Corruption was rampant at a nonprofit entity that managed 35,000 acres of watershed for Newark, New Jersey, with the executive director secretly writing checks to herself and squandering public money in high-risk margin trading, state investigators reported last year, Bloomberg News reported yesterday. The Newark Watershed Conservation & Development Corp. filed for bankruptcy, and its trustees have now placed blame for the mismanagement on 18 people. They include Cory Booker, who was mayor of Newark before joining the U.S. Senate in October 2013, and Representative Donald Payne Jr., who was City Council president before entering Congress in 2012. Trustees of the watershed sued Booker, Payne and the others in bankruptcy court for their role in the misappropriation and waste at an entity that got almost $10 million a year to manage the city’s reservoirs and water-treatment plant. The lawsuit, filed Nov. 6, drew heavily on a February 2014 report by the state comptroller’s office, which said that from 2008 to 2011, “the NWCDC recklessly and improperly spent millions of dollars of public funds with little or no oversight by either its board of trustees or the city.”
