The credential behind the inspection was never verified.

A week before the story ran in The East Hampton Star, Richard Normoyle, East Hampton Town’s chief building inspector, told the town board that the Building Department was finally making progress on an application backlog that had plagued it for more than a year. That was the good news.

Then people in the building trades started checking a list.

New York’s Department of State publishes the roster of active code-official certifications. Normoyle’s name wasn’t on the version dated July 6, 2026. Neither was Dawn Green, the town’s senior building inspector. Four other Building Department employees, all certified within the previous twelve months, were on it.

State law is not ambiguous about why this matters. Certification is the first item under the minimum training requirements for building safety inspectors in Title 19 of the New York Codes, Rules and Regulations. Someone with an inactive certification cannot perform inspections, and may be penalized if they do. The basic training program runs 60 hours across more than 30 topics, and a newly appointed inspector has six months from the date of appointment to finish it. Normoyle has worked for the town since September 29, 2025.

At an Amagansett Citizens Advisory Committee meeting, the committee’s chairwoman, Rona Klopman, said out loud what the absence implied: that his inspections since he was hired were “null and void.” The Star noted the accusation could not be verified.

It could not be verified because the system of record won’t say. The Department of State’s Division of Building Standards and Codes failed to respond to multiple requests over a week to confirm his status. And the list itself carries a disclaimer that ought to stop anyone who has ever leaned on it: “Data are not audited for accuracy prior to publication. They do not represent definitive determinations as to whether a person has fulfilled training requirements.”

Normoyle’s own account is plausible and specific. He says his national certifications were submitted to the state in 2021 in lieu of in-service training, as the regulations allow, and that he has completed his annual 24 hours of in-service training since. He was first certified in New York State Code in 1997 and last updated that certification in 2007, shortly before thirteen years in private industry. His résumé, obtained through a records request, lists many International Code Council certifications and makes no mention of the New York State one. Councilwoman Cate Rogers said he has 35 years of qualifications and all certifications. Councilman Tom Flight said that if the town makes the public adhere to standards, the town should adhere to them as well.

Every one of those statements may be true. None of them is a verification. The town hired a plans examiner with a thirty-year career, and for ten months nobody asked the one authority that could settle the question whether he was authorized to do the work. When somebody finally asked, the authority went quiet, and its published answer came with a warning label on it.

You have this same arrangement, and it costs nothing to keep, which is why you keep it. The certificate of insurance a subcontractor emailed you in 2021, filed and never re-pulled from the carrier. The electrician’s license number you copied into a job folder and never entered into the state’s lookup. The food-handler cards in the binder that expired in a month nobody tracked. The alarm company’s monitoring credential. The freight broker’s operating authority. The bookkeeper who said she was certified, in an interview, five years ago.

In each case you’re holding a document rather than a confirmation, and the difference only shows up backward. A credential that turns out to be invalid doesn’t just stop tomorrow’s work. It reaches back over every inspection, every job, every claim, and every filing it was supposed to stand behind since the day you started trusting it.

Checking is cheap and takes about ten minutes: the licensing board’s own database, the carrier’s own confirmation, the certifying body’s own roster. Doing that once a year on the credentials that carry real weight is the whole practice. Note also what East Hampton found when it looked, that the public list was wrong about a second inspector too, and the state agreed to fix her entry. A registry that disclaims its own accuracy is a starting point for a question, not an answer to one.

So: which of the licenses, certifications, and insurance attestations your operation depends on have you actually verified against a reliable source, rather than trusted because they were on a list?

← More observations