North Haven Slugfest Will Wind Up In Vote June 21

With a population of less than 900, an area of 2.7 square miles and no commercial center, the Village of North Haven’s elections for decades have been a yawn, with no opposing candidate, no campaign events, no speeches, no debates, and no media buys.

This time, in the first contested race for mayor in three decades, two of the three candidates are treating voters to a slugfest.

Terie Diat, 61, and Chris Fiore, 75, both retired corporate executives and incumbent trustees, have been exchanging barbs via letters to the editor, door-to-door campaigning, email blasts, and a heavy dose of print and radio ads.

Meanwhile, a third candidate — Jack Reiser, 64, a landscaper who served as mayor for three terms from 1988 to 1994 — has offered to be the low-key alternative, without a single Reiser roadside sign among the dozens scattered around the village for Fiore and Diat.

Fiore also has hung his banner on one of his prized antique vehicles — either a VW microbus, a yellow school bus or a 1950s police cruiser — left parked on the grass at corner of his property at the intersection of Ferry Road and Sunset Beach Road.

North Haven’s 880 registered voters will decide whose strategy worked this Tuesday, June 21, when balloting will take place from noon to 9 p.m. in Village Hall on Ferry Road.

Voters will also fill two trustee seats Tuesday. Veteran Trustee Dianne Skilbred, the deputy mayor, is running for reelection as Fiore’s running mate on the same North Haven Party line that is Mayor Jeff Sander’s brand. Trustee Claas Abraham also is seeking reelection, running on his own Hog Neck Party line.

The mayoral fisticuffs started soon after Sander — now 80, and who was elected to four two-year terns without opposition — announced in late March at a Village Board meeting that he would not seek reelection. The next day, Diat announced in an email with the subject line “Exciting News!” that she was a candidate to succeed him.

“I have worked hard, have learned much under Mayor Sander’s tutelage, and already have achieved a long list of accomplishments … With my strong professional career experience and leadership background” — she was a top finance executive at Colgate-Palmolive — “I am perfectly suited and prepared to serve as mayor of North Haven.”

A few days later, Fiore — also a retired corporate executive with a retail career that included serving as president of the accessories retailer Henri Bendel — sent out his own email, blasting Diat for what he considered her unseemly rush. “I was hoping Jeff would be allowed some time to get the word out after 10 years of selfless service as mayor,” he wrote, “but, unfortunately, there was an email within hours of his announcement to the board regarding his possible replacement.”

He went on, “It’s the personal qualities of an individual that make one an attractive candidate. Do you trust this person? … Does he realize North Haven is a village and not a corporation?”

Sander declined to endorse either one, saying they both were excellent candidates.

In the style of past local candidates for office, Reiser, whose late wife, Linda, was the longtime chair of the village’s Planning Board, made no formal announcement when he decided to run, something he has said his wife encouraged him to do before she died in late 2021. A 38-year veteran of the Sag Harbor Fire Department whose late father also served as mayor, Reiser let word spread on its own.

Diat opened a new front in her battle with Fiore this spring when she filed a complaint with the State Board of Elections that Fiore and his running mate had failed to file the first of three campaign finance reports required of all candidates by the May 20 deadline.

She also contacted local radio station WLNG, where Fiore works two nights a week as an oldies disc jockey, to request equal air time, her right under FCC rules. The station gave her, and, eventually, Reiser, 120 one-minute spots and pulled Fiore from the air until after the election.

Fiore told his supporters in an email that Diat had “compelled WLNG to take me off the air” even though he “never once spoke about the mayor’s race on the air — just talked about Bob Dylan and Tom Petty.”

Citing her complaint about his late financial report, which he filed on May 27, he added, “We clearly need to ‘kick ticks out of North Haven’” — a reference to one of Diat’s projects as a trustee — “but we shouldn’t kick out kindness and decency as well. I am a very competent guy who feels he is the most qualified to lead this village in a skillful, smart, unbiased way. There is nothing petty about my campaign. Let’s keep our village a peaceful place and stay on the high road.”

Diat commented in an interview, “I think it’s important that every candidate running for public office … adhere to the rules” and added, “There needs to be a level playing field.”

Diat has been known for her efforts to improve communication among residents and the village, including writing a monthly newsletter; improving the village website; drafting a new shoreline management code urged by Sander that allows rock revetments on North Haven’s high bluffs, which the board unanimously supported; her work tweaking the rental code; and her effort — originally in alliance with Fiore — to bring a cell tower to the village, which collapsed when neighbors angrily opposed the location.

Fiore took the lead on seeing the Lovelady Powell property preserved by the Southampton Town Community Preservation Fund and coming up with a concept plan for how the property might be developed as a passive park. He also led the push to ban gas-powered leaf blowers, settling with the rest of the board on a seasonal ban from May through October that took effect this year.

Reiser opposes the ban as it stands, saying it should cover only commercial landscapers and not residents. He has said the village was “dead wrong” when it allowed revetments along the high bluffs, and noted in an interview that his wife — whose Planning Board won a lawsuit seeking to overturn a decision to deny a revetment there — thought Sander’s push to allow them was a mistake.

The Diat-Fiore clash, and Reiser’s alternative style, can be seen in a livestreamed debate that was sponsored by this newspaper on June 7. It can be viewed by clicking the “Sag Harbor Express” link near the top of the 27east.com home page.

Details about Fiore and Diat can be found at their websites, fioreformayor.com and teriediatformayor.com. Reiser does not have a website.