Documents appear to support man’s claim of being TTF scapegoat
TRENTON » A public works employee who claims he is being scapegoated for the Transportation Trust Fund (TTF) “debacle” may have gotten a huge break.
A review of nearly 50 pages of documents related to the application gaffe that led to the city missing out on hundreds of thousands in dollars in municipal aid shows principal engineer Hoggath Stephen wasn’t listed as municipal engineer in any of the applications the city of Trenton submitted to the state Department of Transportation for three of the past five years.
The revelation that Stephen’s name doesn’t appear on the municipal aid applications suggests he may not have been responsible for putting them together and submitting them, as city officials have suggested.
The documents, obtained by The Trentonian through a records request, also show top city officials, including the mayor, knew about and were kept informed of past municipal aid applications.
But emails exchanged between city officials and DOT further muddy the waters about who is ultimately responsible for the blunder.
One email suggests Stephen was, in fact, the “municipal engineer” who would have been copied on a solicitation letter DOT sent out to leaders in municipalities across the Garden State, undercutting the city worker’s claim the letter never reached his desk.
For now, the city has chosen not to address The Trentonian’s findings.
Controversy
Questions arose about Stephen’s culpability in the funding gaffe when a generically addressed July 24, 2017 solicitation letter sent by the state Department of Transportation to leaders from municipalities around the Garden State surfaced indicating copies of the letter were mailed to Mayor Eric Jackson and the “municipal engineer” for the city of Trenton.
Stephen faces stiff consequences, including possible expulsion from a city post he’s held for more than two decades, for allegedly neglecting to file the 2018 municipal aid application that caused Trenton to miss out on a considerable chunk of $161 million handed out to 505 municipalities around the state.
Applications submitted by the city don’t indicate who was responsible for submitting the applications through DOT’s online grant management portal, System for Administering Grants Electronically (SAGE).
The municipal aid applications the city submitted to DOT in 2014, 2015 and 2017, however, list Francis Goeke of Lanning Engineering in Hamilton and Arthur Elias of Keller & Kirkpatrick in Morris Plains as municipal engineers, not Stephen.
Neither one returned phone calls requesting comment about whether in their designated capacities as “municipal engineer” they submitted past municipal aid applications or whether that duty fell to Stephen, who is also listed on the city’s website as the acting director of the division of engineering and operations.
The records obtained by The Trentonian exclude applications for fiscal years 2016 and 2018 because Trenton didn’t submit a municipal aid application for 2018 municipal aid, an oversight Mayor Eric Jackson dubbed a “debacle.”
Also, the 2016 application paperwork was missing from documents released. But a memorandum addressed to the public works director explained the reason for the missing application.
City principal traffic analyst Anthony Santora’s memo to public works director Merkle Cherry regarding urban and municipal aid funding the city received dating back to 2014 indicated he attached all applications from DOT’s SAGE, except for the municipal aid package for the 2016 Ferry Street project which wasn’t “showing in my SAGE page.”
Municipal Aid Applications
The municipal aid applications are standard templates, requesting the same information every year.
That includes a description of the project the funding would go toward, estimated cost of the project, applicant information and a signature page bearing “title of presiding officer who will be signing this application/agreement.”
In the application information section are entries for the grantee, date the application was initiated and names and contact information for the mayor, city clerk and municipal engineer.
The 2017 application, for example, listed Mayor Jackson, city clerk Richard Kachmar and Elias as municipal engineer, with an initiation date of Feb. 3, 2017.
The signature page indicating who is responsible for signing the application said, “mayor,” indicating Jackson would have known about the municipal funding applications since the documents show he signed off on them in years past.
That is bolstered by a 2017 resolution approving the submission of the municipal aid grant application, which reads in part, “The mayor is authorized to enter into an agreement with the New Jersey Department of Transportation for the above project if funding is approved.”
In a Feb. 3, 2017 memo, Santora wrote to Cherry advising him DOT “recently informed the city that applications were being accepted for fiscal year 2017 municipal aid funding. The city applied for the funds for the reconstruction of West State street between Calhoun Street and Prospect Street.”
Despite the revelations, and the implications of them, the city refused to make officials available to answer questions over the Jackson administration’s highly controversial funding flub or the lone-wolf theory with Stephen as badguy culprit.
Last week, The Trentonian asked city spokesman Michael Walker to make Cherry available for an interview about the findings from the documents.
Walker said Cherry couldn’t talk because he was leading storm cleanup efforts.
The Trentonian repeatedly tried to set up an interview for Monday to which Walker directed a newspaper reporter to “submit all your questions in advance.”
When The Trentonian declined to do so, Walker shut down any interview with Cherry.
Fall Guy
A day after The Trentonian broke the story about the cash-strapped capital city losing out on the municipal aid, Santora reached out to DOT representative Kyle Skala on Feb. 20 to determine who was listed as the city’s “municipal engineer” in a database the state transportation agency used to generate the solicitation letters.
Copies of the July 24, 2017 solicitation letter were mailed the Mayor Jackson as well as the “municipal clerk,” “municipal engineer” and “county engineer,” according to a copy of the letter obtained by The Trentonian.
That fueled speculation that Stephen may have overlooked the crucial correspondence as the mayor suggested in a television interview last month. Jackson – without mentioning the employee’s name – lambasted the worker during the interview and indicated there’d be discipline for the “debacle.”
The records indicate that the same day Jackson’s interviewed aired on Feb. 21, Skala emailed Santora back letting him know, “The engineer that we have on record is Hoggarth. Our database gets updated every year and on a rolling basis whenever changes are brought to our attention.”
In an email the next week, city spokesman Walker doubled down on the mayor’s previous comments telling The Trentonian the employee would be punished to the “full extent that New Jersey civil service rules allow.”
Stephen – who was later outed in a piece by Trentonian columnist L.A. Parker that detailed his past scrapes with city brass – acknowledged in an exclusive interview the city rung him up on disciplinary charges, including neglect of duty.
He felt officials – facing heat from the public – unfairly portrayed his role in the gaffe to make him the fall guy. He promised to “fight till the end” for his job.
It’s unclear if Stephen has retained an attorney to fight the disciplinary charges. The city declined to comment on whether it has commenced internal disciplinary hearings.
Critics of the lame-duck mayor believe blaming Stephen was the mayor’s way of shifting blame to insulate him and his public works director Cherry, who has his own history of missing out on grant funding.
Sting of Loss
The documents show a yearly breakdown of municipal and urban aid funding.
Lessening the burden caused when Trenton missed out on the municipal aid was the $584,950 urban aid award doled out to the city this year.
The award, which was determined by the New Jersey Department of Community Affairs, was more than double the $283,444 that Trenton received in urban aid last year. This year’s urban aid award was the biggest in recent history and substantially more than any municipal aid award Trenton received over a fouryear period starting in 2014, the documents show.
The city averaged roughly $319,000 in urban aid over the same timeframe, the documents show.
DCA spokeswoman Tammori Petty attributed the substantial increase in urban aid to the honeypot doubling to $10 million for fiscal year 2018.
“Thus, every UA town should have gotten a sizable increase over last year,” she said. “It wasn’t just Trenton.”
City officials have refused to say whether they petitioned Gov. Phil Murphy for more urban aid to offset the loss of the municipal aid.