Singh defends record against ethics criticisms
Senate candidate insists accusations in probe have no merit
BY CHRIS GAETANO Staff Writer

Seema Singh

SOUTH BRUNSWICK - Democratic state Senate candidate Seema Singh said that the accusations of ethics violations during her tenure in the state government have no merit and serve only to distract voters from the issues.

Singh, of South Brunswick, has been assailed repeatedly with accusations of improper behavior since her campaign began in June, centering mostly on an ongoing investigation from the State Ethics Commission. The initial complaint, filed in December of last year, says that when Singh worked in the state government in 2003 as the ratepayer advocate, she hired her former chief of staff, Leora Mosston, as a consultant shortly after Mosston's retirement, with a significant pay raise bolstering her government pension.

Singh said that while she did, indeed, hire Mosston as a consultant shortly after retirement, it should not be construed as evidence of any impropriety. Mosston, she said, was hired as a consultant to help her deal with an intense caseload at the public advocate office that Singh simply could not handle alone, because, she said, she lacked the proper resources to do so.

"I had two choices: help the consumer or tell them to just go away until the department was formed," Singh said. "As an advocate of the consumer, I wanted to serve the consumer, and I chose to make sure they were assisted."

Singh explained that former Gov. Christine Whitman had dissolved the Department of the Public Advocate (DPA) during her administration, dealing its responsibilities to various other places within the executive branch. When the moves were made to reform the office by then-Gov. James McGreevey, legislation that would bring its various parts back together under the department's central umbrella needed to be passed.

While waiting for this to happen, Singh said, she had been appointed to deal with the multitude of cases the department would ordinarily handle, if it had existed. During this interim period, she had a large caseload to attend to and needed help to get through it all. To this end, she hired Mosston, who Singh said already had a great deal of experience and knowledge in working with the types of cases required.

"Do you hire someone with 30 years of experience or find someone new who is not experienced? She was highly qualified and already there under the previous public advocate, and she had dealt with cases such as the ones we were being confronted with. … I went by her qualifications and experiences and having dealt with similar experiences and cases," Singh said.

Mosston ended up working at a rate of $125 an hour for about three years, which is how long it took for the DPA to formally revive. Singh said that the process took much longer than she had expected and was initially told it would only take a couple of months.

Singh said that Mosston had actually been paid less than most privately contracted consultants at that time and also had no benefits, since she was no longer a government employee. She pointed out, for example, that Mosston had to pay for her own health coverage. Still, when the bureaucratic dust settled, the contract ended and Singh had the resources she needed.

"Once the [DPA] was re-created in 2005 and, you know, there was legislation and funding, she left because now we had the [DPA] to take care of those issues. She just stayed in the interim to help," Singh said.

Hire of consultants common

With this in mind, Singh finds the ethics investigation surprising. It is common practice, she said, for consultants to be hired by the state government to perform certain duties.

"People hire consultants all the time. In state government consultants are hired by every department. The ratepayer advocate's office has consultants and they hired consultants before I even got there, as they needed them, and that can save money for the state," she said.

She said that she does not know the person who filed the complaint, D. Anthony Bullet, a former chief accountant with the Division of the Ratepayer Advocate, and has also not yet received any official notice that she is under investigation.

Ingrid Reed, of the Eagleton Institute of Politics, based out of Rutgers University, said that it is common practice for the state government to hire consultants from the private sector to perform specific jobs, even at a higher cost than one might expect for a salaried worker, but that strict guidelines also exist for how to do so.

"It's not unusual that someone, a consultant, would get more money than one would think of as a salary, but that's because you're not providing the space and equipment and everything. But the important thing is, were the rules followed, does this purchase of the assistance or talent follow the state guidelines," Reed said.

The institute's associate director, John Weingart, said that there are also places for former government workers to do consulting work for their former employer.

"There certainly are people who work in government and leave government service and go to work for a private company that does work with government in one way or another. … There is nothing wrong with that and it is perfectly understandable," Weingart said.

Weingart, however, expressed reservations about the concept of hiring someone as a consultant into a job that might seem too similar to one they recently left.

"If a person is doing a state job and retires and then gets rehired to do the same or similar job through a consulting job, it ends up costing the public significantly more money to do the same job, and it seems to me to be wrong," said Weingart. "The notion that someone is working for the state, retires, collects their pension and then is hired privately to do essentially the same job is pretty close to double dipping and seems to me to be wrong."

He went on to say, though, that the nature of the hiring process for civil servants does make the use of consultants easier in many cases and, in some, cheaper.

"In the state system … the hiring process is often very cumbersome … and there is then certainly a temptation to use consultants instead, because it's quicker and sometimes does save money. If you know you're hiring a person for a finite period of time, you can do that more easily under contract sometimes than you can where you hire someone in a civil service position," Weingart said.

Denies improper campaigning

Singh also answered a charge from her opponent that she had attended a fundraiser for a candidate in a district not taking part in the Fair and Clean Elections (FACE) pilot program both she and her opponent are taking part in. The accusation was made in response to Singh criticizing her opponent, Bill Baroni, because his name was on the invitation for a fundraiser in a non-FACE district. Baroni said that she had gone to a fundraiser for Assemblyman Upendra J. Chivukula (DMiddlesex Somerset). Singh asserts that this is false.

"I did not go to any Chivukula fundraiser as a Clean Elections candidate," Singh said. She said she did happen to be in the same building as the fundraiser sometime in April, but that she had been there to make arrangements with the staff for an event of her own.

Singh had also faced criticism for accepting campaign contributions from several utility companies during the primary, but she has asserted in the past that this does not represent a conflict of interest, saying that she has a record of defending the consumer from the utility companies. As one example, she said she was key in stopping the merger between Exelon and PSE&G.

"That would have been 900 jobs lost," Singh said .