Hoboken city attorney Steven Kleinman announced this morning to the media that Mayor Peter Cammarano had submitted his resignation, effective at noon. The City Attorney read the contents of the letter to the media:
Hoboken Mayor Peter Cammarano resigns in a letter to the city
As a parent and Hoboken resident said on NJN tonight, their child is 4 months old and has now had their third Mayor. Good luck to Dawn Zimmer leading Hoboken. She will serve as Mayor and run in the special Election to be held this November.
Councilwoman Dawn Zimmer today ended her Mayoral campaign by congratulating her opponent, Peter Cammarano, on his hard fought victory.
Zimmer said, "I congratulate Peter Cammarano for his victory. He worked tirelessly and campaigned effectively. While I know we will not always agree, I pledge to work cooperatively with him as we address the big challenges ahead."
Zimmer went on to say, "This has been a tough election that ended in a photo finish. Now, it is in the best interest of Hoboken that we move on to the task of governing our City."
Here's a bit more from an email sent to her mailing list...
Given the closeness of the race, and the anecdotal evidence of serious improprieties, many have advised me to pursue an election challenge. I gave much thought to doing so, but I have decided against it. This election was extremely divisive, and an election challenge would literally tear our town apart. My attorney has advised me that the margin of victory -- 161 votes - was large enough to make overturning the result extremely unlikely, even if we could prove that improprieties had occurred.
My own view is that Cammarano stole the election and that, in the interests of justice and of democracy, she should have fought on.
As it is Cammarano will not have a majority of the council "in his pocket" so let us hope that the Zimmer/Mason alliance will be able to reign in any future giveaways to developers and to the corrupt Hudson County political machine.
I understand why Zimmer chose discretion as opposed to valor, and pray that it works out for the best. In some sense it's easy for me to urge her to fight on; but she and her people have to live in that town and be subject to the consequences of an ongoing conflict (especially one in which the police are self interested supporters of the other side). Having said that, I urge any ambitious federal prosecutors out there to initiate a probe of all the underhanded shenaningans that were allegedly perpetrated by the Cammarano campaign.
Screwing with the electoral process is, in my book, a form af high treason and should be treated as such. Elections should be seen as a sacrament of democracy and playing these kinds of games should be seen as sacriligious. We, in New Jersey, have become so cynical about living with corruption that we are loathe to really get to the bottom of things for fear of the systemic disruption it could cause.
Progressives in Hoboken, Hudson County, and the whole state need to adopt a far more muscular approach to cleaning up our state or nothing much will ever change.
Meanwhile, I look forward to Dawn Zimmer and Beth Mason staying on the reform track as allies and becoming aggressive guardians of the best interests of the PEOPLE of Hoboken until the next electoral opportunity to clean things up.
Unless Dawn Zimmer asks for a recount, Peter Cammarano will be the next Mayor of Hoboken by a margin of 161 votes. Even if she doesn't, the victory of Zimmer's council candidates has them still ready to flex their muscles:
"It appears we'll have control of the City Council," Zimmer said yesterday.
"The council majority is going to be able to stop the NJ Transit Western Edge, and other out-of-scale projects that are currently in the works," said Zimmer's campaign manager Sam Briggs. "They will finally make redevelopment work for the people of Hoboken and not just the developers."
The new mayor dismissed those concerns:
"Every mayor has to work with whatever council they are presented with. And no City Council majority is lasting," he said. "Just because you have three council members who are with Zimmer doesn't mean they will always vote in lockstep. You will always have some new issue that will change their minds."
It looks like things will continue to be fun in Hoboken.
Well, the absentee ballots have been counted. With the help of absentees, Peter Cammarano won Hoboken's election by 67 vptes. The final vote count, including absentees was 6,043 Cammarano to 5976 to Dawn Zimmer.
But officials are saying it's still too close to call. There are an estimated 100 provisional votes still out there to be counted, which will be counted tomorrow.
There are 775 absentee ballots, but reportedly 75 of them have been impounded as the counting goes on at the Hudson County Clerk's office in Jersey City.
In case you missed it, Tuesday was Election Day in New Jersey's ostensibly nonpartisan municipalities. In two closely watched races, Jersey City's incumbent Mayor Jerramiah Healy cruised to a whopping 52% victory while Peter Cammarano and Dawn Zimmer will face one another in a runoff to determine which of the two will lead Hoboken.
Jersey City Mayor L. Harvey Smith Phillip G. Webb Louis M. Manzo Jerramiah Healy Daniel B. Levin Personal Choice Total
There has been a lot of ink spilled about how Dawn Zimmer was forced to vacate the Hoboken 4th Ward Council seat she stole through voter fraud - like mishandling absentee ballots, having "voters" who don't even live in Hoboken cast ballots and handing out lottery tickets along with campaign literature in an attempt to buy votes.
