Sensing that a newly formed legislative committee to investigate Gov. Phil Murphy’s hiring practices was coming at him like a “locomotive,” Jane F. Kelly called the governor’s office in November to warn of another potentially damaging matter.

Kelly, a vice president in charge of ethics at the Schools Development Authority, told the governor’s top ethics official that the agency’s new chief executive, Lizette Delgado-Polanco, had hired many employees with personal and political connections outside of the normal process and against her advice.

“I’m thinking I’m going to help him. I’m going to call there, I’m going to alert them that this is happening, they’ll get right on it, they’ll fix it and avoid an issue,” Kelly said in an interview. “I thought it was a serious matter and that they would take it seriously.”

Instead, Murphy's office told Kelly she could follow the process for handling personnel matters and file a written complaint.

At the time Kelly said she called, Murphy and his staff were facing fresh criticism for hiring former aide Al Alvarez as chief of staff at the schools authority after he had been accused of sexually assaulting a woman during the 2017 gubernatorial campaign. The Select Oversight Committee had just organized and was preparing to begin hearings into Murphy's hiring practices.

In February, NorthJersey.com and the USA TODAY NETWORK New Jersey first reported the staff restructuring under Delgado-Polanco, detailing the connected and unqualified hires. The day after the report, Murphy said: "We had already been ahead of the story trying to figure out what has gone on there."

The governor's office declined to answer questions about what Murphy knew about Delgado-Polanco's hiring and when. The office also declined to answer any questions about which staff members were alerted to Kelly's warning of potentially illegal hirings of family members and friends.

As governor, Murphy has broad powers over independent authorities like the SDA, where nearly $12 billion borrowed in the past decade to build schools now costs taxpayers $1 billion a year in debt payments. Murphy can shut down action by vetoing minutes and appoint or remove board members.

Beyond the by-laws, Murphy or his staff could have spoken directly to Kelly or Delgado-Polanco, whose union ties and past position as vice chairwoman of the Democratic State Committee were crucial to Murphy's victory. She resigned from the authority and state committee in the wake of the scandal.

The only known action the administration took was to hire a law firm, at $200 an hour, to conduct an investigation that has taken all year and has no known end date. All the while, Delgado-Polanco continued to hire staff.

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Since February, the Network has found – independently and without coordination with Kelly – that Delgado-Polanco hired people outside of the normal hiring process, brought on employees who lacked basic qualifications and the authority created job descriptions for workers months after they were hired.

In the Alvarez case, like this one, Murphy officials deferred to a process they thought was best suited to address the concerns being presented to them. But Murphy has also said "the buck stops with me."

Former Gov. Tom Kean, Kelly's first boss in government, agrees with that platitude but said that anytime an issue of ethics or illegality was raised in his administration, "the instructions were to get it right to me."

"In the end the governor is responsible and anything that reflects badly on the administration is eventually going to reflect badly on the governor," Kean said. "The governor’s got to be aware and decide himself."

The Murphy administration’s response to such a serious allegation “was contrary to anything I’d ever experienced in the past,” Kelly said. In the months since she made her report to the administration, Kelly said she has felt like a "pariah” whose integrity has come under attack.

'The governor's got a locomotive coming at him'

The intent behind her complaint was to help Murphy, Kelly said. And she was not the only person to notify the administration. One of the two dozen employees fired in September told Murphy's office shortly after she was let go that people were being hired improperly, according to multiple people with knowledge of it.

Another employee who was fired raised concerns to the authority board in November about "grossly negligent management" by Delgado-Polanco, including hiring someone with no relevant experience for his job. And in December that former employee asked the board to intercede. A lawyer from the governor's office attended both meetings, according to minutes.

As the authority's ethics officer since 2008, Kelly said she understood that new CEOs typically bring between one and three people with them. Delgado-Polanco was different.

Kelly has acknowledged that she participated in discussions about firings under Delgado-Polanco, but had "no involvement" in the three dozen people she hired.

After learning that Delgado-Polanco's nephew worked for one day in September and that her cousin and the mother of her grandchild were also coming to the authority, Kelly said she thought, "I had better give them a 101 here on what they can and can’t do."

