Forensic audit: State-monitored Trenton skipped rules to spend

As New Jersey’s impoverished capital city seeks a record amount of state taxpayer aid, a forensic audit — long kept from public view — has pinpointed a pattern of lucrative no-bid work, questionable employee overtime and undocumented payments for day-to-day supplies.  

The spending involved millions of dollars from the state and took place under the yearslong watch of the state Department of Community Affairs.  

The department’s fiscal monitors, with an office in Trenton City Hall, are supposed to keep tabs on how Trenton does business as a condition of the $50 million in budget assistance. Still, the audit documented multiple flagrant conflicts with state oversight agreements, adding weight to a series of 2025 news reports in The Jersey Vindicator that first identified Trenton’s unusual procurement practices.  

Financial data, contained in public records from 2023 and 2024, showed vast irregular spending of federal, state and local funds by the Trenton Department of Recreation, Natural Resources and Culture. That department operates in part on transitional aid – a record $50.5 million this year – that state taxpayers give annually to Trenton, where one in three children lives in poverty.  

Public records show Trenton paid at least $3.2 million in federal COVID-19 relief funds for no-bid park upgrades, including a milelong project that destabilized a Delaware River flood zone; failed to substantiate much of $2.8 million in employee overtime; and reimbursed staff who used their personal credit cards, rather than purchase orders, to charge office supplies, holiday decorations, tablecloths, paint, hardware, toys and other purported city expenses. In all, $50,000 of those reimbursements – one-fourth of the total – lacked documentation, the audit found.

A forensic audit is a deep study designed to uncover financial waste, fraud and abuse, and can serve as key evidence in criminal prosecutions. No Trenton employees or elected officials, and none of the vendors named in the audit or the news reports, have been charged with wrongdoing.  

The document, dated Aug. 19, was never publicly released. It’s not clear whether Community Affairs – which ordered the examination in the wake of the Vindicator articles – had access to it. In response to multiple Open Public Records Act requests from NJ Spotlight News, the department said it had no such report. The city delayed a records request for eight months before it released the audit this month to NJ Spotlight News.  

While the audit was kept from public view, the city kept spending. For a free three-hour Halloween festival, for example, recreation paid $127,000, including more than $42,000 for the rental of a Ferris wheel and other carnival rides, plus $1,250 for a mechanical bull. Public bids and price quotes weren’t solicited because such supplies aren’t broadly available, city officials said. As many as 6,000 people attended.  

Credit: (City of Trenton)

“People in the suburbs get to go to Great Adventure. They get to go anywhere,” Mayor Reed Gusciora told NJ Spotlight News. “People who live under economically challenging conditions — they had a spectacular night that they could celebrate and bring in a sense of community. I don’t think there was anybody who felt that was a failure.”  

City Council members did not respond to emailed requests for comment on the audit. Their office phone went unanswered and the voice mailbox was not accepting messages.  

Gov. Mikie Sherrill is proposing a $95 million transitional aid increase, for a total $257 million to be divvied by about a dozen economically challenged municipalities. On Thursday, Community Affairs Commissioner Jacqueline Suarez is scheduled to appear before the state Senate Budget and Appropriations Committee for a hearing on departmental spending included in Sherrill’s $60.7 billion spending plan for the fiscal year that starts July 1.  

Transitional aid is intended as a temporary bridge while the 11 municipalities that receive it, guided by Department of Community Affairs staff, devise ways to increase their revenue so they no longer need to lean on state taxpayers. Trenton, whose first transitional aid payment was $6 million in 2010, now is seeking a record $59 million in combined transitional and capital city aid – more than any other municipality.   

At least half of Trenton’s eight square miles – once crucial to a long-gone industrial boom — are occupied by government and non-profits that are exempt from property taxes. The city gets transitional aid plus $10 million in state payments in lieu of taxes. Together, the funds are roughly 20% of Trenton’s annual operating budget.  

‘Learning experience’  

Gusciora, who is running for a third term, said that after the audit was completed, the city took steps to comply with state procurement law and follow sound fiscal practices.  

“Everything is a learning experience, and this was an instance where there were aberrations of procedure,” said Gusciora, a former assemblyman and municipal prosecutor. “We have corrected that, and we are extremely cognizant of our fiduciary responsibility for taxpayer dollars, and we have made this progress in every area, whether it’s public safety, economic development, water quality, recreation or health.”  

Lisa Ryan, a Community Affairs spokeswoman, did not respond to requests to interview Suarez, the commissioner. In an email, Ryan said it is not the job of the department’s fiscal monitors to manage Trenton.  

“This is high-level technical assistance that focuses on operational reform, adoption of best practices, and sound financial planning. It does not supplant the professional employees in municipal administration and their responsibility for day-to-day operations,” Ryan said.  

At the end of 2025, Trenton began “immediate overtime reductions” and “committed to adjusting future special event spending in 2026 and beyond, with reductions in entertainment, promotional items and food expenses,” she said. The city also is using approved vendors that accept direct payments rather than allowing employees to charge expenses.   

Finally, Business Administrator Maria Richardson “joined the city departmental approval process as a final approver to monitor progress on implementing and abiding by procurement/bid threshold and abiding by procurement/bid threshold and overtime processes.”  

All of the unusual spending cited in published reports and the forensic audit occurred while Richardson was recreation chief and, later, business administrator.   

On the ill-fated no-bid Stacy Park project, $203,000 was paid to E&E Outdoor Maintenance, whose owner’s other business, a catering company, also did business with the city. The caterer also prepared meals for private parties at Richardson’s historic West State Street mansion, she told the Vindicator last year.

