betts in November informing her that Hurteau was not eligible to serve as acting police chief because she had failed the police chief exam twice.

Kagel-Betts said that while civil service has jurisdiction over a provisional appointment, the appointment of Hurteau as an acting police chief in an interim role is an internal village policy procedure and therefore under the jurisdiction of the village.

Gaining more clarity on where one entity’s authority ends and the other’s begins, and getting on the same page when it comes to Hurteau’s role as acting chief, is something Kagel-Betts hoped would be resolved with the Wednesday conference call. “We’ve been getting conflicting information from civil service through this whole process,” she said. “So we’re going up the chain of command.”

Southampton Village PBA President Michael Horstman seemed to back up that claim, saying on Tuesday that he was told by Kuzemchak in December that Hurteau “can take the test as many times as she wants until she passes.”