Kelly said she sent an email to Alvarez, and later forwarded it to Delgado-Polanco's assistant, detailing the hiring rules and procedures. Alvarez said the authority would follow the advice, Kelly said, but over the next several weeks more than two dozen people with connections were hired at high salaries and outside the normal process.

The oversight committee was about to begin hearings into administration hiring practices, and Kelly said she anticipated that what happened at the authority could damage Murphy more than the hiring of Alvarez and others with questionable backgrounds had.

"I was clear to them: I’m trying to help you," Kelly said. "The governor’s got a locomotive coming at him."

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She called the governor's office on Nov. 26 to explain the hiring under Delgado-Polanco. Kelly wanted to remain anonymous, she said, because she was concerned about retaliation.

The governor's chief ethics officer, Heather Taylor, followed up four days later after consulting with the Attorney General's office and told Kelly she could file a complaint. Kelly said she initially thought that if the governor’s office "did not understand the urgency of the matter," she should take it as a sign not to take it on herself.

But the hiring under Delgado-Polanco was “so bad,” Kelly said, she filed a complaint on Dec. 5. An administration official not authorized to speak about the matter because of confidentiality rules said a law firm retained by the state began working on the complaint on Dec. 26.

A legal agreement obtained by the Network shows the Morristown law firm Carmagnola & Ritardi was hired Jan. 10 to investigate a whistleblower complaint, billing $200 an hour.

Kelly said she expected that instead of hiring an outside firm that would spend months investigating at taxpayer expense, the administration would be able to look into her claim and promptly determine there had been improper hiring. From the time Kelly called the governor's office until investigators showed up at the authority on Feb. 26, Delgado-Polanco had hired five more people, according to records.

Mahen Gunaratna, Murphy's communications director, said in a statement: "As the governor has said from the outset, these matters were previously under review by outside counsel. We look forward to these reviews concluding soon.”

Feeling 'in the crosshairs'

Kelly has spent most of her career in government. A graduate of Seton Hall Law School, she was a legal assistant to former governor and Supreme Court Justice Richard Hughes before joining the Kean administration in 1984. She was executive director of the New Jersey Utilities Association, an assistant commissioner in the Department of Environmental Protection and general counsel to South Jersey Industries before becoming vice president at the schools authority in 2008.

It is not her normal style to talk to the media, Kelly said, but she recently came forward because she has felt “in the crosshairs” at the authority and her integrity has come under attack.

“In the end, all you have is your good name,” Kelly said. “I have no choice. I went through the proper channels.”

After alerting the administration in November, Kelly said her life “started to become really difficult.” She was functionally “cut out” of her duty overseeing the department that deals with the Open Public Records Act, Delgado-Polanco would not speak to her and staff avoided her, she said. Delgado-Polanco did not return messages seeking comment.

“I was really a pariah,” Kelly said. “I couldn’t even do various aspects of my job.”

One longtime employee, Karen Clark, was moved out of the human resources department two days after she’d been seen speaking in a hallway with Kelly. Clark was moved into the construction department, a field she said she has “no experience” in.

Clark was replaced as a human resources generalist by Jenna Arcila, the daughter-in-law of Delgado-Polanco’s friend and deputy chief of staff Patricia Arcila Cabrera. Arcila had no college degree or experience in human resources before then, and her last job was operations assistant at Bloomingdales.

In recent weeks, Kelly has been accused of tampering with a former employee’s file, a criminal offense. She has denied the claim and sued that former employee in response, accusing him of defamation.

Rob Nixon, the chairman of the authority's board who ordered an internal audit of the personnel decisions, has worked with Kelly since joining the agency in 2010.

"I don't know that I've worked with a more competent professional in state government. Her integrity is unquestioned to me," Nixon said. "I have found in a lifetime of working in government when people speak truth to power, sometimes power doesn't like it."

Other people who have worked with her have come to the defense of Kelly.

Kean, the former governor, said in an interview that "she was clean as a whistle, there was never anything but praise" for her as his assistant counsel. Don Guarriello, another authority vice president, has worked with her for 11 years.

"She works hard and is very ethical," said Guarriello, who signed a memo in March disputing an assertion by Delgado-Polanco that hiring was done in consultation with him, Kelly and other executives. "She does what she thinks is the right thing to do."