A former Madison Twp. supervisor voted to accept a contract with a window company his daughter works for, violating the Public Officials and Employee Ethics Act, the state Ethics Commission found.<\/p>\n
Andrew Nazarenko, who served on the township Board of Supervisors for 24 years, violated four sections of the act, according to the commission, which handed down a decision Wednesday.<\/p>\n
Nazarenko suggested using $279,310 in Coronavirus State and Local Fiscal Recovery Funds for a window replacement project in December 2022, according to the order issued by the state. He discussed the proposal with his daughter, Kimberly Nazarenko, who works as director of operations for Pella Windows and Doors of Northeast Pennsylvania, and Wayne Mazur, commercial sales manager at Pella.\n<\/p>\n
Mazur emailed Kimberly Nazarenko the proposal for replacing the windows in the township building in February 2023, with the body of the email stating, \u201cKim, Please forward to your dad. Thanks.\u201d She forwarded the email to her father, who then forwarded it to the two other township supervisors, the order states. Nazarenko did not contact any other window retailers for quotes for the project.<\/p>\n
Supervisors voted in March 2023 to advertise for bids for the window project. Pella was the only company to submit a bid.<\/p>\n
Nazarenko discarded the email from Pella before the supervisors voted in April 2023 to award the company a $161,919 bid. The township paid Pella a total of $174,009 in seven payments in 2024, which was used to determine employee bonuses, including one Kimberly Nazarenko received that year. Andrew Nazarenko signed two checks authorizing the payments.<\/p>\n
Nazarenko\u2019s participation in discussions about and voting to accept a bid from Pella resulted in \u201ca pecuniary benefit to Pella Windows and Doors of Northeast Pennsylvania, a business with which his daughter is associated,\u201d according to the summary of the decision issued by the commission.<\/p>\n
The commission also found Nazarenko failed to file statements of financial interests for 2020, 2021 and 2022.<\/p>\n
Nazarenko, a Democrat, was defeated in November by Republican Jason Canjar for the seat on the supervisor board. Nazarenko declined to comment on the violations Thursday when reached by phone. He told commission investigators that he should have abstained from the vote and was familiar with the requirement, according to the order, and provided amended statements of financial interest late last year for 2020 through 2022, correcting the errors.<\/p>\n
Supervisor Chairman Aaron Sepkowski\u00a0emphasized while the ethics investigation was on Nazarenko individually and not the township, he and his colleagues on the board were upset to read about the report.<\/p>\n
He said Nazarenko should have abstained from the vote or disclosed that his daughter works for the company.<\/p>\n
\u201cEthics isn\u2019t too hard to uphold,\u201d Sepkowski said, adding such an incident is rare in a community like Madison Twp.<\/p>\n
Nazarenko agreed to pay the state $750 to settle the violations, file amended statements of financial interest with the township through the state Ethics Commission, and not accept reimbursement, compensation or other payment from the township.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A former Madison Twp. supervisor voted to accept a contract with a window company his daughter works for,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":39041,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[46,201,182,16789,139,28,178,180,179,181],"class_list":["post-205529","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-scranton","tag-courts","tag-lackawanna-county","tag-local-news","tag-madison-township","tag-news","tag-pennsylvania","tag-scranton","tag-scranton-headlines","tag-scranton-news","tag-top-stories-stt"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/205529","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=205529"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/205529\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/39041"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=205529"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=205529"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=205529"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}