New Jersey's Department of Education has hired a former minor league baseball coach to be a $95,000-a-year community liaison, a job he won four months after his wife became head of another state agency following her efforts to help Gov. Phil Murphy win his election.

Veteran former infielder Enohel Polanco-Gonzalez is now a community liaison in the department's Office of Civic and Social Engagement where he works with community and faith groups, maintains a database of organizations and helps with department programming, the education department said. It's a department once home to a Murphy campaign aide who resigned when it was disclosed that his conviction for public corruption barred him from any state job.

His wife is Lizette Delgado-Polanco, chief executive officer of the Schools Development Authority and vice chairwoman of the Democratic State Committee. Delgado-Polanco, a former union leader long active in Democratic politics, is now under fire for her role in a staff restructuring at the authority that cost more than two dozen employees their jobs while people with connections to her and with questionable qualifications replaced them at higher salaries or in new positions.

Details of that restructuring, first reported by NorthJersey.com and the USA TODAY NETWORK New Jersey, have brought fresh scrutiny to the Murphy administration's practices.

Several lawmakers have called for a special committee already investigating the authority's hiring of former chief of staff Al Alvarez — before Delgado-Polanco became CEO — to begin looking into the authority's restructuring. And the top Democrat in the Legislature wants the authority abolished.

While most of the attention has been on the schools authority's hiring of Alvarez after he had been accused of sexual assault, the education department's Office of Civic and Social Engagement is the original source of questioning about Murphy's hiring practices.

The office had hired Marcellus Jackson, a former Passaic councilman who admitted to taking bribes while in office, a criminal violation that prohibited him from serving in state government and forced him to resign. He had worked on Murphy's campaign and was hired as a special assistant in the Office of Civic and Social Engagement at a salary of $70,000 to perform some of the same functions as Polanco-Gonzalez, according to statements from the education department.

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​​​​Polanco-Gonzalez is also part of an inter-familial web of government workers. The education department's chief of staff is Kellie LeDet. Her husband, Cory LeDet, was one of Delgado-Polanco's hires at the authority. And Delgado-Polanco's daughter works for the governor's office.



Polanco-Gonzalez, 44, was interviewed for the community liaison position by the office's director, Lavar Young, and his hiring was approved by Commissioner Lamont Repollet, an education department spokesman said. Polanco-Gonzalez has a salary of $95,000, according to payroll records.

His job duties include working with community and civic organizations and the faith-based community, which Jackson also did, but also assembling and maintaining a database of such organizations and helping with department programming. Examples of his recent work include helping plan an African-American History Month program for about 400 students and working a Saturday at an elementary school in Trenton to aid low-income students, the department said.

His resume does not list his educational background, and the education department said it does not maintain a record of job postings and job requirements.

A native of the Dominican Republic, Polanco-Gonzalez brings a key attribute to the job, the department said.

"Enohel works as community liaison, and one of his skills is that he is bilingual, so he is able to help the department with outreach to Spanish-speaking residents, who are one of the largest growing constituencies in the state," spokesman Mike Yaple said in an email.

Polanco-Gonzalez does not appear to be a replacement for Jackson. "As far as Marcellus’ title and responsibilities, they are different," Yaple said.

Most of Polanco-Gonzalez’s working life has been on the baseball field. Commonly known as "Polo," he was drafted by the New York Mets in 1995 and spent 14 years in the minor leagues, playing for 21 teams that included the affiliates of the Cleveland Indians, Colorado Rockies and Florida Marlins.

Most recently he was the bench, hitting and third base coach for the York Revolution, an independent league team in Pennsylvania. He was that team's first player-coach before transitioning exclusively to coaching, according to the team's website. He turned to coaching after suffering a spinal cord fracture in a car crash while returning home from a concert with Delgado-Polanco in 2009.

"It changed everything," Polanco-Gonzalez said in a 2012 interview with MyCentralJersey.com. "It happens — boom — and you think everything is fine, but the pain gets worse. It was hard to swing, hard to run. I was getting (medical) treatment but it didn't work. Baseball is about ability and if don't have 100 percent of your ability you can't play."

That same year, Polanco-Gonzalez became a naturalized U.S. citizen, fulfilling a goal he set five years earlier when he moved to New Jersey, he told a baseball blog at the time. That was also a presidential election year, and Polanco-Gonzalez said he planned to exercise his newly secured right.

“I could never vote in the Dominican because I was always in America during the elections. Even in May, they voted for president, but I was here. I don’t know who I am going to vote for in the election," he said. "I’m not really political, but I have to see and make some decisions. But I will vote.”

As a coach, Polanco-Gonzalez was a "major" contributor on and off the field, helping the club reach the postseason in multiple years and instrumental in bringing on "key" players, especially from the Latin-American community, the Revolution website said.

He will not return for another season now that he is working full time for the state, Yaple said.

While still playing baseball, Polanco-Gonzalez also worked for a time at the public affairs firm his wife once led, D-Solutions, as a public affairs and community relations manager, according to his resume.



The Office of Civic and Social Engagement, where he works now, was formerly known as the Office of Constituent Relations. But when Repollet took over the education department last year he "wanted to re-brand the role of office from one that suggests the department will respond to questions and issues, to one of proactively engaging a wider community," Yaple said.