When there is still snow on the ground past St. Patrick’s Day, thoughts turn longingly to the beach. Say, the Jersey Shore. Which in turn brings to mind the extreme yet comically ham-handed efforts of Governor Chris Christie’s administration to keep secret the process that led to the controversial selection exactly one year ago of a firm to run a $25 million ad campaign for last summer’s tourist season touting the Shore’s comeback from Superstorm Sandy.

As you may recall, Christie came under criticism during his reelection campaign last summer for having inserted himself and his family into the rousing “Stronger than the Storm” ads encouraging tourists to come back to the Jersey Shore. The ads had been funded by federal Sandy recovery aid, and it seemed eyebrow-raising, at the least, for them to feature beaming pictures of a governor in the middle of a reelection campaign, rather than just your average smiling New Jerseyans. The eyebrows shot up quite a bit further when it emerged that the firm that had gotten the job and agreed to feature Christie in its ads, public relations giant MWW, had bid its labor costs at a much higher price—$4.7 million versus $2.5 million—than a well-regarded New Jersey ad firm that had also bid for the work.* Making matters even more interesting was that the award had been made by a selection committee led by Christie’s very close longtime aide, Michele Brown, whom Christie appointed to run the New Jersey Economic Development Authority, a $225,000 post. Also noteworthy was that MWW had hired just a few months earlier the former executive director of the influential Burlington County Republican Party. (It was also hard not to notice that MWW's founder and CEO, Michael Kempner, who is normally a loyal Democratic donor, was not writing any big checks to Barbara Buono, Christie's opponent, last year. MWW dismisses this fact, noting that Kempner has given far more heavily to national candidates than state ones and had raised money for Jon Corzine, Buono's predecessor as Democratic candidate for governor, only because he was a good friend.) New Jersey congressman Frank Pallone, a Democrat, in January asked the inspector general of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development to audit the awarding of the job to make sure federal contracting rules were followed.

Further raising the intrigue around the “Stronger than the Storm” ads has been the lengths to which the Christie administration has gone to keep secret the relevant documentation. When Shannon Morris, the president of the New Jersey company, Sigma Group, that came in second to MWW, last summer requested the state’s evaluations of the proposals to better understand why her firm had lost, she received almost nothing in response. “Typically when you have a state-run bid like that you have…it fully transparent, it’s all posted online,” Morris told me. “There was nothing like that in this case.” When Asbury Park Press reporter Bob Jordan made an open-records request for the scoresheets that the selection committee members filled out to rank the ad proposals, the state returned to him in January the scoresheets—with the names of the committee members redacted.

Knowing this, I was heartened to find that my own request for the scoresheets was returned to me later in January with the names of the committee members fully disclosed. I planned to include details from the scoresheets in a cover story on Christie that I was in the process of writing, but the piece’s main thrust veered away from the Sandy ads, and I decided to revisit that issue later. This week, when I went to do just that, I discovered that the Internet link the Economic Development Authority had given me for the reams of documents I had requested was no longer operable. I asked that the documents be resent. They were, and lo, this time the names of the committee members were redacted from the scoresheets. When I asked the authority’s legal officer, Shane McDougall, about the discrepancy, he replied that “if the original documents had been disseminated without these redactions, it was done inadvertently.” He added that the redaction of names was done “on the basis of the advisory, consultative, and deliberative privilege, the expectation of privacy and the protection of the competitive bidding process.”

This retroactive redaction might have been maddening were it not so ineffective: I had seen enough between what had been sent before and what was in the newly redacted documents to piece together the story behind the evaluation process. Put simply, there was no contest whatsoever between MWW on the one hand and Sigma Group and the two other finalists on the other hand. In fact, reading the scoresheets is a bit like looking at the scores of the East Bloc figure skating judges at the Olympics during the height of the Cold War.