State ethics board fined Trenton parking officials over insider contract deal

Trenton’s parking controversies keep piling up.

Former Mayor Tony Mack went to prison over a bribery scheme tied to a downtown garage project.

Now, four former and one current member of the Trenton Parking Authority have been fined nearly $10,000 by state ethics officials for steering a lucrative consultant contract to a former colleague, according to records obtained by The Jersey Vindicator.

The ethics case has dragged on for five years. The state’s Local Finance Board, part of the Department of Community Affairs, issued fines earlier this year to former parking authority Chair William “Bill” Watson, former commissioners Harry Reyes, Andrew Worek, and Perry Shaw III, and current commissioner Scott Rice.

A government transparency advocate who closely follows ethics cases told The Jersey Vindicator these are among the stiffest fines he has seen leveled against state public officials in such a case.

The current and former parking authority commissioners are all appealing the fines, likely dragging out the long-winding Trenton saga until “after people die,” said Micah Rasmussen, a political analyst who directs Rider University’s Rebovich Institute for New Jersey Politics.

“This is a way to escape accountability,” Rasmussen said.

Watson disagrees. He paints the ethics case as a witch hunt that began because of two power-hungry commissioners — one who later succeeded him as chair after he says the scandal marred his reputation.

“Please tell me how I benefited from this?” Watson told The Jersey Vindicator. “We had two disgruntled commissioners on the Parking Authority. Because they did not get their way, they then brought these outrageous charges.”

How it started

The ethics probe, which became public in 2021, centered on Watson, a well-known Trenton political operative and brother of U.S. Rep. Bonnie Watson Coleman, a Democrat who represents the city.

Parking authority commissioners Anne LaBate and Evangeline Ugorji filed a complaint with the Trenton Ethics Board in 2020. They alleged Watson had bypassed the state’s ethics law, which prevents agencies such as the parking authority from hiring former members for work unless contracts are competitively bid.

The law also bars former board members from negotiating or appearing on behalf of others before the same board within a year of leaving.

The Trenton ethics board hired the Maley Givens law firm to conduct the initial stages of the investigation. It focused on whether Watson tried to find a workaround to the state ethics law so the parking authority could hire fellow commissioner Perry Shaw III as a consultant.

Watson allegedly arranged for the parking authority to award a $120,000 contract to a newly created parking firm that, in turn, hired Shaw as its executive director.

That firm, KEJ Associates, was owned by Kim Jackson, who at the time was Princeton University’s parking and transportation director.

Maley Givens subpoenaed communications between the parking authority commissioners and Jackson, suspecting they had coordinated to steer the contract to Shaw.

The law firm found that Jackson formed KEJ Associates in November 2019 — a day after the parking authority advertised its search for a new consultant. A month earlier, Shaw had expressed interest in working for the board as a consultant and handed out his résumé to other commissioners at the October meeting.

Another major issue: Jackson “prominently” featured Shaw, then still a parking authority commissioner, in the bid package she later submitted, records showed.

The contract advertisement wasn’t widely circulated in trade publications, appearing only in The Trentonian for a couple of weeks around Thanksgiving 2019.

The law firm criticized the parking authority’s procurement process as not intended to attract a “large pool of applicants.”

The case languished before the Trenton Ethics Board for two years, becoming a political flashpoint that cost Jackson her job at Princeton.

As a city lawmaker pushed to abolish the parking authority and expel commissioners, they threatened to sue, claiming they were defamed by the leak of the ethics probe.

Watson and Perry later fought in court to quash subpoenas, arguing the Trenton ethics board had “poisoned” the process by not keeping the case confidential until its investigation was over.

In 2022, a state judge transferred the case to the Local Finance Board at the state Department of Community Affairs.

What happened

This May, the finance board found Watson, Reyes, Worek, and Rice violated the ethics law by giving “unwarranted privileges” to Shaw, and fined each of them $2,350.

The board wrote that Watson appointed a three-person review committee, including himself, Reyes, and Rice, to review the single bid from KEJ Associates.

The commissioners approved the contract at the Jan. 23, 2020, meeting. A week later, Shaw resigned from the parking authority to take over as KEJ Associates’ executive director, according to the records.

Shaw was fined $500 for having a conflict of interest. He appeared before the parking authority 16 times after his resignation.

Ugorji called the fines “overdue,” while LaBate said she “did what I thought was right” without concern for any backlash from Watson, a political power broker who once served as chief of staff to former Mayor Doug Palmer.

After pushing to have the finance board take over the ethics case, Watson and Perry are now criticizing the agency’s decision as flawed.

Watson said he paid about $10,000 for his initial legal defense, so he’s not cutting any more checks — especially because he believes he’s innocent.

Watson and Shaw told The Jersey Vindicator they will build defenses around the idea that the parking authority’s attorney, Michael Ash, told them the unusual contract arrangement was legal. That claim is contradicted by the initial ethics complaint.

Ash declined to speak on the record about whatever legal advice he gave commissioners.

“I didn’t go out and try to break any laws,” said Shaw, who now runs the Trenton Community Street Team, a group of city violence interrupters funded through state grants.

Asked about possible coordination with Jackson, Shaw refused to say whether they had talked before she included him in her bid.

Reyes, Worek, and Rice all declined to comment.

Rice — Mayor Reed Gusciora’s appointee — remains on the parking authority board. And that’s not changing as he still has the mayor’s and LaBate’s support.

Gusciora told The Jersey Vindicator the finance board’s fines are “excessive,” and the ethics case is “water under the bridge.”

Without explaining how, LaBate said Rice is less culpable than other commissioners and called him an “asset” to the parking authority.

‘Outrageous charges’

Government transparency advocates still aren’t happy, saying the finance board’s policies make it difficult for citizens to get justice in ethics cases.

For starters, the state finance board refused to tell The Jersey Vindicator how many pending ethics cases are on its docket, citing state law that keeps proceedings confidential during early investigative stages.

Many cases take years to decide, said John Paff, a well-known open-government advocate who shared a list of closed cases he compiled with The Jersey Vindicator.

Paff tried challenging the finance board’s policies a few years ago, pushing the agency to release some information after its preliminary investigation, similar to how police publicly file complaints once an initial probe is complete. But the agency refused, calling Paff’s arguments “unconvincing.”

In ethics cases, records aren’t made public until a month after the finance board issues violation notices. That meant Watson and the others weren’t even named in minutes of the meeting when the board approved their fines. They were referred to only as five local government officials.

Paff filed public records requests to obtain the violation notices so he could learn who had been fined. Had he not been tracking the board’s meetings, the case might have gone unnoticed.

Most fines the finance board issues to public officials are small, Paff said.

The agency usually needs “flagrant, blatant, obvious, dots-connected” evidence, as it had in this case, to show someone violated the ethics law, Rasmussen said.

As of Aug. 6, the finance board had issued more than 2,100 violations between 2024 and now, most for public officials who didn’t file annual financial disclosure statements, resulting in roughly $185,000 in fines, Department of Community Affairs spokesperson Lisa Ryan said.

But nearly 300 cases were vacated, and the finance board has collected only about $27,000 in fines over the same period.

Lawmakers would have to push to increase penalties for ethics violations, Ryan said.

Paff said there’s no appetite for that.

“TPA is only a microcosm of what’s wrong with the city, county, and state,” Ugorji said.