Sad Fireworks

Rarely does a single meeting — in fact, a single exchange at a single meeting — require as much unpacking as does the April 8 Southampton Village Board meeting, where a vote related to Police Chief Thomas Cummings’s new contract sparked a conflagration and raised several issues worth discussing. So let’s get started.

First, the small stuff, though it’s not unimportant.

Mayor Jesse Warren made an important point that might have gotten lost in the resulting furor: Members of municipal boards really shouldn’t “abstain” from voting. That’s in quotes because a board member really should only abstain under very specific conditions, such as having an identifiable conflict of interest (which should then be identified). In reality, a vote of “abstain” is essentially a “no” vote — it’s a refusal to vote in favor of something. That’s how it should be recorded, and considered, and cast.

Village Board member Joe McLoughlin might have felt unfairly pressured into a premature vote, but his contention that serving as a negotiator and a liaison to the police department precluded him from voting has no merit: He is, after all, a member of the board, first and foremost. The appropriate response would have been to instead vote “no” — which, by insisting on abstaining, he did anyway. But an elected board member should always be ready to vote his or her conscience and leave no doubt.

Then there’s the issue of a Police Benevolent Association card, which the mayor suggested amounted to a bribe if one had been given to Mr. McLoughlin. That seems like a serious stretch — the cards, typically given by union members in exchange for a donation or to favored recipients, are more ethically questionable in the opposite direction: They’re commonly called “get out of jail free” cards, because flashing one during a traffic stop, the story goes, often will get you a warning instead of a ticket.

These PBA cards are an artifact of the historic inequity of policing and, despite being potent fundraising devices, amplify the message that police are willing to treat people differently, based on whether they are in a position to possess a secretive card; just imagine who gets them and who doesn’t.

Especially in the current climate, these cards are poisonous, and every department that offers them should eliminate them. Yesterday.

On to the bigger issues: Mayor Warren’s insistence on shaming his police chief as a negotiating tactic, and his jaw-dropping bullying of a fellow village official. Rarely do you see an elected official behave that way in public, and, in the latter case, almost never toward someone he supported in the last election.

It’s not surprising: The mayor’s approach has always eschewed consensus-building and focused more on a singular vision. You either get on the bandwagon or have it run over you.

Mr. McLoughlin and Chief Cummings both found themselves under its wheels. The mayor’s histrionics about the chief’s compensation, depending on your point of view, are either warranted (that is a lot of money, after all) or not (as with school superintendents, the pay scale for police chiefs is elevated, and Chief Cummings, a veteran of law enforcement, seems in line with those lofty comparables). But Mayor Warren undermines his own case by injecting so much venom into the debate, and insisting on dragging the entire negotiation into the public arena. He’s saying the quiet stuff very loudly, as he tends to.

As for his heated exchange with Mr. McLoughlin, it was, as the target suggested, “grossly inappropriate,” in both content and tone. Have local politics deteriorated to the point where it’s acceptable to openly accuse a fellow board member of accepting a bribe — based on the allegation that he received a PBA card that would get him out of traffic tickets? The fact that Mr. McLoughlin doesn’t drive only underscores how frivolous the accusation is, and how odd it is that the mayor thought it was the time for a public scorched-earth attack on a fellow board member.

The misrepresentation of the “evergreen” clause in the chief’s contract by the mayor and Village Board member Gina Arresta — and then doubling down, even when it was clear that the standard legal clause simply maintains a former contract’s terms during negotiations — continues a troubling trend of this administration twisting facts to fit a political narrative.

Southampton Village is becoming an example of dysfunction at the local level, when the national game of scoring points and winning elections takes precedence over actual governance. If a village board is unable to work out its differences civilly, and explodes like fireworks as it did earlier this month, nobody should applaud the grand finale.