Budget has major technical flaws, imperiling easy passage

There are rumblings this morning that the state budget approved by the Senate and Assembly budget committees late last night has serious and potentially fatal technical flaws that could jeopardize its passage tomorrow.

Despite little disagreement among Democratic leaders over the content of the budget itself, a rushed process to get the bill done before a procedural deadline at midnight last night resulted in multiple mistakes in the bill – mistakes which include imbalances on the budget scoresheet. Some appropriations weren’t even on the scoresheet at all; “entire line items were missing,” one person with knowledge of the proceedings told the New Jersey Globe.

With the deadline to pass a budget and avert a state government shutdown arriving tomorrow, legislators are confronted with a number of unappealing solutions.

Under the rules of the legislature, the budget needed to be passed out of committee before midnight last night in order for it to come up for a full vote by the budget deadline, which is tomorrow – hence the rush among Democratic legislators, who conducted a vote with only scoresheets and language chances in front of them.

Republicans said they never got a chance to actually see the full budget document and pilloried the scoresheets for having substantial errors, errors which were seemingly greater than the problems in the budget itself. Members of the public, meanwhile, were denied the ability to testify at all.

Given the hard deadline tomorrow, Democrats could choose to simply pass the bill they’ve got, flaws and all, and come back next week to do cleanup work. Legislators are usually loath to work over the summer recess, but it would give them some breathing room that they don’t have right now.

Another option Democrats have is to work on fixing the budget today and ask Republicans for approval of an emergency, a procedural motion that allows a three-quarters supermajority of legislators to set aside usual rules and pass a bill on an accelerated timeframe. But Republicans were quite against the prospect of an emergency vote yesterday, and they don’t sound much more amenable today.

Or the state government could simply shut down, at least for a brief period. If Democrats work out the problems today and re-pass the bill through committee, they would only have to wait until 12:01 a.m. on Saturday before they could hold a full chamber vote – an exhausting and somewhat embarrassing maneuver, but one that few members of the public would likely notice.

All of this trouble comes despite the fact that, in essence, there is little drama over the actual provisions of the budget. Gov. Phil Murphy waged a brief war against legislative leaders’ StayNJ property tax relief plan, but they came to an agreement last week, and the New Jersey Globe reported that an overall deal on the budget was completed by Monday morning.

Instead, many of the problems appear to have stemmed from the Office of Legislative Services (OLS), which struggled to put together the multi-hundred-page document in time for last night’s vote. One of the main reasons for the delays yesterday was that the OLS system went down, forcing OLS staffers to manually check the math of the budget themselves, a Herculean task.

Asked last night about the reason for the frenzied process, Senate President Nick Scutari (D-Linden) implied that he thought OLS bore some of the blame. But Republicans have pushed back on that characterization, saying that OLS did the best they could with unclear directions and constant changes coming from the Democratic side.

“Despite Democrats telling the public that the budget was done days ago and blaming yesterday’s delays and mistakes in the budget and score sheets on the hard-working staff at OLS, everyone paying attention knows the truth,” State Sen. Mike Testa (R-Vineland) said in a statement this morning. “The blame for the last-minute rush, the inaccurate score sheet, and the lack of an actual budget bill that anyone could review at time the bill was approved late last night, lies squarely at the feet of Democrat leaders.”