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By RICHARD PEARSALL
Courier-Post Staff
The revolving door between the transportation industry and New Jersey's Statehouse spun freely during the Whitman years, with former Transportation Commissioner Frank Wilson leading the way.
Wilson's job talks with prospective employers in the private sector while he was still transportation commissioner led to an investigation by the state's Executive Commission on Ethical Standards.
In a separate matter that was not investigated, Wilson almost single-handedly engineered approval of the South Jersey light rail line, then left to take a job with the firm that did the feasibility study and preliminary design of the line.
Others followed where Wilson led, moving in both directions through the revolving door. No questions, however, were raised about their ethics.
Frank Russo, the head of NJ Transit's Office of New Rail Construction under Wilson, resigned in 1998 to take a job with Raytheon, the Lexington, Mass.-based construction giant.
Russo's office was created by Wilson to oversee projects like the South Jersey line and the Hudson-Bergen, the state' s other light rail project. The Hudson-Bergen is being designed, built, operated and maintained by Raytheon.
Jeffrey Warsh, the current executive director of NJ Transit, moved to that public post in 1999 from his job as public relations executive for The MWW Group, in East Rutherford, a PR firm working on the Hudson-Bergen line for Raytheon. Before going to MWW, Warsh was a state assemblyman and member of the Assembly Transportation Committee.
James Weinstein, the current state transportation commissioner, was president of Riverfront Associates, a Trenton-based public relations firm, when he was tapped by Gov. Christine Todd Whitman in 1999 to head the transportation department.
Representing casino mogul Steve Wynn, Riverfront successfully lobbied the state to build a $330 million highway tunnel from downtown Atlantic City to the marina district, home of Wynn's Mirage casino.
New Jersey officials are not prohibited from discussing employment with companies they're doing business with, nor is there any requirement that a period of time elapse before they join such a company.
Only two restrictions apply to sitting state officials:
•They are not to initiate employment talks.
•If they are solicited, they must report the contact to their superiors and recuse themselves from any further state business with their prospective employer.
Frank Wilson recused himself from the Nov. 26, 1996, vote by the NJ Transit board of directors approving the South Jersey Line.
A week later he joined Daniel, Mann, Johnson & Mendenhall, a Los Angeles-based engineering and construction services firm, as a corporate vice president.
Daniel, Mann, Johnson & Mendenhall, which goes by its initials, DMJM, performed the study that concluded the Camden-to-Trenton line was feasible. It has since gone on to secure contracts for a total of $72 million worth of work on the South Jersey project.
Wilson went on to become president and chief executive officer of DMJM, a post he held until October, when he became president of AECOM Technology Corp., DMJM's parent company.
Both DMJM and Wilson deny there was any conflict, and no question about a conflict was ever raised before the state Executive Commission on Ethical Standards.
"Before I talked to anyone about employment, I sought the direction of the ethics commission. Basically, I notified the world what I was doing."
And when he did have a discussion with a prospective employer, Wilson said, "from that day forward, I had nothing to do with any project that firm might have with the state."
At the time Wilson was talking with DMJM about employment, the attention of Democrats in the Legislature and the ethics commission was focused on his talks with other prospective employers. These firms were involved with a bigger and more visible project, the installation of E- ZPass on state toll roads.
In the E-ZPass case, a bidder on the state contract, Lockheed-Martin, charged that Wilson had been talking about employment with other firms in the running for the contract.
The ethics commission investigated the charges at the request of state Sen. Richard Codey, an Essex County Democrat.
In 1997, Wilson agreed to settle with the the commission by paying $1,200 - $300 for each of four charges that the commission concluded had some merit. He denied any wrongdoing.
Codey said the settlement was a "slap on the wrist" and little more than a cost of doing business for an executive on the rise.
The maximum penalty Wilson faced was $2,000, or $500 a count. And that would have involved turning the case over to the attorney general's office for prosecution.
Rita Strmensky, executive director of the ethics commission, said she has urged the Legislature to raise the fines to make them more of a deterrent, but has not had any success. She said penalties haven't changed in 30 years.
In a recent interview, Wilson said it was his recollection that DMJM was called in to design the line, not to decide if it were feasible. The record shows that DMJM was hired to do both.
Under New Jersey regulations, hiring an engineering firm to study the feasibility of a project it could profit from does not constitute a conflict of interest, state officials say.
The Federal Transit Administration said it discourages such connections on any project it funds. But the South Jersey line does not involve any federal funding.
New Jersey law does prohibit ex-employees, while in their new jobs, from working on projects they participated in as state employees. A violation is punishable by a fine of up to $5,000 and six months in jail.
Strmensky said there is no evidence that provision was violated.