The ongoing attack on transparency in New Jersey has now entered its burlesque phase, and you can’t say you didn’t see it coming – not after a year in which the Democratic majority has tried to gut the Open Public Records Act (OPRA), demolished the Election Law Enforcement Commission (ELEC), pulled the plug on police accountability bills, and used dark money like mother’s milk.
Nowa plan is forming to declaw State Comptroller Kevin Walsh, who has a singular talent for exposing corruption and waste and a burning contempt for anyone who fosters New Jersey’s reputation as a bureaucratic cesspool.
Walsh’s recent reports on waste and abuse in Essex, Union, and Hudson Counties were meticulous and scrupulous, and his ability to follow the money and expose financial misconduct has left most county governments quavering.
So their reaction was to direct the New Jersey Association of Counties to dispatch a letter to Senate President Nick Scutari, asking him to defang the watchdog \-- which is all you need to know about their level of confidence in refuting Walsh’s conclusions about the bewildering ways some counties waste taxpayer money.
Specifically, the NJAC wants the Legislature to hold hearings on the Comptroller, to which Walsh says, “Bring it.” It also asks Scutari and the governor to establish a third-party arbiter to review the Comptroller’s reports before the public gets to see them.
If you find the timing suspicious, join the club.
No bulletin here: New Jersey is a better place because of Walsh’s work. In the past year, he has exposed the sociopaths who ran a racist police training outfit known as Street Cop and ran them out of town. His Medicaid team, which is half his 140-person staff, found substandard patient care for 1,500 residents at a dozen nursing homes that charged the state $100 million. He found 57 towns were screwing their taxpayers by flouting a state law that caps sick leave pay at retirement.
And the recent reports on the three counties should have taxpayers reach for pitchforks and torches.
In December, Walsh found Union County had paid three officials a total of $412,772 in extra stipends and tuition reimbursement without first following the legal process of passing an ordinance. That would have given the public a chance to reject those payments. Oops.
In March, he discovered that Hudson County had awarded $13.5 million in contracts for health services at the Hudson County jail, hand-selecting each vendor without opening the contracts up for public bidding. Busted.
But the magnum opus was last week’s review of the Essex County’s $40 million vaccination program, one in which Walsh exposed a deluge of dodgy payouts of federal funds. It included years of no-bid contracts that never met “emergency procurement” criteria. It included county workers getting full-time pay in the vaccination program while they were already clocked in for their day jobs. It found a worker making $130,000 that no one is able to identify.
It even included a cameo from Rasheida Smith -- the veteran political consultant whose company was hired for robocall services -- who was paid twice for the same $110,000 invoice in 2021. Once exposed, Essex County called the second payment “a loan,” which she is repaying it over five years -- at zero interest.
The NJAC objects to Walsh being “judge, jury, and prosecutor,” but this is the same NJAC that endorses an OPRA “reform” bill that allows governments to hide public records on a whim – which will reduce transparency to a Jersey joke -- so it’s very hard to take its complaints about being misunderstood seriously.
Walsh, for one, sounds amused: “We share the facts before we publish these reports, and none of the counties here has challenged the facts,” he said. “These are not close calls. Taxpayers are entitled to know where government has done well, and where government has done poorly.”
In the case of Essex, Joe DiVincenzo ran the best vaccine operation in the state, and the County Exec would rightly point out that in the chaos of the moment, you couldn’t watch every nickel when you administer 650,000 vaccinations and 450,000 tests.
But that doesn’t mean you can throw federal dollars around recklessly, and an investigation is part and parcel for any emergency response evaluation -- especially one related to the first global pandemic in a century.
This particular investigation about Essex mentions “waste,” “fraud,” and “abuse” 64 times in its 28-page report – which led the Comptroller to make referrals to the Department of Labor and “appropriate entities.”
One expects objections from powerful county politicians, but as Walsh put it, “This seems to me like a discomfort with accountability, more than anything else.”
Dena Mottola Jaborska of NJ Citizens Action was more blunt: “They just making themselves look like the corrupt leaders we’re trying to replace,” she said.
Scutari is still digesting the letter, but if he wants to put Walsh in front of a legislative committee, let’s get that show started. The Comptroller always seeks engagement with the governor or legislative leadership after he publishes every report. These reports are no different.
But it should begin soon. Federal inspectors are everywhere from Alaska to Florida, just starting the process of clawing back billions in pandemic relief money while handing out civil judgments.
Eventually, they will make their way to Jersey. Some elected officials might fear Walsh, but they should thank him for providing a preview of the judge, jury, and prosecutor waiting in the wings.
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