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Rep. Tom Kean Jr. (R-NJ) used his perch as a state policymaker to benefit from the changing makeup of New Jersey’s energy production.
In New Jersey’s elections this year, everyone wants to say they’re running against the state’s political machine, which has been significantly hobbled under the weight of indictments and legal battles.
In the Seventh Congressional District, Democrat Sue Altman has run on her substantial anti-corruption record at the state Working Families Party, taking on those same machine figures. She’s running against Republican incumbent Tom Kean Jr. (R-NJ), a longtime state legislator and scion of a political dynasty.
Kean has responded by saying he’s actually the real anti-corruption reformer, citing his Senate run 20 years ago against Sen. Bob Menendez (D), now convicted on bribery charges, and his vote to expel disgraced Republican congressman George Santos.
For Kean, depicting himself as a reformer is a way to try to dress himself in moderate’s clothing, by claiming he’s willing to go after both parties.
But his record says otherwise, especially when it comes to the entanglement of his personal financial portfolio with energy markets. Based on financial disclosures, Kean holds significant stakes in ongoing offshore wind projects set to receive tax subsidies from a state program that he helped set up when he served in the state legislature.
When discussing his bipartisan work, Kean often brings up environmental causes he’s championed in the Garden State, like preserving open public lands. It’s an issue he says he picked up from his father, a former governor of New Jersey known for his conservationist bona fides, which led Kean Jr. to serve at the Environmental Protection Agency during the George W. Bush administration.
On energy, he supports an “all of the above” approach, to make it easier for both renewable and fossil fuel production. In particular, he has backed offshore wind, a sector that New Jersey has been eyeing for years. Amusingly, Donald Trump, whom Kean has endorsed for president, declared at a campaign rally in New Jersey this year that he would specifically end offshore wind.
BUT THERE’S A LONGER BACKSTORY. Kean has used his perch as a policymaker to cash in on the changing makeup of the Garden State’s energy production.
When Kean served as the Republican minority leader in the New Jersey state Senate, he initially showed very little interest in the emerging renewable-energy market. For most of his career, Kean has taken campaign cash from oil and gas companies and voted accordingly on a host of his donors’ legislative priorities, a pattern that’s continued during his time in Congress.
But in 2010, Kean was approached by Adam Zellner, a former official at the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection and political adviser who’d left government to help private-sector companies navigate the bureaucracy he’d grown intimately familiar with.
The consultancy Zellner set up, Greener by Design LLC (GBD), specialized in the new market landscape for clean energy to help companies tap emissions trading systems, carbon offsets, and other market opportunities.
Along with another state lawmaker on the Democratic side, Kean took a 10 percent stake in GBD for $100,000. The potential conflict of interest was reported on at the time in the Newark Star-Ledger and raised eyebrows in the state.
Shortly thereafter, Kean played a key role in shaping these markets he had recently invested in. As a state Senate leader, he worked across the aisle by sponsoring a bipartisan bill to foster a homegrown market for offshore wind. The bill, the Offshore Wind Economic Development Act, exclusively did so by offering government subsidies to new market players with few strings attached.
The way it worked is by setting up an offshore wind certification program called OREC to work with companies for project approval along the coastline. With certification, the companies operating these projects would be able to access a new $100 million tax incentive program overseen by the state’s Economic Development Authority.
In the years that followed, GBD expanded its footprint in the state with a handful of clients. It started slowly; in his financial disclosures for the next three years, Kean reported GBD as a source of modest income, below $10,000. After that, he listed it just as a business organization in which he held an unspecified interest, but stopped reporting it entirely after 2014. Then in 2019, it reappeared on his federal disclosures as both an asset—though with no reported income—and a business position where he was an LLC member.
Yet GBD’s value and investor income jumped thanks to the very tax incentive program Kean helped set up. In part, the decade-long timeline can be explained by the fact that it took a number of years for projects to go through the certification process and accompanying permitting, both in-state and federally.
In 2021, one of GBD’s clients, Atlantic Shores Offshore Wind (ASOW), a joint venture between Shell and EDF Renewables, became one of the first offshore wind projects approved and funded through the OREC program. This year, it was finally federally approved to go live.
The same year the project was selected by OREC, guaranteeing regulatory assistance and tax breaks, GBD’s assessed value went from $50,001-$100,000 up to $500,001-$1 million. With a 10 percent equity stake, that means Kean would be netting up to $100,000 from this long-term investment boosted by his own government program, as indicated on his final registered disclosure. That one year alone would make up the cost for his entire initial investment in GBD.
Now, technically the stake is no longer owned by Kean. Once he won his congressional seat in the 2022 midterms, Kean transferred the ownership to his wife. An assortment of other investments were also put into a blind trust run by his family. But in terms of a long-running financial interest like offshore wind, that hardly makes a difference; as long as he holds the asset in GBD, it’s likely to expand in value, thanks to his past policy work in New Jersey.
In a statement to the Prospect, Kean MacLelland, a spokesperson for the Kean campaign, said: “Tom has always fulfilled strict ethical reporting standards in both the state legislature and in Congress, and fully disclosed his passive stake in Greener By Design during annual reviews with non-partisan ethics counselors, and in his publicly available annual personal financial disclosure forms.”
How Kean ended up cashing in on offshore wind is indicative of the very political process that corruption reformers in the state have tried to bring attention to for years. Public money gets allocated for certain policy goals only to end up enriching the very public officials who designed the policy. Political boss George Norcross was recently indicted for a tax break program in Camden that went to politically connected real estate developers such as his company.
It bolsters the case that the Altman campaign has made in the race that Kean has used his position for personal gain. It also makes the case for greater restrictions on representatives’ financial interests.
