Worker collected OT while home faking water samples for testing, records show

The Trenton water utility worker fired for fudging drinking water data for over a year in New Jersey’s capital and its suburbs collected about 125 hours in overtime and double-time pay during his 14 months on the job, payroll records show.

Cesar Lugo submitted water for testing from his faucets at home instead of the eight to 11 locations where he was supposed to collect samples for Trenton Water Works, Trenton Mayor Reed Gusciora told the New Jersey Monitor. The utility serves almost 220,000 people in Trenton, Ewing, Hamilton, Hopewell, and Lawrence.

Lugo is now under investigation by the state Attorney General’s Office after state environmental and city officials determined he falsified drinking water data from November 2022, when he began the job, through December 2023. He was fired in January, and the utility notified customers of the monitoring failures last week.

Trenton Mayor Reed Gusciora said Lugo was tasked with collecting water samples for contaminant and quality testing on a daily basis for the utility, which draws drinking water from the Delaware River and stores it in a 125-year-old, 100-million-gallon reservoir in the city.

“He has to go into the filtration plant, report to work, then go out to various locations,” Gusciora said.

Instead, he added, “he was going home, hanging out, and then at the end of the day he would just come back and hand in water that he got from his tap water or anywhere else, you know, a bottle of Poland. He was bringing back ‘samples.’”

A neighbor tipped Trenton officials that something was fishy after noticing the same city car on the street day after day, which drove the city to investigate, Gusciora said.

“They just noticed that the guy’s car was always parked there and wanted to know if he ever went to work,” Gusciora said.

Michael Walker, a utility spokesman, did not respond to a request for comment.

It’s unclear what Lugo’s salary was. In a previous position as a laborer in the city’s water and sewer department, he made $36,708, payroll records show.

As a water sample collector and a laborer before that, Lugo filed for overtime or double-time pay almost every month in 2022 and 2023, totaling about 240 hours, according to payroll records a citizen obtained through public records requests and shared with the New Jersey Monitor.

City officials now are scrutinizing all city employees’ overtime, the first such citywide review since Gusciora became mayor in 2018, he said.

Critics say the review is long overdue.

Overtime abuse is rampant in Trenton, said Michael Ranallo, a longtime resident who co-founded the Facebook page Trenton Orbit. Ranallo discovered through records requests that a city parks and recreation employee pulled in $100,000 in overtime and double-time pay in one year alone.

Runaway overtime pay also underscores the need for city officials to ensure jobs that impact public health, like a water-sample collector, come with wages good enough to attract reliable, competent workers, Ranallo said.

“If we have money to be paying those people essentially from an unlimited well of overtime and uptime, why don’t we have the money to pay qualified and responsible individuals a competitive wage for these extremely critical positions?” he said, referring to water-sample collectors and testers.

Gusciora said officials have added oversight measures to ensure drinking-water monitoring occurs, including installing GPS trackers on city cars, directing supervisors to check on sample collectors in the field, and requiring sample collectors to document site visits with photos.

He stressed that Lugo’s case shows a failure of monitoring, not water quality. The water at the filtration plant is tested hourly — and that was done during the time Lugo was submitting fake samples, Gusciora said.

The utility has been under state oversight since 2022. State environmental officials earlier this fall accused the utility of “serious … continued noncompliance” with the state’s Safe Drinking Water Act and levied a $235,000 penalty. The department now is soliciting bids to help the utility manage and fix its water treatment plant and other operations over at least a two-year period.

The department is expected to release independent reports on the utility’s fiscal condition, organizational structure, staffing adequacy, and management early next year.