But, right now, I want to focus on some of Dawn Zimmer's major-league hypocrisy. There's nothing that gets my blood boiling more than a "holier-than thou" attitude - especially when its coupled with a "do as I say, not as I do" mantra. Below is a video that really hammers home this point.
For some context, I want to show how this isn't just an isolated incident of Dawn's hypocrisy. For example:
Dawn Zimmer promised to never, ever take any HCDO money... but she then went right ahead and took thousands of dollars from that very group. I'm not saying their money is dirty, just that Zimmer went against her word and broke a crystal clear pledge. Check out her original comment in the 4th Ward forum on Hoboken411.
And speaking of Hoboken 411... Dawn Zimmer claims to be a reformer who believes in transparency. But last week it came to light that she gave thousands of dollars to the moderator/creator of Hoboken411 - who hid the transaction from his readers and then went on to make the website's 4th Ward forum a free-for-all to bash Chris mercilessly - while censoring comments and banning those who support Campos or point out Dawn's deficiencies. And might I add that, along with its racist and classist undertones, Hoboken411 has recently shown its right-wing colors by lobbing attacks at Bob Menendez, Neil Cohen, Cory Booker and even that nasty, dirty organization People for the American Way. RealHoboken.com did a fantastic job of running down the story.
Dawn Zimmer talks about the evils of politics and how nasty machines are... but then her campaign's brain trust goes ahead and breaks bread at an HCDO fundraiser with recently-indicted Guttenberg Mayor David Della Donna, just days after Della Donna was indicted.
And now, to cap it all off, Dawn Zimmer - who has railed against developers and blamed them for every problem in Hoboken - is taking money and support from uber-developer Frank "Pupie" Raia... a man who said "I can buy anything." Well, apparently his money has now bought Dawn Zimmer. (In case you were curious, the woman in the back of the elevator in the above video? You guessed it. Dawn Zimmer.)
Throughout this campaign - aside from talking about fecal fruit - the only two things Dawn Zimmer has been saying on the campaign trail are: a). Developers are bad and b). Flooding is bad.
Well, then I just have to ask why on earth has Dawn Zimmer decided to take money and support from Pupie - a developer who has exacerbated Hoboken's flooding over the last few years. This makes her hypocrisy even worse.
For 16 years, uber-developer Frank "Pupie" Raia sat on the North Hudson Sewage Authority while the floods came time and time again. And Pupie did nothing. Moreover, Raia's ShopRite development project was so poorly executed, it turned 9th and Madison into one of the worst flooding corners in Hoboken. Yet, Dawn seems perfectly content to take his "dirty" money and walk arm-in-arm, door-to-door talking with voters.
You're judged by the company you keep and held to the standards you set. When all is said and done, Dawn Zimmer has said far more than she's actually done to make Hoboken a better place. And what little action we've seen is simply riddled with hypocrisy.
Dawn Zimmer has been shown to be quite a hypocrite in many ways these past few months... but taking money and support from disgraced developer and flood-enabler Frank "Pupie" Raia really takes the cake.
It never ceases to amaze how tone-deaf some politicians can be. Take, for example, the entire Hudson County Democratic Organization. Last week, State Senator and North Bergen Mayor Nicholas Sacco held his annual HCDO fundraiser in Garfield (which is, incidentally, in Bergen County, but I digress). It was, as I've been told, the place to be seen in Hudson County politics.
Guttenberg Mayor David Delle Donna certainly thought so. Fresh off an indictment for extortion and mail fraud, Delle Donna joined a number of HCDO luminaries at the fundraiser. But some of the attendees were not what I'd lovingly call the usual, ahem, suspects.
There was a strong Hoboken contingent in attendance, for example. Carol Marsh, the HCDO's primary candidate for Assembly from the 33rd District, Frank "Pupie" Raia, the HCDO's candidate for Council from Hoboken's 3rd Ward, and gadfly Michael Lenz all showed up. What's interesting about this group is that they make up the brain trust, as it were, of 4th Ward Council Candidate Dawn Zimmer's campaign to legitimately win the seat she stole through election fraud in June and then vacated when challenged in court. And yet somehow, Zimmer still claims she's not an HCDO candidate.
A few weeks ago, the anonymous poster Jersey Boy went to bat for Hoboken Council candidate Dawn Zimmer, claiming she wasn't part of the HCDO machine and that attacks against her for taking HCDO support were hypocritical coming from those who had also accepted HCDO support in the past.