For other long-neglected parks citywide, Trenton likewise failed to solicit state-mandated public bidding — designed to obtain the best price — and spent roughly $3 million more in federal COVID-19 relief funding. And Richardson’s husband, Michael Richardson, in 2025 was paid $31,250 for musical entertainment at city events, some after the forensic audit was released to Trenton officials.  

In October, less than two weeks before the Halloween festival, Richardson issued a memo to city departments saying they no longer may buy event T-shirts and promotional items without her approval and a waiver from Community Affairs’ fiscal monitor.   

“The City of Trenton is currently operating under significant financial constraints. As stewards of public resources, it is our collective responsibility to ensure that all expenditures are necessary, reasonable, and aligned with the City’s core priorities,” Richardson wrote.  

Richardson did not respond to NJ Spotlight’s multiple requests for comment. City spokeswoman Ranai Morgan did not respond to an emailed list of questions.  

No ads, no bids

The forensic audit built on many findings first published in The Jersey Vindicator.  

In 2014, Richardson settled a whistleblower lawsuit for $350,000, alleging retaliation by then-Mayor Tony Mack because she had refused to engage in contract splintering, or making vendor payments in installments that fell below the public bidding threshold. That practice is forbidden by state law.  

Richardson was recreation director and later, business administrator, while Trenton splintered at least $3.2 million in COVID-19 relief money for parks, public records show. One of the projects, the clearcutting of trees in the milelong Stacy Park on the Delaware River, was done without state environmental permits. The work further destabilized a flood zone that encompasses hundreds of homes, a state highway and the State House, and ultimately was halted by the Department of Environmental Protection, which ordered the city to repair the damage. That has yet to happen.

Gusciora said he gets “compliments every day” about clear river views from the formerly overgrown riverbank. “I was disappointed in what happened,” he said of the Stacy Park project, “but I was not aware nor was part of the process.”   

The audit highlighted how the city failed to follow state bidding law for the Stacy Park job and other parks. It noted how the purchase orders of one landscaper “bear a signature that appears visually similar to the signature commonly observed on documents with another contractor.” Some companies that worked on the parks lacked the state’s pre-clearance, and for the audit the city did not produce some documents about the job terms, crew size, work scope and pay rates. Some invoices lacked dates and descriptions of jobs completed, or repeated vague phrases such as “removed trees.”  One company’s compensation grew 50%, to $90 per hour, with no sign of who had approved the increase or why, the audit found.

“The recurring lack of documentation suggests broader issues with procurement oversight and recordkeeping practices that warrant further evaluation,” the audit states.  

Last year, as the Vindicator was reporting on the Stacy Park irregularities, the Department of Community Affairs ordered the City Council to approve the expenditures at a public meeting. By then, the money had been spent. Richardson told the council that because the series of aggregate payments were lower than the $44,000 requirement to trigger advertising and public bidding, she had believed the expenditures followed protocol.

Richardson did not respond to NJ Spotlight News’ requests for comment via phone, text and email. Her duties now include personally clearing all expenditures in excess of $100, city officials said.  

Personal credit cards

Trenton reimbursed $200,000 to about 50 employees for day-to-day purchases on behalf of the city, including snacks, laundry services, charter buses, uniforms and luncheons.

“We were informed that the city does not have a credit card or other means to make payment to vendors,” the audit stated, “which is why employees will make these purchases and seek reimbursement.”

The city lacked receipts for one-fourth of the payments, the audit found. Interim recreation chief Paul Harris personally charged $53,273.52, including $20,000 that he said was for State Police background checks of prospective employees. Harris said he used his card because the State Police wouldn’t accept city payment, the Vindicator reported last year. In response to a public records request, State Police said it didn’t maintain data about the transactions.  

Harris had no background check reimbursements in 2025, public records show. The city paid a vendor $1,920 for the service.  

Harris did not respond to requests for comment for this story via phone, text and email.  

Employees on camera  

Though Trenton subscribed to a global positioning service to track city-owned vehicles, no data were available for the cars driven by several recreation employees who were paid thousands of hours in overtime. While the city has biometric timecard software with a secure browser for workers to clock in and out remotely, “this feature does not appear to be implemented,” the audit found.   

When the auditor asked Harris how the city monitors employee hours and whereabouts, Harris said that is the role of security personnel. “For pool staff, presence can be verified, if necessary, through security camera footage installed at pool facilities,” according to the audit. The city lacks “standardized procedures for supporting and validating overtime hours,” it stated, leaving Trenton “exposed to potential compliance issues, audit findings or public scrutiny.”  

One employee who did document his overtime and double time was Harris, who as a recreation assistant was paid hourly before he became interim chief. As assistant from 2020-24 he had total compensation of $871,483, each year more than doubling his regular pay with overtime. Some years, public records show, his extra hours were equivalent to a second full-time job. In 15-minute increments he chronicled thousands of hours of “out-of-title” activities, contrary to civil service rules that bar Trenton’s unionized employees from working outside their job descriptions.   

According to those records, Harris watered drooping poinsettias at City Hall; visited city homes to make sure the U.S. Postal Service delivered information fliers that he had designed; reviewed employee drug screens; folded uniform T-shirts and organized storage closets; drained and power-washed municipal pools, inspected engineers’ work, turned off a space heater in the middle of the night and took on City Hall webmaster duties.   

At one point Harris – AFSCME Local 2286 interim treasurer at the time — wrote that he was working on organized labor contract negotiations and expressed frustration that he lacked computer access. “Trying to get data to compile accurate data without proper access is an ongoing issue,” he wrote. “Some BS. So many hours creating reports that already exist.”