Just when you thought it was safe to consign Lizette Delgado-Polanco to our state’s sleazy bureaucratic history, we learn that her reign of terror at the Schools Development Authority was brought to the governor’s attention — long before her nepotism fever spiked — and then ignored.
This sounds like a classic Only In Jersey story, but that doesn’t make it any less appalling. The SDA’s vice-president of corporate governance and legal affairs sounded the alarm nearly a year ago on Delgado-Polanco’s practice of firing career public servants and hiring unqualified friends, relatives, and union cronies, which is a violation of SDA policy and ethics guidelines. That’s bad.
But here’s the punch line, as reported in The Record: Jane Kelly, who understands government’s glacial pace as a veteran of six administrations, red-flagged the hiring hijinks to her superiors in September. And Delgado-Polanco’s chief of staff — Al Alvarez, whose own hiring remains a mystery, as it happened after some were aware of Katie Brennan’s assault allegation against him – told Kelly that they’d follow her recommendations on hiring procedures. Spoiler alert: They didn’t.
Two months later, after Delgado-Polanco hired two dozen more unqualified pals — many at six-figure salaries — Kelly alerted Gov. Phil Murphy’s chief ethics officer, Heather Taylor. Taylor’s response on Nov. 26 was even more sidesplitting.
File a complaint, Kelly was told.
The chief ethics officer of an agency that oversees $11 billion in school construction projects says the place is bloated with patronage, and she is treated like a disgruntled whistleblower?
Seriously, isn’t Trenton a special place?
“To get this warning from someone who is a respected member of government, and then allow it to go on as long as it did, this is beyond disturbing,” said Senate Majority Leader Loretta Weinberg, who co-chairs the legislative committee that oversees the administration’s hiring practices.
“The committee is still officially open for business, and leadership will decide how to proceed. But I’d say we have a duty to find out what happened here, and to correct it.”
Weinberg is especially vexed that the governor’s own investigation drags on, months after Delgado-Polanco herself has been forced to resign. “What happened to that report?” Weinberg asked. “The governor said they were ahead of this, and now it’s gone on for seven months.”
Reconvening the committee, just to have Kelly testify under oath, seems like a no-brainer. Everyone (notably, Senate President Steve Sweeney) sounds eager for another round, because as Assemblywoman and vice-chair Nancy Munoz (R-Union) put it, “We have yet to find out whether this governor is willing to hold his staff members accountable.”
But there is more to do, because the SDA is still a case of the spoils system run amok. It still has dozens of employees who don’t belong there. Some make six figures. Some didn’t meet baseline qualifications, such as having a driver’s license or bachelor’s degree.
Accordingly, a package of nine bills were introduced Tuesday, all of them arising from the recommendations of the select committee’s scathing report on the SDA. Most of them pertain to hiring protocols. One bill turns the authority for human resource management of the SDA over to the Civil Service Commission. Another requires the CSC to document all hires and monitor standards for recruitment, selection, hiring, and employee records.
Are new layers of oversight necessary? Put it this way: After Kelly’s complaint was filed on Dec. 5, it took nearly three months for taxpayer-expensed investigators to show up. By then, Delgado-Polanco made five more hires, the Record reported.
Everyone is eager to see the governor’s report on the SDA, if only for the comic relief. But we’re more interested in examining ways to repair it. This joke is getting stale.
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