Ex-Collingswood, NJ, Mayor Sues Borough over EMS Vote

The former longtime mayor of Collingswood has sued his own borough claiming the new mayor violated ethics laws after casting the deciding vote to outsource emergency medical services at a board of commissioners meeting last month.

James Maley, a current commissioner and former Collingswood mayor, filed a lawsuit in Camden County Superior Court alleging Collingswood Mayor Daniella Solano Ward should have recused herself from voting to award an EMS contract to Virtua Health EMS.

Solano’s husband is a doctor in the Virtua Health network and met with the borough fire department and elected officials prior to a request for proposals being issued, the lawsuit said.

On Monday, Judge Francisco Dominguez issued a temporary injunction against the creation or execution of any contracts between the borough and Virtua Health EMS until the court can sort out the facts in the case. The next hearing is scheduled for Monday, according to court records.

At the Dec. 1 Collingswood Board of Commissioners meeting, Ward said she disagreed with the borough’s solicitor who advised her to recuse herself from voting on awarding the bid for EMS services to Virtua because of a conflict of interest. The solicitor also shared his legal opinion with the other commissioners prior to the meeting.

Maley, a municipal land-use attorney and former mayor of Collingswood for 27 years, pounced on Ward’s statement at the meeting announcing she would cast the deciding vote.

“It’s absurd. It is wrong. It is unethical,” Maley said about Ward’s anticipated vote contradicting the borough attorney’s advice. “You should have not been involved in this process.”

According to Maley, he was left in the dark about the possibility of privatizing the borough’s EMS services and claimed Ward and the deputy mayor were not transparent with the public.

In the lawsuit, Maley claimed Ward, who was elected mayor in May, should have recused herself from voting on the matter based on an informal meeting she and her husband had with Collingswood Fire Chief Geoffrey Joyce and other fire department members in August.

At that meeting, Maley claims the group discussed the borough’s request for bids to manage and operate the borough’s EMS services while excluding Deputy Mayor Amy Henderson Riley, who oversees public safety, from the meeting.

Ward and her husband, Jared Ward, met with the deputy mayor and the fire chief in August to better understand the volume of emergency call statistics, according to Collingswood’s attorneys.

Ward, a former EMT, is a physician who works at Cooper, Virtua and AtlanticCare hospitals, according to court documents.

Ward, her husband, Riley and Joyce denied in sworn affidavits that the contract was discussed at the August meeting. Riley claimed she was present for the meeting.

Ward and her husband did not immediately respond to requests for comment. Riley and Joyce declined to comment on the ongoing litigation.

Collingswood’s attorneys also denied the contract proposal was structured at the August meeting and said the borough did nothing wrong.

An attorney for the borough declined to comment on pending litigation.

A request for bids for EMS services was publicly advertised in September with a deadline for sealed bids on Oct. 16, according to a resolution passed by Collingswood’s commissioners.

Based on the belief that the potential request for bids was discussed at the August meeting, Maley asked the borough’s solicitor, Joseph Nardi, to offer a legal opinion prior to the Dec. 1 meeting on whether Ward should recuse herself from voting, court documents show.

Nardi issued a detailed legal analysis in an email sent to all three commissioners on Dec. 1, hours before the commission meeting to award the contract. It concluded that Ward should recuse herself from the vote.

Ward ignored the advice and cast the deciding vote to award the contract to Virtua Health EMS, which submitted the lowest bid. The final vote was 2-1 in favor with Maley casting the lone opposing vote.

“The biggest thing for me is there’s gotta be a more public process on this,” Maley told NJ Advance Media on Wednesday.

Brown and Connory, the law firm where Nardi is a partner, was not reappointed as Collingswood’s borough solicitor at the reorganization meeting on Monday.

Virtua submitted a $0 bid for the contract while a second bid was submitted by Event Medical Staffing Solutions that would have charged the borough about $454,000 to operate the borough’s EMS services.

A spokesperson for Virtua declined to comment on the allegations in the lawsuit.

As a result of privatizing EMS services, Maley said at recent commission meetings that the borough will lose about $450,000 in billing revenue, money that helped fund firefighter positions.

Ward argued that the revenue loss will be offset by over $100,000 in overtime savings for the borough. It would also free up firefighters to focus on responding to fire calls while improving response times, she said.

Collingswood’s fire department has historically staffed four or five firefighters for each shift and two of those firefighters were assigned to ambulance responses, according Joyce’s affidavit filed in the case.

“Based on the requirements for staffing the ambulance, that leaves two or three firefighters available to respond to fires at any given time,” Joyce said in the affidavit. He added that the staffing limitations have created serious scheduling issues for the borough in recent years and claimed three or fewer firefighters cannot properly respond to an average house fire.

After Maley filed his suit on Dec. 16, Ward and the others accused of violations filed sworn certifications claiming they did not discuss the bid proposals at the August meeting. They also accused Maley of cherry picking facts.

Attorneys for Collingswood said Maley “relayed his incorrect assumptions about the August 2025 meeting to borough solicitor Joe Nardi, III, who used Plaintiff’s ‘facts’ to form the basis of a legal opinion about a purported conflict of interest.”

Attorneys for the borough also claim that Maley shared the legal opinion with the press and attached it to a public legal filing without considering the borough’s attorney-client privilege, according to court documents.

Ward’s husband, who works in a separate division of the Virtua Health system as a doctor, joined the meeting to discuss the burden EMS services place on Collingswood’s career firefighters, according to Ward and the borough’s attorneys in their response to Maley’s lawsuit.

Collingswood receives over 4,000 calls for emergency services per year, well above area averages of 1,500 calls annually in neighboring departments with similar staffing levels, according to Joyce.

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