The pools got Italian ice and scuba diving lessons. The ballfields got new bleachers and restrooms. And Stacy Park, a mile-long stretch of Delaware River waterfront that fell into neglect after a highway plowed through it half a century ago, got a makeover — right up until state environmental regulators shut it down.
Trenton’s multimillion-dollar parks revival looked like exactly the kind of investment a city this poor and this long underfunded deserved. But the way it was paid for told a different story.
An investigation by The Jersey Vindicator, based on roughly 20,000 pages of documents obtained through the state Open Public Records Act, found that Trenton’s Department of Recreation, Natural Resources and Culture awarded at least $3.2 million in no-bid contracts, ran seasonal payroll $6 million over budget across two years, and allowed three employees to charge tens of thousands of dollars in government purchases to their personal credit cards — all while operating under state fiscal oversight. The city, which received a record $50.5 million in state transitional aid this year, has since agreed to hire a forensic accountant to examine the spending. None of the contractors has been accused of wrongdoing…