Kudos to New Jersey Monitor‘s Dana Difilippo for her excellent article on NJEA President Sean Spiller’s “highly unusual” campaign for governor.  We commend Ms. Difilippo and the Monitor for not being in the tank for the NJEA the way New Jersey Globe is.  Independent journalism is not dead yet in New Jersey.

Difilippo provides several important facts that will be familiar to Sunlight’s readers:

• Despite “Spiller for Governor” mailers and ads saturating the state, Spiller’s campaign has no paid staff.  We would add that’s because Spiller has raised a mere $182,000, only about 1% of the total raised by the gubernatorial field and far less than any other candidate for the Democratic nomination.  It’s March, and Spiller still hasn’t qualified for matching funds.  The Spiller campaign simply does not have the money to pay a staff.
• Spiller’s candidacy exists only because of the $22 million already spent by Super PAC Working New Jersey, which plans to spend $35 million on Spiller’s run.  We would add that $22 million was more than all the other Democratic candidates combined. 
• Working New Jersey is run by ex-NJEA Executive Director Ed Richardson (who famously became a multimillionaire off of teachers’ dues) and funded by $22 million from the NJEA’s own Super PAC, Garden State Forward. Working New Jersey is essentially the NJEA’s “Spiller for Governor” Super PAC.
• Garden State Forward is funded by teachers’ regular annual dues, as NJEA Vice President Steve Beatty has admitted to the Globe (of course) but not to teachers.  NJEA leadership has spent $22 million of teachers’ regular dues backing Spiller without teachers’ “knowledge or approval.”
• A quoted elections expert notes that state law bars Super PACs like Working New Jersey from coordinating with Spiller’s campaign. Both Working New Jersey and the Spiller are closely connected through the NJEA, of which Spiller is president. It “stretches credulity to believe the two entities are operating independently, without consultation and without any mutual discussions …”  All of which makes us wonder why ELEC is not investigating this.
• Democratic gubernatorial candidate/Newark Mayor Ras Baraka pointed out Spiller’s obvious conflict of interest: “You can’t not raise money and then have a $35 million piggy bank … and don’t believe it will have an impact … on your decisions [as governor] … Ultimately, we need to make sure we’re raising money from the same people we are going to get our votes from …”  But not the ethically-challenged Spiller.

We would add that there is an additional conflict of interest for Spiller: he’s the president of the NJEA and part of a small group of top executives that makes the spending decisions for Garden State Forward via an opaque process, according to the Star-Ledger.  As NJEA president, Spiller has a duty to spend teachers’ dues in the best interest of teachers, not on his personal political ambitions.  

Spiller’s political career has been rife with questionable ethics and conflicts of interests, so this is just more of the same.  He’s a highly controversial candidate but teachers are being forced to back him nonetheless.  Once again, Spiller wins and teachers lose.  What a scandal.