She volunteered at her sons' schools and began to notice something curious: Hoboken, for all its walkability, has less park space per capita than Manhattan. "We don't have yards in Hoboken," Zimmer says. "Our parks are our yards—that's where we go to play. Having enough for everyone is part of the quality of life." So she got involved in advocating for more park space in developments planned for her neighborhood.

As a parks committee member, she started thinking, "Hmmm, we could accomplish more if our city councilman would communicate." So in 2007 she ran for city council and won--the first elected office she'd held since being class president at Laconia High. Then, as a city council member, she started thinking, "Hmmm, we could accomplish more if we had a mayor we could work with." So she ran for mayor in 2009. Her sons were 8 and 10 by then, and a full-time job close to home seemed doable--to her, if not to the political establishment.

"We were a grassroots campaign funded by individuals, and it felt like the entire state political machine was against us," Zimmer recalls. "People said, 'She doesn't have the background. She can't do this.'" When she lost to Peter Cammarano by just 161 votes, it felt almost like a victory. Then it actually became one.

In July 2009, three weeks after the new mayor was sworn in, the FBI arrested him and 43 others around New Jersey as part of a multiyear political corruption investigation. Charged with taking bribes, Cammarano resigned. As city council president, Zimmer became acting mayor, and that November she won the job for real. She is Hoboken's first female mayor and first Jewish mayor.

The corruption scandal wasn't the last crisis the crisis communicator would face, but it was a tough one. "Every time something like that happens, it paints every elected official as something really negative--when the reality is that being in elected office is a way to give back to your community," she says. "When I came in, I had a big mountain to go up because the level of trust was really broken.

Climb a mountain? No problem for a mayor who sails, plays tennis, runs and skis. On their honeymoon, she and her husband climbed Mount Kilimanjaro. She and her mother biked along the coast of Japan; she and her twin brother, Tim Zimmer '90, biked from New Hampshire to Ottawa. Most days in Hoboken she rides her bike to work. When she gets there, she relies on the discipline she cultivated on the hundreds of mornings she rose before dawn to row crew at UNH.

She still lives by the crew philosophy: "Stay focused on your goal. You can't start thinking about the pain. You have to push through absolutely as hard as you can." It's been good advice for the mayor, and the city, in the months since the storm.

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