Press Release 8/4/19 

Courtesy of Sharon Hubberman

PERTH AMBOY – Perth Amboy City residents received news from various social media platforms that Mayor Wilda Diaz may be issuing legal actions against the City Council Members utilizing taxpayer dollars to fund a lawsuit. “Even though the Mayor knows that our City budget has over a $5 million budget gap, she continues to waste taxpayer dollars to pursue her political agenda rather than having solutions that won’t increase property taxes to fill the budget gap,” said City resident, Sharon Hubberman. “Unfortunately, her mismanagement of the City’s resources is becoming more and more evident each day.”

Diaz currently faces a recall issued by three concerned residents. According to the statement issued on the recall notice it states: “Since the three terms of office of Wilda Diaz, mayor of Perth Amboy, our City of Perth Amboy has been plagued with her mismanagement, lack of transparency, and she has failed to successfully address our degraded water and sewer system despite rising water fees to our residents.”

Recently, Perth Amboy has had the biggest 20 foot deep sinkhole on Gordon Street which was caused by the aged sewer system. In a CBS New York news article, the City Engineer City Jeff Rauch is quoted to shed light on the Gordon Street sinkhole. “We have an old brick sewer, it’s a single layer of individual bricks that forms the pipe and it collapsed,” he said. The CBS New York article further states that he had seen it before, “Not as large as this, but we’ve had sinkholes develop, small ones and we were able to catch it before it got worse,” he told CBS2’s Tara Jakeway.

In addition to the sinkhole, residents received water violation notices where a contaminant called TTHM exceeded the maximum contaminant level in their drinking water. This level is set by the US EPA and the NJDEP for public safety. “The Mayor’s business administrator has chosen to call our water quality concerns a “political stunt”,” Hubberman said. “Water is an integral part to human life and it is an important issue that our residents care about. As concerned residents, we initiated the Recall of Mayor Wilda Diaz because we need to do our best to put the City of Perth Amboy Residents First. The council has been more responsive to our concerns, and now they may need to be preoccupied with a lawsuit against them,” she said.

The recall committee is still collecting petition signatures for the recall of the mayor; you can visit the recall team’s Facebook page called Recall Mayor Wilda Diaz for more information. The recall team will be at various locations collecting signatures from Perth Amboy residents, please visit the facebook page or call 732-800-2017.

Sharon Hubberman is a former candidate for Mayor of Perth Amboy.