Town Settles Bambrick Discrimination Complaint, Betts Retires

The East Hampton Town Board last week agreed to pay $24,500 to its former head of Code Enforcement, Betsy Bambrick, to settle a discrimination complaint Ms. Bambrick had filed with the New York State Commission on Human Rights.

Ms. Bambrick had claimed that she had been subjected to a hostile work environment under Public Safety Director David Betts, a “whisper campaign of character assassination” and retaliation within Town Hall, age discrimination, and even a physical assault.

The Human Rights Division conducted an investigation and found possible merit in the matter of her age discrimination claims after further review of only the age discrimination issue. Ms. Bambrick retired in 2017 under the cloud of disciplinary charges against one of her former code officers — who said the charges were part of a smear campaign against Ms. Bambrick — and filed the complaint against the town and Mr. Betts, who himself retired from his post as director of public safety last week, the day before the settlement was approved by the Town Board.

Ms. Bambrick, who ran unsuccessfully for a seat on the Town Board last year, said she was satisfied with the settlement this week, but had hoped to have an opportunity to see her charges presented in person to those she felt wronged her.

“When I filed my [complaint], I wasn’t looking for any taxpayer funded jackpot,” she wrote in an email last week. “I really wanted to have Betts take the stand and answer — under oath — questions regarding all of his unethical and illegal behavior. And [the town] was complicit and should have been held accountable.”

From the town’s standpoint, the settlement will end further legal jousting and Supervisor Peter Van Scoyoc said that the decision by the town to settle the matter was purely financial.

“I’m happy this is settled, but it’s always a bit annoying to settle something over a nuisance,” he said following the settlement approval. “We don’t admit having done anything wrong. We believe her claims were meritless. But the settlement was the most cost effective way of resolving things because the cost of continued litigation was going to exceed the cost of this settlement.”

The settlement also required the town to pay $13,000 to cover Ms. Bambrick’s legal bills for adjudicating the complaint.

Mr. Van Scoyoc said that the timing of Mr. Betts’s retirement and the settlement was purely coincidental and had no connection to Ms. Bambrick’s complaints against him. Mr. Betts’s wife, Charlene Kagel, left her position as the town’s chief internal auditor last month to become Southampton Village’s administrator. Mr. Betts is also a former Southampton Village Police Department officer and was the director of public safety for Southampton Town as well. He is the chairman of the Southampton Town Republican Party.

“I let them know a while ago that I was going to be leaving, to be fair to the town as far as their plans,” Mr. Betts, who worked in East Hampton for six years, said this week but declined to comment on the settlement itself. “We made a lot of good things happen and I’m sure they will continue that good work.”

The town’s code enforcement department has been short staffed for most of the last two years, since the departure of Kelley Kampf, and Ms. Bambrick in close succession. The current director of the Code Enforcement department is Donald Kauth, who came out of his own retirement to fill a gap, and is set to go back into retirement at the end of the month but may work part-time until a new head of the department is found, Mr. Van Scoyoc said. The town currently has five full-time code enforcement officers and the 2021 budget adds a sixth. The supervisor said he wasn’t sure how the town was going to proceed in terms of filling Mr. Betts’s position.

Ms. Bambrick, who had worked for the town since 1989, was made the head of the Code Enforcement department in 2011. In 2014, the town created the director of public safety post and hired Mr. Betts, giving him coordinated oversight of the code, building and fire marshal’s departments. In 2016, the town created an assistant director of public safety post and promoted Ms. Kampf, who had been hired as a code enforcement officer only a year earlier, to the post, making her Ms. Bambrick’s immediate supervisor.

Ms. Bambrick claimed that Mr. Betts made inappropriate sexist comments to her, was dismissive of her leadership role and spoke ill of her to colleagues and, she suspected, to Southampton Town officials with whom she was interviewing for a post in that town. She also claimed that Ms. Kampf injured her by grabbing her arm forcefully.

In 2016, Mr. Betts recommended disciplinary charges be filed against one of the town’s code officers, Arthur Bloom, stemming from an incident in which Mr. Bloom allegedly threw out the official copy of a written warning that he had issued to a contractor after deciding the warning had been issued in error. After a months-long review and hearings, an independent hearing officer, attorney Eileen Powers, reported to the town that Mr. Bloom’s account of the incident was erratic and wholly unbelievable and that Ms. Bambrick’s testimony had been evasive. Mr. Bloom was fired and Ms. Bambrick retired shortly after the disciplinary report was released.

Ms. Bambrick, who now works for the St. Michael’s senior housing complex in Amagansett, said she is happy to see the unpleasant conclusion to her three decades at the town in the rear-view.

“I am doing fulfilling work where I am treated with respect and appreciated,” she said.