Threats and Accusations, Followed by Promises of Reconciliation, in Latest Round of Back-and-Forth Between Southampton Village Trustees and Mayor

Southampton Village Mayor Jesse Warren said in late January that one of the village trustees called him on Friday, January 13, and “demanded” that he resign as mayor.

Warren declined to name which trustee it was, but in a press release on January 24 said that the trustee “indicated he was speaking on behalf of the other trustees, and threatened me.”

Warren added that the trustee stated that if Warren did not resign “immediately,” he would “spread false and damaging information about me, as well as refer baseless criminal charges to the Suffolk County district attorney’s office.”

He added that the call made it clear that the trustee’s intention was to “discredit me publicly” by leaking information related to a complaint made by Village Administrator Charlene Kagel-Betts, who sued the mayor and the village late last month, alleging age and gender discrimination. Warren added that the trustee, in the phone call, “indicated that the trustees would encourage the administrator to sue the village and settle the claim with her using village funds” if he did not resign.

Warren said there was no chance he would resign. He said his response to that alleged threat was simple.

“I will come back every day to try to work together, because we have to do that,” he said. “Clearly, we will have our differences, but we serve the public, and we have to work together.”

Both Bill Manger and Roy Stevenson — the two male trustees on the board — responded to those claims in recent days.

Manger was adamant. “I didn’t call the mayor,” he said. “I have hardly spoken to the mayor in two months. I never told any trustees to tell the mayor on our behalf that he should resign.”

He said he was not aware of any other phone calls of that nature, as the mayor alleged were made by other trustees, and denied that they agreed to nominate one member to speak to Warren on their behalf.

“I can tell you categorically that we didn’t have the four of us get together and nominate one person to call and tell Jesse to resign,” he said. “If [a trustee] did that, he was acting on his own.”

Stevenson was cagier in his response, declining to either confirm or deny whether he had called the mayor, although he did not hesitate to respond when asked if he or any other trustees had encouraged Kagel-Betts to sue the village.

“Absolutely not,” he said in response to that query.

Stevenson said he did not want to comment further on the matter — including whether the phone call occurred and if anyone had threatened the mayor to resign — because he said he did not want to add any fuel to what has become a tense relationship between the trustees and the mayor in recent months.

They have sparred over a wide range of issues during public meetings, and the disagreements have escalated notably since the mayor cast the lone dissenting vote in the hiring of Suffolk County Deputy Commissioner Anthony Carter as the new police chief in December. Carter resigned from the appointment — which was provisional, since he had not yet passed the civil service exam — just a month later, and the four trustees sent out a scathing press release blaming the mayor and his behavior related to the hiring for Carter’s decision to ultimately decline the position.

The acrimony between the mayor and the trustees has escalated since then, although the mayor and the trustees insist that they can and will still work together to do the jobs they were elected to do.

“I don’t want to add to the ‘circus’ act,” Stevenson said, referring to wording in a recent editorial in The Press that took the mayor and trustees to task for their infighting. Stevenson said he took exception to the suggestion that the disagreements between the trustees and mayor would leave important work in the village undone.

“I’ve been working my ass off on issues facing the village and spending a lot of time on that,” he said, adding he would not let any disagreements between him and mayor prevent them from working together to solve issues.

Despite the explosive allegations made in his press release, Warren pledged to do the same.

Late last week, less than two weeks after sending out the press release, he said he’d spoken with Stevenson and Deputy Mayor Gina Arresta, and they agreed to “put the [police chief] decision behind us and work together for the betterment of the community.”