HOBOKEN – This week’s release of more than 500 emails from the lawsuit of former Housing Authority Executive Director Carmelo Garcia against Mayor Dawn Zimmer, her husband Stan Grossbard, and former and current members of the authority, may indicate that Grossbard has been the ghost in the local political machine that many people have suspected.
The email exchanges start in October 2012 and extend into July 2013. Many of them deal with the removal of Garcia and HHA Attorney Charles Daglian, and appear to include public officials and, in at least one case, political people without government positions.
The extensive exchanges involve a number of areas. But they appear to show a clear pattern of political and governmental advice from Grossbard, who is not a government official, to various people, in particular then-HHA Board Chairman Jake Stuiver.
Most important are a number of emails issued by Grossbard to Stuiver, HHA board member Greg Lincoln, and HHA Commissioner and City Councilman Dave Mello, laying out strategies for Garcia’s removal as executive director of the HHA. Mayor Zimmer was copied in a number of emails to her personal email account.
In one email, Grossbard even proposes a possible resolution for the board to pass to enact Garcia’s removal.
One Grossbard email dated Feb. 26, 2013 talks about three possible options to resolve the conflict between the board and executive director and why removal of Garcia is the best. Grossbard even suggests offering Garcia terms of reemployment that he was not likely accept.
A follow-up email on March 7 talks about getting around the city’s labor attorney and hiring an attorney who “will not spill the beans” in regard to some of these details and suggest the board simply “terminate his [Garcia’s] contract and move on.” A third email dated March 11 offers a suggested resolution that might be passed to accomplish this.
All these are set against the background of Garcia’s claim that he maintained sole appointing authority on the HHA, which one email said is true, and which the plans outlined in these emails intended to change.
While this may not rise to the level of conspiracy that Garcia claims in a lawsuit he filed against Zimmer in 2014, it certainly suggests significant communication between the mayor’s husband and the HHA over how to remove Garcia and Daglian, who was the HHA board attorney at the time.
For more on this story, read this weekend’s Hoboken Reporter.
– Al Sullivan
Emails suggest mayor’s husband’s involvement in Garcia firing
