SUMMIT — Todd Barretta moved to New Jersey from Connecticut 18 months ago to become NJ Transit's first chief compliance officer.

Now, Barretta has faced bankruptcy, foreclosure and extended unemployment. He's burned through all his savings, and he's had to enroll his son in the state's public health insurance program.

Why? The 38-year-old blew the whistle on the dysfunctional agency, and he says he paid for it with his career.

"At the end of the day, I’m a liability," Barretta said in an interview with NorthJersey.com and the USA TODAY Network New Jersey. "I never, ever intended to be that."

Gov. Phil Murphy spent $1.3 million on an audit of NJ Transit that reiterated many of the troubles Barretta publicly testified about to state lawmakers more than a year ago.

The audit showed that the agency had become highly politicized under former Gov. Chris Christie and structured its hiring practices to favor applicants with connections to the governor's office rather than experienced professionals. Such practices had contributed to an exodus of senior supervisors and depressed morale among those who stayed.

The audit also showed that the agency had no strategic planning, was deficient in procurement and technology and needed to improve its customer communication.

Barretta had told lawmakers the same thing when he testified in August 2017 to a joint oversight committee investigating NJ Transit after the fatal Hoboken Terminal crash.

"It’s great that it’s vindicating," he said. "I can barely feed my kid right now. No one wants to hire me because of it."

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Not only did the Murphy administration never consult him during the audit, its Attorney General’s Office is also representing the agency in a lawsuit against him.

The Christie administration sued Barretta soon after his testimony.

Because the Attorney General’s Office represents the agency in legal matters, the Murphy administration is in the awkward position of defending its predecessor in court.

"They’re still spending money and resources fighting Governor Christie’s battle," Barretta said.

Both NJ Transit and Murphy's office referred questions about Barretta's treatment to the Attorney General’s Office. The office did not respond to requests for comment.

Set up to fail?

Barretta took the $175,000-a-year job at NJ Transit in February 2017 thinking he would be able to help the agency identify its weaknesses and fix them.

"It was a crazy-good opportunity," he said. "They told me they wanted me to improve the organization."

So Barretta went into the trenches.

"My position was supposed to give me unfiltered access to employees, down to the ticket collectors," he said. "I sat on trains coming home. I talked to everybody who was on that train."

But when he brought what he found to the agency's senior leadership, they told him not to rock the boat or write anything down. He was told to mark documents "confidential and privileged" to circumvent New Jersey's Open Public Records Act.

If the agency's management wanted Barretta to succeed, it would have been hard to tell.

Barretta said he was never given a budget. For the first six weeks, he had no computer in his office. He even resorted to stealing office supplies from other departments until a secretary caught him.

"I couldn’t even buy a $2 notebook," he said. "I worked there for six months and I couldn’t charge a dollar to the company for anything."

When he tried to have a phone line installed for a fax machine in his office, at the cost of $27 a month, he was denied. The fax machine was supposed to help employees send complaints to Barretta confidentially. The Federal Railroad Administration uses a similar system so railroad employees can flag safety and organizational issues confidentially.

Instead, the fax machine sat there, disconnected.

Barretta was also supposed to have unlimited use of a company car. For the first few weeks, he used his personal vehicle for company business.

Eventually, he did get a company car, and he used it for personal errands as well as company business. Later, NJ Transit would use that as justification for his firing.

"I didn't ask for the car," Barretta said. "They threw the car at me."

The last straw

In spite of warnings from NJ Transit management, Barretta continued to raise issues as he found them. Eventually, he was barred from speaking to lower-level employees.

The last straw may have been in an executive session in June 2017.

Barretta argued that the agency's $30 million reserve for legal expenses related to the fatal September 2016 Hoboken crash was too low. He became vocal in the meeting, backing up a board member who thought the amount should be at least $50 million.

However, the $30 million was recommended by the state attorney general. After the meeting, Barretta said, Steve Santoro, then the agency's executive director, called him into his office and chastised him for challenging the attorney general's recommendation.

Barretta said Santoro told him "to shut my mouth."

Barretta was demoted, then fired the next month.

His successor, Christine Baker, came from the Attorney General’s Office.

NJ Transit potentially faces massive legal exposure for the Hoboken crash, which killed one person and injured more than 100 others.

As NorthJersey.com and the USA TODAY NETWORK New Jersey has reported, there are currently 45 lawsuits that have been consolidated under one case in Hudson County, with another dozen that could be included by the time it goes to trial. The plaintiffs are seeking tens of millions of dollars in damages from NJ Transit.

Both Barretta and Murphy's audit recommended that NJ Transit retain its own general counsel instead of relying on the Attorney General’s Office to represent it in court.

"There are so many conflicts of interest here," Barretta said.

In addition to opposing Barretta in the lawsuit against him, the Attorney General’s Office is preparing to defend the very hiring practices under Christie that Murphy's audit faulted.

Cases heading to trial include a whistleblower lawsuit filed by Paul Oliva, a former compensation director who claims he was fired for raising concerns about hiring discrimination, as well as an age discrimination lawsuit filed by Neil Yellin, a former deputy executive director who claims he was pushed out in favor of a Christie ally.

Barretta had filed a whistleblower complaint with the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration, but has since dropped it. Instead, Barretta is relying on the state Conscientious Employees Protection Act for his defense.

"They sued me in state court first," he said. "There’s no doubt about their liability under state law."

Personal toll

Barretta can hear the trains from the back porch of a small house he and his son share with his girlfriend and her two sons. They're stopping at the station in Summit, where, in one of his first acts as governor in January, Murphy ordered the audit of NJ Transit.

The crumbling, century-old concrete retaining wall in the station is a symbol of the agency's deterioration Barretta initially found and Murphy's audit later confirmed.

Nine months later, Barretta said he could have better spent the $1.3 million cost of the audit fixing those problems.

Instead, he's broke. NJ Transit won't take him back, and no one else will hire him, either.

"No one’s ever going to hire someone who’s going to blow the whistle," he said.

Barretta said if he had only himself to worry about, he would do it all again. But considering the impact on his family, he's not so sure.

"I wanted to show my kid that doing the right thing is what you have to do, even if it means personal sacrifice," he said. "That’s why no one else says anything. They made an example of me."

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