Report
urges dismantling of school agency
Panel calls for SCC's
replacement
Thursday, March 16, 2006 • BY DUNSTAN McNICHOL •
Star-Ledger Staff
The state corporation set up to manage a
$6billion overhaul of decrepit public school buildings in
New Jersey's poorest communities has bungled the assignment
so badly, it should be scrapped and replaced with a new
agency, a task force recommended to Gov. Jon Corzine
yesterday.
"Good riddance," was the terse reaction
of one lawmaker, Assemblywoman Joan Voss (D-Bergen), to the
suggestion to disband the troubled Schools Construction
Corp., which has been dogged for more than a year by
allegations of mismanagement and waste.
The task force recommended creation of a
new agency with a new board of directors exclusively devoted
to building schools, while turning some of the SCC's
responsibilities over to local districts and the state
Education Department.
Even as it issued its 10-page report, the
task force reported new problems within the SCC. Ongoing
delays in launching 59 projects approved for construction
last July, for instance, have added at least $135million to
their projected costs -- meaning the state no longer has
funding to complete all of the jobs.
And during a conference call, task force
members for the first time confirmed that criminal
investigations into the SCC's activities are under way, but
declined to elaborate. A spokesman for the Attorney
General's Office would not comment.
Corzine, who appointed the task force
last month, endorsed the panel's plans.
"We'll be able to bring true talent and
do a lot better job," he said during a question-and-answer
session with reporters in Teaneck. "Sometimes bringing
change will bring a greater transparency and control, I
think that's what they're suggesting in this
report."
Assembly Majority Leader Bonnie Watson
Coleman (D-Mercer) pledged her cooperation in pursuing
legislation to set up the new authority.
"The SCC turned into a regrettable
monument to bureaucratic inefficiency and waste," she said.
"The working group has put forward a plan of reform that not
only will consign the SCC to the scrap heap of bad ideas,
but will allow New Jersey to meet the future educational
needs of all its children."
Less enthusiastic lawmakers worried that
the proposed management shakeup would only further delay
work on hundreds of school projects awaiting state approval
and funding.
"I have no problem with restructuring an
organization that has essentially become defunct," said Sen.
Ron Rice (D-Essex), who is also deputy mayor of Newark,
where more than $3billion in school work has been proposed.
"But we need to do everything in our power to get projects
going now, to give children the educational opportunities
they deserve."
Assemblyman Joseph Malone (R-Burlington),
an author of the 2000 legislation that set up the school
building program, said he feared that the shift to a new
agency might mean little real reform of a program whose
mismanagement appalled him.
"It's a 'Groundhog Day,'" he said,
referring to a movie in which a man relives the same day
over and over. "We'll just keep doing the same thing again
and again and again."
Besides calling for the establishment of
a new agency, called the Authority for Schools, within the
state Treasury Department, the task force recommended that
local school officials gain more authority to manage
construction in their communities, and more responsibility
for assembling the land where the schools would be
erected.
Responsibility for doling out
construction grants to communities not covered by the court
order should be removed from the school building agency and
assigned to the Department of Education, the report
recommends.
The task force intends to report back to
Corzine on May 15 with additional recommendations and a plan
for establishing the new authority.
The proposals cap a traumatic year for
the SCC, which was set up in 2002 to manage an ambitious
program to rebuild or replace more than 400 decrepit,
overcrowded or outmoded school buildings in 31 of the
state's poorest communities in response to a 1998 state
Supreme Court order. Lawmakers authorized $6billion for the
program.
Since early last year, when the
corporation announced it would complete fewer than a third
of the required projects with that $6billion, the agency has
been subject to a relentless barrage of critical
reports.
A Star-Ledger analysis of the SCC's first
six completed schools found that extraordinarily high
professional fees and cost overruns had led them to cost, on
average, 45 percent more than 19 schools constructed without
the agency's participation at the same time.
An inspector general's review launched in
response to that report found pervasive management problems
that left the agency "vulnerable to waste, fraud and abuse
of taxpayer dollars."
And a state auditor's report released
last week found evidence that 12 private construction firms
hired to help the SCC manage the $6billion of projects
already in the works had been allowed to overcharge the
agency by hundreds of millions of dollars.
Last year, then-Gov. Richard Codey
overhauled the board directing the agency. Two chief
executive officers resigned and a nationwide search for a
new CEO is ongoing.
Earlier this week, Donald E. Moore, head
of the SCC's Division of Design and Construction since the
program was launched, resigned, saying he planned to pursue
other opportunities.
Moore's division was singled out for
criticism in an inspector general's report last year, and he
had been assigned a new boss as part of the makeover of the
school building program.
Staff writer Tom Hester contributed to this report.
© 2006 The Star-Ledger. Used by NJ.com with
permission.
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