Cannabis chair firing reveals inner workings of troubled commission

As the minutes wound down in the disciplinary hearings that would eventually lead to her firing, Cannabis Control Commission Chair Shannon O’Brien sat across from Treasurer Deborah Goldberg, the person who’d appointed her to the job, and began reading an 11-page letter aloud.

In that drab 12th-floor conference room in an office tower across from the State House, O’Brien recalled in her comments that Goldberg had personally asked her to apply for the role, according to a copy of the testimony reviewed by WBUR.

“I was not sure that I wanted to put myself back in the sometimes harsh public limelight,” said O’Brien, a former treasurer herself who once ran for governor against Republican Mitt Romney.

Speaking directly to Goldberg during the hearing, O’Brien said she ultimately took the job because, “I believed, as I thought you did, that this role would provide me the opportunity to leverage my experience as a change agent to make improvements in an obviously troubled state agency.”

The series of hearings this spring and summer were the climax of a year-long political drama that seemingly concluded Monday when Goldberg dismissed O'Brien. Transcripts of the hearing reviewed by WBUR showed a battle over control of a fractious commission rife with infighting.

According to O’Brien’s allegations in her hearing testimony, she walked into an agency with greater problems than the treasurer had disclosed while recruiting her. Right away, she said, she faced anger and discord, notably from the executive director and from a board member who had been seeking the chair role.

She went on to describe in detail a “toxic” work environment full of behavior more characteristic of a high school cafeteria than a commission overseeing a $7 billion industry.

“I found an agency made up of fiefdoms, whose leaders declined to cooperate with each other, in which constant weaponization of complaints to human resources had become part of the culture, waged by persons to promote themselves, take down others, satisfy grudges and the like,” O’Brien said.

In O'Brien's telling, Goldberg’s decision this week to dismiss her for “gross misconduct” is unfounded and makes her just the latest victim of this cycle.

But internal agency investigations submitted during O’Brien’s disciplinary process concluded that she, too, contributed to that toxicity. At the heart of the conflict were her dealings with then-executive director Shawn Collins. An outside attorney hired to investigate Collins' complaints wrote that O’Brien, unsatisfied with Collins' job performance, threatened him with the “blunt instrument” of termination.

The investigation said she once yelled at him, angry about how the communications team handled a news story about her, and that she revealed his plans to resign in a public meeting before he announced them himself — an “abusive and humiliating” violation of workplace policy, according to the report.

O’Brien pushed back on the report's conclusions in the testimony reviewed by WBUR. She, alongside other commissioners interviewed by the outside investigator, said that Collins had spoken about feeling burnt out and expressed a desire to leave even before O'Brien was appointed.

O’Brien said she told Goldberg in April of last year she was considering firing Collins — a former top aide to Goldberg — because he was “incapable or unwilling to motivate or manage the staff” at the cannabis commission.

“From that point on, I was toast as far as you were concerned,” O’Brien said to Goldberg.

O'Brien also alleged that Collins bragged to others that he "got rid of" the former cannabis chair, Steve Hoffman, who resigned abruptly in 2022.

Goldberg suspended O’Brien last September and has spent more than $616,000 in the legal effort to remove her. O’Brien continued to collect her $196,551 salary while she was suspended.

In a statement Monday, Goldberg said she decided to remove O’Brien after “careful consideration” and with “deep regret.” Collins, reached by WBUR Tuesday, said he had no comment.

In the hearings, O’Brien also sought to defend herself against allegations she made racially insensitive comments to fellow Commissioner Nurys Camargo. According to another internal investigation, Camargo alleged O’Brien referred to then-Communications Chief Cedric Sinclair as Camargo’s “buddy.”

“As Black and brown people, she [Chair O’Brien] pairs us together,” Camargo said. “Basically, putting all Black people together in the same bucket.”

O’Brien denied that her use of the word “buddy” had any racial connotation.

“Commissioner Camargo and Cedric Sinclair are friends,” O’Brien said in her testimony. “She calls him by a cute nickname — ‘C’. No one else does that.”

Sinclair was later suspended for reasons the commission has declined to disclose. A WBUR investigation found three women staffers said they were repeatedly bullied by him.

Camargo also took offense when O’Brien suggested she “probably” knew State Sen. Lydia Edwards, a prominent Black politician and former city councilor.

“I don’t think all people of color know each other," O’Brien said in her testimony. "I do believe that two highly public political officials in the city of Boston who are women of color and have similar progressive agendas would likely know each other.”

O’Brien said she thought Camargo resented her because she was chosen as commission chair. She said Camargo "campaigned for the Chair position and was deeply upset that she was not appointed."

A commission spokesperson did not return a request for comment from Camargo.

O’Brien partly blamed Goldberg for the commission board's hostile dynamics, saying it was the treasurer who intimated that  Camargo was not qualified for the chair role.

“That was you,” O’Brien said to Goldberg during the hearing. “When you announced my appointment in August of 2022, I was embarrassed to be attacked publicly by persons who were upset with your failure to appoint a woman of color.”

O’Brien and her legal team plan to appeal her termination to the state’s highest court.

“We intend to take this to the Supreme Judicial Court directly,” her lawyer Max Stern said in an interview Tuesday.

Stern said they plan to challenge the nature of the disciplinary hearings — where Goldberg was the sole decision-maker and the O'Brien camp was not allowed to cross-examine witnesses.

“We think this is an extreme violation of the most basic norms of due process,” Stern said.

O'Brien previously tried to get a lower court to block the hearings.

The Treasurer’s office has so far declined to make public a copy of its decision in the case which details the exact violations for which O'Brien was fired.

For now, the commission remains without a full-time chair or executive director. The remaining commissioners have routinely bickered in public meetings and often disagree about who should lead the sessions.

Goldberg on Tuesday designated Commissioner Bruce Stebbins as acting chair.

"I am grateful that he has agreed to serve in this capacity until a permanent Chair is appointed," she said in a statement.

Goldberg did not provide any timeline on when that might be.