It's time to knock down the spin and set the record straight.
The problem here is not the extensive support Dawn Zimmer has received from the HCDO. That's her right. Good people have accepted that backing in the past and will again in the future. The problem is that Zimmer's a hypocrite, consistently denying that the support she's received makes her an HCDO-backed candidate. Dawn has presented herself as an opponent of the organization and, well, that's a tough sell when they're providing her core of support.
My campaign has not received, and will not accept, any contributions on a personal or organizational level from the Mayor, the Hudson County Democratic Organization, Brian Stack, or any of the other players involved in the battle for control over the Hudson County patronage machine. We have had no discussions whatsoever with any of those people or organizations in which support has either been solicited or offered.
That's a promise she broke repeatedly, taking thousands from HCDO-aligned County Executive Tom DeGise, HCDO Chairman and Jersey City Mayor Jerramiah Healy, and the HCDO itself. In response to this, Zimmer has said that she only took $4,000 from HCDO. She clearly misses the point. She made a campaign promise to take nothing from them.
Again, neither I nor anyone else associated with her opponent, Councilman Chris Campos, think there's anything wrong with Healey's or DeGise's money, but Dawn Zimmer has gone on the record in the past saying that there is. Politicians are free to change their minds, of course, but there's always a price to be paid for it. And in Zimmer's case, she needs to stop denying that she is a beneficiary of HCDO support. After all, DeGise and HCDO consultant Paul Swibinski didn't end up at her campaign headquarters on election night by accident.
One thing that gets under my skin is when machine politicians bash other machine politicians for being -- you guessed it -- "machine politicians." Either change your style of politics or accept what you are and stop being a hypocrite tossing that label at others.
But that, like many things in politics-as-usual, is just a fact of life we have to live with.
But I find it really abhorrent when machine politicians accuse non-machine politicians of being machine politicians. That is the case in today's Political Insider column in the Jersey Journal discussing Hoboken's Fourth Ward do-over run-off.
Battling it out are former Councilman Chris Campos and current Councilwoman Dawn Zimmer. The columnist writes about a press conference Campos and supporters held to discuss the race.
Much of the press conference had Campos and Councilman at Large Peter Cammarano arguing that Zimmer stole the election using illegal tactics orchestrated by the Hudson County Democratic Organization. Cammarano said there have been only three other cases in New Jersey political history where a candidate had to vacate a seat.
.....
Cammarano listed a number of HCDO people who worked for Zimmer, including North Bergen spinmeister and consultant Paul Swibinski. He even rejected criticism of Campos getting help in the runoff investigation from former Jersey City Mayor Gerald McCann as "a page out of the HCDO playbook."
Of course who just happens to pass by the press conference but Gerald McCann -- 'on his way to register voters for Campos,' he told the columnist. And the only people active in this Fourth Ward race who have ever paid the HCDO's Swibinski are Cammarano and Campos (They hired him two years ago for their race with Hoboken Mayor David Roberts).
In fact, it's rather funny to hear Zimmer labeled as an 'HCDO tool' because people who run in Hoboken and Hudson County political circles know what kind of politician Zimmer is: a wide-eyed, elitist, newcomer, reformer, do-gooder type. She doesn't get down and dirty with the machine. They tried to enlist her, but failed. They endorsed her because Campos now runs with Brian Stack's HCDO splinter-group, DFHC. And while she accepted their endorsement, she turned her nose up at their help -- rather naively. Most people wrote her off for that reason, but she pulled an upset on a rainy and (what should have been) a low-turnout day.
'Ha. Newcomers vote,' the HCDO shrugged and walked away. They would laugh even harder when they heard that Zimmer agreed to re-do the election. 'Naive, rookie mistake.' You're supposed to keep your head down and never admit mistake, no matter how small. "There have been only three other cases in New Jersey political history where a candidate had to vacate a seat" because people who know politics know you fight it in court all the way. Never deny your victory. That's what a machine politician would do, that's the advice the HCDO would have given Zimmer.
But Zimmer's decisions show she is no machine politician.
Now for Round Three and the HCDO isn't running to her side. They're too focused on the next primary. Their only presence in this race comes out of the mouths of Cammarano and Campos, who, in the DFHC are more machine than 2,000 Dawn Zimmers.
This is not to say whether the Fourth Ward's needs would be better served by either Campos or Zimmer, or who is running a cleaner campaign. I can't attest to that. I don't live there.
But I do know what kind of politicians these are, and this mischaracterization of Zimmer by Campos and Cammarano is just plain wrong.
