LILLEY: Retired NJEA Executive Director Adds $879K to His $7.3 Million Compensation, Courtesy of NJ Teachers

Just when you thought the last $2.5 million chapter had been written on former-NJEA executive director Ed Richardson’s lucrative career as a NJEA officer, Sunlight has learned that he was paid another $878,569 after he retired, bringing his reported career compensation to $8.2 million. By comparison, New Jersey teachers — whose highest-in-the-nation dues funded Richardson’s lavish compensation — have an average salary of $70,000 a year.

Sunlight finally obtained a copy of the NJEA’s 2020 calendar year IRS Form 990, where we learned that Richardson was paid another $878,569 in 2020, the year after he retired. As documented previously by Sunlight, Richardson’s total reported compensation as an NJEA officer had been $7.3 million, so now it’s $8.2 million.

But this $8.2 million figure leaves out Richardson’s pay for 2018 because that year’s Form 990 has not been processed by the IRS. For an estimate, Sunlight took the average of Richardson’s compensation for 2016 and 2017, which came to $410,277 — actually a rather modest sum for Richardson, who was paid $1.2 million in 2015 and $2.5 million in 2019. The resulting total non-pension compensation comes to $8.6 million, which is likely a conservative figure.

This also leaves out Richardson’s gold-plated, over-funded $5.5 million pension (per Sunlight’s calculations).

As the table below shows, all of this adds up to $14.1 million in total compensation for Richardson as an NJEA officer. This is an extraordinary amount of compensation by any measure, or as the Star-Ledger’s Tom Moran said, “Wall Street” compensation.