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promoted by Rosi
Although this news story didn't take place in NJ, it may as well have. This stuff goes on right here - right now. In Bergen County.
We need refresher courses in how corruption happens because, like an arms race, the bad guys are always trying new games to get one over on us.
I have tried to explain how this works to folks in the past few years, but I find this story a clear explanation of just how Pay to Play and kickbacks work when the firms in question can avoid the scrutiny given to the main contract winner in a government contract.
more below the fold |
| In fact in many cases, contractors are the very ones squeezed in this. The contractor who actually gets the bid, as in this story, is forced to hire a no-show subcontractor, or else they won't get other municipal contracts or private projects approved in that town. In NJ, it is often private projects that corruption busters aren't looking at because they are not public contracts.
The contractor who actually wins the public contract is in effect - blackmailed into paying ransom to a different no-show company because that is how the Mayor wants it. In NJ, remember, Mayors appoint all but ONE of the folks on the Planning Boards here and can make Planning Board members see things their way by threatening to take them off the Planning board. As a former member of a Planning Board, the only one NOT appointed by the Mayor, I saw firsthand the undue influence that a Mayor can have over the other members.
Unseen pressure to deny a contractor's PRIVATE jobs are used to blackmail these contractors into hiring certain engineers, attorneys, or subcontractors for jobs both public and private. They are being literally shaken down. In one Bergen County town a client of mine admitted he was called to Borough Hall to talk to someone in the Building Dept who asked who his engineer and attorney was. The contractor was then "advised" to use a specific attorney and subcontractors. He was given a piece of paper with a phone # on it and told to call "this guy".
When certain attorneys, or firms, like bad pennies, show up on Planning Board night - it is quite obvious to a compromised Planning Board what their vote should be.
This shake-down type of corruption forces up the cost of doing business for NJ contractors and consequently, the tax payers on both private and public jobs. Architects and engineers privately admit they hate the system, but they are forced to pay up or go out of business.
The thing that is so insidious about this kind of corruption is that, instead of taking a bribe envelope stuffed with cash, the Mayor's buddies are getting $$$ in the form of what looks like legitimate work given to private construction firms, engineers, architects and attorneys BY private contractors. These parasites then turn around and donate huge sums to the Mayor's campaign. Because it isn't as blatant as getting a municipal no-bid contract, it is under the radar. But it amounts to blackmail in the end, because contractors, who are usually vilified as being bad actors in the public's view of corruption, often are victims with no way to complain.
And Mayors are the enforcers and ultimate beneficiaries. They get campaign cash for making certain projects skate through approval OR NOT while the passing of cash is laundered through the private sector. Who would suspect that anyone else has the ultimate decision on who to hire as a subcontractor for a private sector job but the general contractor? In the case in this story, and in NJ, that decision is sadly often made for them - by a corrupt and greedy Mayor. |
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