City mayoral candidate's experience becomes issue

By Meir Rinde

Mayoral candidate Tony Mack has touted his experience as a school business administrator as one reason residents should vote for him in the May 11 election, given that financial management is central to serving as mayor of the perennially cash-strapped city.

But the former Mercer County freeholder has served as the business administrator of just one K-8 district, in tiny Barrington Borough in Camden County, where an audit revealed accounting problems during his time there. His contract was bought out in late 2008 or early 2009, after he had spent a year and a half on the job.

His tenure in Barrington was criticized yesterday by mayoral candidate Frank Weeden and by Lionel Leach, the political director of a state workers union local that has endorsed candidate Paul Pintella.

Leach accused Mack of a history of poor financial management in his campaigns and work. During Mack's 2006 mayoral run, city check-cashing businesses complained that Mack's payments to his campaign workers were bouncing.

"Can we trust Mr. Mack with managing a $210 million city budget when he cannot balance a campaign checkbook or a Board of Education budget?" Leach wrote. "The answer should be a resounding "NO!'"

At the time, and again yesterday, Mack attributed the audit issues in the Barrington district to an antiquated computer system that hampered his staff, and which he helped Barrington modernize. He said he left the district after the state directed small K-8 districts to stop directly funding some top administrative staff, including his own job.

"My experiences in Barrington were great," Mack said yesterday. "I got my state business administrator certification through Barrington, which is something you have to earn."

"I balanced the budget as a result of my fiscal prowess," he said. "We gave the township of Barrington over a half million dollars of savings to the taxpayers."

Copies of reports from a Camden County weekly newspaper, The Retrospect, describing Barrington's accounting problems under Mack, have circulated in Trenton political circles for months but only became campaign fodder this week. The Times confirmed the reports through interviews and documents obtained in an Open Public Records Act request.

The Barrington district's 2007-2008 financial audit, covering Mack's first year there, had five negative findings, including "inadequate controls over financial statement preparation." Paid bills and other transactions had not been recorded properly, leaving the school board misinformed about the district's financial condition.

The cause of all five findings was "Insufficient knowledge on part of business administrator," according to the audit presented by the firm Inverso & Stewart in December 2008. A consultant hired by the district was able to reconcile the transactions over a period of a few months.

Mack's $85,000-a-year contract ran through the following June, but he was given a separation agreement and no longer worked as Barrington's school business administrator as of January 2009.

Several past and current board members in Barrington did not return calls seeking comment. One former member, Larry Laskey, asked to be called back so he could make a comment, but did not answer the phone or return repeated messages.

Current board president James Cavallaro claimed he joined the board too late to know anything about the accounting problems under Mack.

"He was gone six months into my term," Cavallaro said. "Tony seemed like a very nice gentleman, very pleasant to talk to."

Bill Carle, a parent whose child attends one of Barrington's two elementary schools, criticized Mack and asked the board to fire him in October 2008, after a preliminary audit and a consultant hired by the district revealed that at least $300,000 in transactions had not been recorded properly, a school official confirmed.

"I just knew that he wasn't performing his duties," Carle said last week. "We had to have somebody else come in to clean up his mess. Soon after, he resigned."

Carle said he was particularly upset that the auditing process showed the district had a surplus of over $1 million, just as it was about to cut funding for sports team travel because it thought it was running short of cash.

"All of a sudden the money was found, and boom, they didn't have to stop the kids from traveling to other towns to play basketball," Carle said. Mack "lacked the knowledge for that position, and really fooled everyone."

Mack applied for the position in May 2007, citing among his qualifications his oversight of the county budget as a freeholder and his former presidency of an AFSCME union local in Trenton, according to a copy of his application provided by Barrington.

He was serving as a volunteer business administrator trainee in Evesham at the time of the application and since 2005 had worked as a special investigator for the state Department of Education, where he investigated complaints and audited school districts. He had previously worked as Trenton's recycling coordinator.

At Barrington, in addition to modernizing the finance system and overseeing a surplus, Mack said  he saved the district money by implementing a payment in lieu of insurance for employees.

He said he left because the district was ordered to stop funding the business administrator position from its own budget.

"My understanding of the board at the time was that they were hiring a part-time business administrator because the state basically stated to K-8 districts of a certain size that they weren't going to fund business administrator positions, and the town would have to fund the position," he said.

After Mack accepted a separation agreement, in 2009 the district hired the consultant who fixed the accounts, Carole Anne Visalli, to work 30 hours a week as business administrator, according to board meeting minutes.

In addition to Mack, Pintella and Weeden, the mayoral candidates are Alexander Brown, Keith Hamilton, John Harmon, Eric Jackson, Annette Lartigue, Manuel Segura and Emmanuel Shahid Watson.

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