The NJEA Has Created a New Super PAC to Spend $35 Million to Support NJEA President Spiller’s Run for Governor. Will NJ Teachers Pay for All of It?

Kudos to Politico for staying on top of NJEA President/former-Montclair Mayor Sean Spiller’s run for governor.  A new Super PAC, Working New Jersey (Working NJ), has filed with New Jersey’s elections watchdog, looking to spend $35 million to get Spiller the Democratic nomination for the 2025 governor’s race.  According to the filing, Working NJ’s objective is to support the election of a governor who, first and foremost, “supports public education,” which clearly points to Spiller, who was endorsed by the NJEA in record time as an advocate for public education.

Working NJ is quite obviously a NJEA front:

• Working NJ’s chairperson is former-NJEA Executive Director Ed Richardson.  As Sunlight has documented, Richardson infamously was paid $846,688 a year for 11 years as a NJEA exec, for a total of $9.3 million — “Wall Street money” per the Star-Ledger‘s Tom Moran.  The multimillionaire Richardson is an odd choice to lead a Super PAC supporting Spiller, who claims he’s running “because it’s not just millionaires and Wall Street that should have a voice.”  You can’t make this stuff up.
• Working NJ’s Treasurer is Gayl Shepard, the former-President of the Montclair Education Association, an NJEA affiliate.
• Another Working NJ officer is Steve Wollmer, former-NJEA Director of Communications.

As Sunlight previously reported, the NJEA has already spent $8 million on Spiller by giving that money to Spiller’s personal Super PAC, Protecting Our Democracy, which was widely regarded as a platform for a Spiller run. Working NJ appears to be the full-campaign version of the NJEA’s effort to elect Spiller.  Add that $8 million to Working NJ’s $35 million and you get $43 million.

Much if not all of this $43 million will come from the NJEA’s own Super PAC, Garden State Forward.  Unlike the NJEA’s traditional PAC, NJEA PAC, Garden State Forward is funded by New Jersey’s teachers’ highest-in-the-nation regular dues.  $43 million would equate to about $375 for every full-time teacher in the NJEA.  Yet NJEA leadership hides the existence of Garden State Forward from the very teachers who fund it.  So this $43 million would be spent without teachers’ knowledge or consent.

And no wonder.  As Sunlight has amply documented, Spiller is a highly controversial candidate:

• His tenure in Montclair has been full of legal troubles, conflicts of interest, strife, and discontent. It’s not a stretch to say he was a failed mayor of Montclair.
• He also has unresolved criminal liability hanging over his head in the form of an on-going, state criminal investigation of Spiller’s alleged misuse of state health benefits. Three Wildwood officials were indicted for similar behavior, and Spiller pleaded his 5th Amendment right against self-incrimination over 400 times in a deposition.
• The Star-Ledger highlighted this reality in its recent editorial: “Spiller needs to address the many legitimate concerns about his ethics, as mayor of Montclair, and as president of the New Jersey Education Association.”
• The word in Montclair is that Spiller did not run for re-election because he is so unpopular he would have lost badly.

Is Spiller really the kind of candidate New Jersey teachers would choose to support with $375 of their hard-earned money?  Too bad they won’t have a choice.