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Teaneck Councilwoman Barbara Toffler
Attorney Erik A. Hassing put the township on notice last week that he will be requesting what is known as summary judgment overturning the censure on Dec. 2 for several reasons. Among them: that the council should have sent the matter to the Municipal Ethics Board for an independent hearing.
Toffler also wants to be reimbursed for legal fees because the censure stemmed from her official duties.
The council now has until Nov. 22 to file its official response, according to its attorney, Thomas B. Hanrahan. The lawyer has advised the governing body to seek a judge’s order rejecting Toffler’s bid, Councilman Elli Katz told CLIFFVIEW PILOT.
“I would hope Councilwoman Toffler would drop her suit, stop wasting taxpayers’ money and focus her energy on helping our Teaneck residents,” Katz added.
Toffler, however, said she did nothing wrong.
“I have offered from the start of the suit to pay my own legal expenses if the Council would rescind the censure. They refused,” she told CLIFFVIEW PILOT.
The former professor at Harvard Business School and published author was pulling from a parking spot this past January when her car knocked the license plate off another vehicle. Not seeing any damage from behind the wheel, and unaware of the fallen plate, she said, she drove off.
After viewing a surveillance video, police gave Toffler two summonses later that day. She said she took care of them immediately and paid to have the plate replaced. The vehicle’s owner didn’t claim any other damage, she said.
“I deserved the two summons(es) I received,” Toffler told CLIFFVIEW PILOT. “I unknowingly knocked a license plate off a car in a parking lot packed with snow, and did not realize it, so drove off. I have never raised any issue with the tickets and paid my $100 fine and $33 court costs.”
What angered her, she said, was that only a certain number of people knew about what essentially was a minor incident – and that one of them told a newspaper reporter about it. She expressed those concerns to the same reporter and in discussions with her fellow council members, she said. The censure vote followed soon after.
“All I said … was that I believed SOMEONE telling the press and publicizing my 2 tickets was retaliating against me,” Toffler told CLIFFVIEW PILOT. “I have proof that when the story appeared in the press I had emailed that I didn’t know who had released the information. From reading the story it sounds like Deputy Mayor Adam Gussen told the story.”
She said it “felt like acts of retaliation for my putting a stop to the Public Safety Director plan.” But Toffler emphasized that she “did not use the word retaliation to the press.”
Council members also alleged that Toffler tried to prevent the release of public records about her, in violation of state law.
But there’s more to that tale, as well.
Toffler said she simply asked the then-acting township clerk whether there was a way to determine whether a man who sought police reports for her home address and security camera footage of the fender bender had a criminal record.
She said she was specifically concerned over the murder of a Teaneck gadfly, as well as a hostile tenor of council meetings that required police presence, not to mention the shootings of public officials in two other states.
It was “surely reasonable, responsible, and in keeping with her duties for … Toffler to inquire if an investigation was done by the Township to ensure a person making a [public records] request was honest when they asserted … that they had no criminal record, particularly when the documents requested would or could contain home addresses,” Hassing wrote in court papers filed in Superior Court in Hackensack.
Produced by “biased political rivals,” the censure resolution approved on Feb. 8 was dropped on Toffler without notice, the court filing contends.
Council members clearly abused Toffler’s rights by “refusing to hold any inquiry and refusing to send the allegations to an impartial third party for investigation,” the June court document argues. The matter should have been sent to Teaneck’s Ethics Board and not been handled by the council, it adds.
The resulting resolution is “rife with factual inaccuracies, misstatements, unsubstantiated references, gross misapplications of law, non sequiturs,” and was approved without Toffler having the opportunity to defend herself, Hassing said.
It “wrongfully and publicly damaged [Toffler’s] political, professional and personal reputation,” he wrote, noting that his client is an author and speaker on ethics in the corporate workplace.
To make matters worse, he wrote, Hassing said, Toffler wasn’t permitted to see the censure resolution until after the council had approved it.
“In short,” he contends, “the Township Council through a biased and unconstitutional procedure passed a censure that was intended to silence Councilwoman Toffler, who is an outspoken elected official with a long history of challenging the status quo, demanding factual and fiscal oversight and support for the proposed actions of the Council, and refused to abdicate her legislative responsibility and become a rubber stamp for the whims of Township Management.”
Hanrahan has filed court papers on behalf of the council that call Toffler’s claims “frivolous and without any reasonable basis in law or fact.”
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