PAYING TO PLAY IN ESSEX COUNTY

Money Doesn’t Talk, It Swears

One of Bob Dylan’s more famous lines from back in the 1960s is: “Money doesn’t talk, it swears.” (And if you haven’t yet seen A Complete Unknown, the Dylan biopic starring Timothy Chalamet, do.) Well, we swear, in New Jersey, a state with a well-deserved reputation for elevating four-letter words, political money swears a blue streak, from Bergen County to Cape May. And thanks to an unfortunate law enacted in 2023, one backed by Governor Phil Murphy, it’s getting louder.

That law, the Election Transparency Act, dramatically raised limits on campaign contributions and, especially, allowed contractors and others seeking to do business with county governments to fill the coffers of the politicians who make those business decisions. Astonishingly, the limit on public contractors giving money to county party committees went from $300 – yes, you read that right, $300 – to $112,500.

In Essex County, the boss-run political capital of northern New Jersey, contractors, engineering and construction companies, lawyers, insurance firms, and construction-connected unions have supplied the ruling Essex County Democratic Committee (ECDC) with hundreds of thousands of dollars. (Props to the New Jersey Election Law Enforcement Commission, which keeps track of all this stuff.)

The bottom line: in 2024, the ECDC took in $797,000 in political contributions. Of that, more than $209,000 came in big chunks from contactors and other business folk looking to do business with the county. And another $162,000 came from Big Labor, mostly from unions that partner with construction firms, such as laborers, electrical workers, carpenters, plumbers, pipefitters, and other construction unions. (Often, the bigwigs at construction firms have sweetheart deals with the union bosses, and they work together to fill the pockets of politicians who dole out profitable contracts.)

And in Essex County, where the ECDC rules the roost – it often seems like they spray for Republicans in Newark and environs – the chief roost-ruler is LeRoy Jones, the chairman of the ECDC, who has some questionable business ties of his own, in conjunction with his Trenton lobbying company, 1868 Public Affairs.

Greasing the wheels of politics for committees in all of New Jersey’s 21 counties, this cash from contractors and their friends is usually described as “pay to play.” You wanna play businessman in Essex County? Then pay up.

The law in question is one that the New Jersey Election Law Enforcement Commission (ELEC) calls “the most sweeping overhaul of campaign finance laws since 2004”: the euphemistically titled “Elections Transparency Act” (ELA). Unless you’re an elections law specialist with a law degree and nothing to do for the next couple of days, don’t bother trying to read the whole thing: it’s undecipherable legislative gobbledygook. But one thing is clear: just like the infamous U.S. Supreme Court decision in Citizens United, this law isn’t about transparency at all. What it does do is open the floodgates for political contributions from the wealthy and superrich. For county governments and political committees, it set the stage for a lot more cash to flow into so-called “pay-to-play” arrangements, where contractors and unions engaged in, say, construction and engineering projects, can feed the hand that feeds them.

Back in 2023, Assemblyman Brian Bergen, a Republican, said (to his credit) that he was “baffled” by the need for the law. “I think we should rename it the Public Corruption Authorization Act,” he said. (Not that corruption in New Jersey worries about being authorized.)

Here’s what happened with the ELA.

It doubled the limit for political giving to a candidate from $2,600 to $5,200, it gave the governor more power over the supposedly independent ELEC, and gutted the state’s pay-to-play laws, allowing contractors to donate to political warchests. It doubled and tripled the amount of money a contributor can give to legislative, state, and county party committees, to $75,000 (or more). And it drastically reduced the statute of limitations for pursuing crooks who violate the election laws, from ten years to two years.

And, as noted earlier, under the old law, a contractor sniffing around new business in a country was limited to giving just $300 to any county committee. Under the new law, the ELA, that limit skyrocketed to $112,500.

That’s a lot of money.

Contractors are just beginning to realize how the law has turned the giving game into the Wild West. “It’s taking a while for them to get used to the new limits, but they’ve already started rushing in,” says Joe Donohue, ELEC’s deputy director. Partly as a result of the new limits, parties are raising much, much more money than in the past. For instance, in 2023 the three main New Jersey Democratic Party fundraising committees pulled in $10,173,000; in 2019, the last comparable off-year election year, they collectively raised just $4,000,000. That’s a 154 percent increase, ELEC helpfully calculates for us.

The county party committees did even better. The 42 county committees, such as the Essex County Democratic Committee, raised $12,868,000 in 2023. Says ELEC: “County parties in 2023 prospered … from the new law. The new law eliminated a $300 limit on contributions by public contractors that had existed since the mid-2000s to discourage public officials from steering lucrative contracts to donors who provide them with large checks. … In 2022, county parties raised about $150,000 directly from public contracting firms that filed annual disclosure reports with ELEC. Following the enactment of the new law in 2023, the amount was nearly ten times more at $1.4 million.”

The top ten contracting firms doling out cash to politicians in New Jersey in 2023 include four that filled the Essex County Democratic Committee’s coffers in 2024, too: Remington & Vernick Engineers, Colliers Engineering and Design, French and Parrello Associates, and Pennoni Associates, Inc., whose 2024 contributions to ECDC totaled $41,350. In all, as mentioned above, the ECDC raised $163,000 from firms looking to do business in the county.

In all, contractors, attorneys and labor union PACs contributed $371,350 to the Essex County Democratic Party in 2024. That’s nearly half of its total take of $797,409. And while a small portion of that union money came from teachers (NJEA) and AFSCME (just $8,000 in all), the vast majority of the union money came from a dozen or so construction-related unions. And $16,000 came to ECDC from the company that handles bond sales for counties and municipalities statewide, McManimon, Scotland and Baumann, LLC.

Like Louisiana and Rhode Island, New Jersey is generally considered one of the most corrupt states in the United States. In recent years, it’s lived up to its reputation, from Bob Menendez’s gold bars to George Norcross’s self-dealing. So it’s a shame that the new law has made corruption just that much easier.