On social media, during the 2021 Teaneck Council and Planning Board public input times – and now in more and more whispered discussion among residents – questions swirl around the legitimacy of the Town’s 2020 contract given to the Nishuane Group, an Essex County urban planning firm, to become Teaneck’s “alternate planners”]

This issue got very focused by Mayor Dunleavy in his Council’s 3/25/21 post-Good & Welfare soliloquy when, citing his recent discussion with the Township attorney, he categorically defended the validity of the Nishuane contract.  His statement manages to misrepresent virtually every aspect of the situation in just 4 minutes. That 4 minutes can be seen here.

But let’s be sure we call out the Mayor’s errors.

1) The winning Moving Teaneck Forward (MTF) slate was required to list the Michele Delisfort $900 contribution in its report to the State (ELEC) due on May 1, 2020.  MTF  never disclosed any contribution by Nishuane’s Managing Partner Delisfort until it was included in an amended State report on 1/21/2021. Management of this contribution was replicated in the MTF’s reporting of most other large contributors, i.e. 46 large contributor names and data that MTF failed to file before 1/21/2021. See image to the left summarizing the key contribution page from both the original (received by ELEC on 5/4/2020) and the late & amended (1/21/21) R-1 (11-day pre-election) MTF report. The Delisfort contribution is fourth from the bottom.

2) As is seen in the July 1 resolution approving the illegal Nishuane contract, Council’s own language claimed that no one from Nishuane had contributed a reportable $300+ contribution.  (See image below – or the viewer of this post may want to read the entire Council resolution approving the Nishuane contract; it states that Nishuane had submitted a proposal and had NOT made contributions that we now know it did make click here ) 

3) The Mayor claims that the “attribute rule” [sic] made the Nishuane/Delisfort contribution exactly $300 per candidate and hence legal. But in ELEC’s regulations, the “attribution rule” has nothing whatsoever to do with what is a reportable contribution. The  number of candidates in the joint-candidate slate does not change the reporting threshold because any candidate committees (single or joint) always and everywhere must report any contributor’s contribution of $300+. (click here & go to-Definitions -19:25-25.1) 

 And no contributor entity or its primary officials may make any reportable contribution to any municipal office candidate committee within a year  and still preserve its right to be a vendor eligible for receipt of a municipal contract.. That is true under both state and town codes. (see multiple statements to that effect throughout the State regulations and Town code. (For example, click here at19:25-25.2).  If the Mayor was right, then why did MTF report the Delisfort contribution in its amended 11-day pre-election report filed on 1/21/21/21?

4)  Mayor Dunleavy wrongly claims that the Town-Nishuane contract was never fully executed.  In its OPRA response seeking this contract, the Town clerk’s office described Nishuane’s contract approved on 7/1/2020 as “fully executed” and showed it had been signed on July 1, 2020 by Ms. Delisfort and the Mayor himself. (See image below for the key portions of the fully executed Town-Nishuane programmatic contract and its official attestation by Dunleavy and Delisfort.)

5) The Mayor claims that Nishuane had never actually done any work for the Town. Ms. Delisfort claimed she had been working on a review of the draft OSRP when she attended and spoke to the Planning Board on January 28 at 2hr and 24 min of the video (click here). It does appear true that Nishuane never submitted an invoice for that work – and has told the Town it does not plan to invoice it now or ever. 


6) The Mayor in the video above expresses hope for being able to persuade Nishuane to come back soon.  He apparently does not know that if the above discussion of the pay-to-pay violation is true, the Nishuane firm is now disqualified from having a Teaneck town contract for four years. (click here).

7) At the end of his statement (see video), the Mayor says: “The [MTF] candidates were completely above board in terms of how it was handled”.  If that were true, then how do we explain the ELEC record of what was/was not included in the MTF reports to the State (ELEC) and the extreme lateness of the most recent entire set of MTF reports? It was not until January 21/2021 that MTF provided that new complete set of the MTF financial and other data. And do the summary $ numbers in that new “report set” match what MTF had originally reported to the State beginning in April 2020? They don’t! In the five new reports submitted 8 months after the election, no financial #’s match what the MTF candidates and their candidate committee chair and treasurer had earlier certified to the state (ELEC) to be true. We can only speculate about why and at whose urging MTF decided to submit entirely new reports. We do note, however, that in its R-1 report for the 4th Q of 2020, MTF reported a single transaction. It reports that on December 31, 2020 it had been invoiced for a new $1500 fee from a new vendor. It is for a fee still to be paid to a new auditor whose work was characterized in that final report as being an “ELECT audit”.  MTF candidates were “completely above board”? Could it be instead that both the new audit and new reports were responsive to a State investigation? It would be useful to know if MTF officials had originally assured Nishuane and many other large contributors that their contributions would not be disclosed. 

Where can you find more info on this issue?

In addition to all of the above, we provide below 2 additional  images wherein on signed documents Nishuane’s leadership claims not to have made the $900 contribution that the very latest MTF reports clearly show they had made. 

Where can you see the complete set of 12 MTF reports – 5 of which are what ELEC calls “amended” reports? The financial and other data are significantly different in the amendments than what MTF had originally filed with the State (ELEC). Go control and click here and then on the “candidate committee” line, type in Moving Teaneck Forward and click “year” and click the 2020 option from the list. All 12 reports will come popping up, organized by when the original report for each type/period came in to ELEC and then above it the date its amendment was filed. 

To see/read the entire “fully executed” July 1, 2020 contract between the Township and the Nishuane Group – signed by both the Mayor and Michele Delisfort, click here.