You really can’t blame a town for trying to better itself. Many years ago, when “The Hamptons” became chic, Shinnecock Hills tried to rename itself Hampton Hills. Nothing came of it. Seventy years ago, the hamlet of Good Ground petitioned to change its name to Hampton Bays and that succeeded. (Good Ground is a great name. Too bad.) Around twenty years ago, the down and out hamlet of Mastic Beach tried to change its name to Hampton Harbor. But nothing came of that.

Lots of places have tried changing their names to better themselves. The Bahamas voted to change the name of an island off the coast of Nassau from Hog Island to Paradise Island. That worked. The town of Port Juarez in Mexico decided to change its name to Cancun. And that worked.

Which brings us to an American of Italian decent named Lawrence G. Chiaravallo. Eight years ago, Mr. Chiaravallo ran for the office of Mayor of the Town of South Belmar, New Jersey and won. South Belmar is eight miles south of Belmar and was named at a time when Belmar was a thriving oceanfront resort. It was a good idea. South Belmar had cachet. At the time.

By 1990, however, Belmar was broke and with it went South Belmar. By 1998, when Larry Chiaravallo became Mayor, there was not much money in the till and few prospects.

So Chiaravallo had an idea. He had taken notice of a small lake at the south end of town called Lake Como, where people went out in rowboats to catch bluebill, yellow perch and crappies. No one knew how it had gotten its name, but Chiaravallo decided to petition to change the name of the town to Lake Como. They had a lake. There was a very famous Lake Como, the height of chic and fashion, in northern Italy, about an hour’s ride from Milan. Lake Como, New Jersey had a certain ring to it. It would be good for business, he said at a village meeting and everybody agreed and so the name change passed. At Chiaravallo’s invitation, officials from Lake Como, Italy came to New Jersey to attend the name change celebration. And in return, Chiaravallo went to the village of Lecco, on Lake Como, Italy, where he gave an address to the municipal council, after much preparation, entirely in Italian. He got a standing ovation. Lake Como, New Jersey was taking its place in the firmament again.

Four years passed and Chiaravallo was re-elected as Mayor of South, er, Lake Como again. But the name change had not done the trick. The Village treasury didn’t have two nickels to rub together.

What Mayor Chiaravallo did about this to try to solve the problem only came to light a few weeks ago, after he was defeated at the polls running for a third term by a challenger named Michael Ryan. It wasn’t anything that Chiaravallo did wrong or felt bad about. It was just that the town felt that it was time for a change and at age 81, Chiaravallo kind of agreed with them. He ran a half-hearted campaign. And he came in second.

In going through Chiaravallo’s desk during the changeover, however, Mayor Ryan came across quite a bit of paperwork involving FEMA, Oprah, Bill Gates and the Kingdom of Kuwait. The new mayor felt a little funny about it and took it to the town council. Chiaravallo had done this without telling anybody. “When you do something like this using official village stationery,” Mayor-elect Ryan said, “the public has a right to know about. And they didn’t. So we’re just going to leave it be.”

Mayor Chiaravallo, as he had begun his second term, had come to the conclusion that he ought to try something else. They were still broke. He had made applications and sent letters to all the appropriate funding agencies for villages — the County, the State, the Feds — and nothing had come of it. They desperately needed a new courthouse, a new police station, fire house, fire truck and judge’s chambers. Who else could he ask?

And so there came into the picture Oprah, FEMA, Bill Gates and Kuwait. Chiarivello sent letters to them all, asking for $15 million, which he said he would use to build new municipal buildings. Oprah, he felt, might send it because she had a good heart. FEMA might send it because they were so screwed up, they wouldn’t even know they sent it. Bill Gates might send it because he was so unbelievably rich he could afford to send it. And the Kingdom of Kuwait — well, they were rich — and hadn’t America helped them out with hundreds of millions of dollars about fifteen years ago to throw Saddam Hussein’s Army out of Kuwait? The residents of Lake Como, er, South Belmar, at the time, were American taxpayers. They had paid some of their taxes to help the Kuwaities. Kuwait owed us. Maybe just a little.

Mayor Chiaravello didn’t hear back from Bill Gates, Oprah or FEMA — they probably lost his letter at FEMA, he reasoned — but on official Kingdom of Kuwait stationery, he got a very enthusiastic reply saying that they might very well be interested, and he should contact their envoy in Washington.

Well, Mayor Chairvello, who, before he had retired to become mayor of South Belmar, had owned a restaurant in that community, might not have taken it a step further than that, but at this point the Mayor considered himself a debonair man of the world and a successful diplomat, having just a few years earlier charmed the officials from Italy.

Armed with the letter, he contacted the Kuwaiti ambassador in Washington, Salem al-Sabah, and arranged a meeting with him. This was to be the first of numerous meetings, most of which were held either in Washington or New York, where Chiaravello met with the al-Sabah, several other officials, and at one of the meetings, gave each of them a Lake Como sweatshirt.

“We talked about our kids and our families. They talked about — if they contributed the money for the new town hall — how they wanted a nice plaque on the outside of the building thanking them for their contribution. I said sure.

“Another time, after the Katrina disaster in New Orleans, they asked if I could help get the word out that they had contributed $500 million for the relief effort. I said I would do everything I could do.”

When Mayor Ryan approached Chiaravello about all this during the changeover, he was told that just two weeks earlier, he had gotten a call from his friend the U. N. Ambassador, saying that the matter was still being considered at the palace back in Kuwait. They’d let him know.

Mayor Ryan, thus may soon have to decide what to do with tens of millions of dollars that come thundering in from a bank in Kuwait.

He is also considering a letter, replying to a letter he had sent earlier, which came from the state department.

“We are unaware of any federal law or policy that would preclude the kind of discussions that Mayor Chiaravello carried on with the government of Kuwait,” a state department spokesperson wrote.

Mayor Ryan is on his own.