Mayor: ’09 Campaign Contributions Weren’t Illegal

Haddonfield Mayor Jeff Kasko said this week that none of the contributions to his 2009 campaign for borough commissioner were illegal.

The illegality was with a Monmouth County engineering firm’s secret reimbursement of employees who donated to politicians, the mayor said in taking issue with a July 9 Haddon Patch report.

A quarter of the $8,283 Kasko raised for his successful maiden run for the Board of Commissioners has been cited in a criminal indictment against Birdsall Services Group. The company pleaded guilty to reimbursing contributions made by employees to political campaigns around the state, including Kasko’s in 2009.

The donations were $300 or less, and, as such, did not need to include the names of the donors on state campaign finance reports. The scheme, and reimbursements, kept Birdsall’s involvement off the books until the pay-to-play operation was uncovered.

Kasko maintains the donations to his campaign, a total of $2,100, were legal, but the reimbursement by Birdsall were illegal. A headline in Haddon Patch last week said: “Jeff Kasko Denies Knowledge of Illegal Donations to 2009 Campaign.”

Kasko says that headline and story were misleading.

“I am especially concerned about the use of ‘illegal contributions’ three times right at the beginning of this piece, which strongly infers that I or my campaign did something wrong,” Kasko said in an email last week. “We did not.”

Kasko was re-elected to the borough Board of Commissioners in May and subsequently appointed mayor by the board.

The new mayor also said claims in the Patch article that he was “not aware of contributions funneled illegally to his 2009 campaign for borough commissioner” were not correct.

“Not accurate at all,” Kasko said. “I did not discover anything recently and never said this. And there were no illegal contributions.”

But when asked during a phone interview on June 28 about contributions in his 2009 campaign the mayor said he knew the majority of his donors but not all.

“I obviously had no idea Birdsall or anyone else was doing this. You can’t do that and they got caught.”

A recent report in the Star-Ledger uncovered ledgers of payments to Birdsall employees who made the contributions and were reimbursed by the company, a violation of state campaign financing laws. The Star-Ledger called the donations “secret contributions” that many political candidates may not have known about.

The scheme created a “perfect political machine” that skirted the law for years, the newspaper noted.

No politicians have been charged with wrongdoing.

The state's Division of Criminal Justice Corruption Bureau obtained a nine-count state grand jury indictment in March charging Birdsall Services Group and several employees and shareholders.

The company pleaded guilty to money laundering and making false representations for government contracts. Under a plea deal, the firm paid $1 million in criminal fines, plus another $2.6 million in civil fines, and is banned from public contracts for a decade.