After a hectic week of complications, the New Jersey State Senate and Assembly passed the Fiscal Year 2024 budget today on largely party-line votes – apparently with the necessary technical fixes adopted and no further action required by the legislature. Gov. Phil Murphy is set to sign the budget sometime later today.
The budget, which appropriates $54 billion in state funds and $26 billion in federal funds, has been under negotiation since February, with dozens of public hearings in the Senate Budget and Appropriations Committee and the Assembly Budget Committee since then.
But thanks to behind-the-scenes issues with the Office of Legislative Services (OLS), the debut of the actual budget document came down to the wire, with the two budget committees only approving it with less than an hour to spare before a procedural deadline on Wednesday evening. Legislators did not actually have the full bill in front of them when they voted on Wednesday, and the public was not given an opportunity to comment.
As the New Jersey Globe reported yesterday, the document they approved turned out to have some important technical issues. The budget scoresheet, a summary of spending in the budget, was particularly flawed, though it’s not a legally binding document.
That led to a frenzied period of discussion over how to fix the budget before midnight today, the deadline to avoid a government shutdown. Among the options discussed were passing a flawed bill today and coming back for a cleanup session sometime later in the summer, or holding an emergency committee hearing and staying until the early hours of tomorrow morning to pass the bill.
The ultimate solution, though, turned out to be relatively undramatic. Most of the budget’s technical issues – which were apparently more minor than was reported – have already been resolved, according to Democratic legislative leaders, and Murphy will issue select line-item vetoes to fix any remaining problems.
“I’m happy to report this evening that the technical errors that have been reported in the press have been corrected,” Senate Budget Chair Paul Sarlo (D-Wood-Ridge) said on the Senate floor. “There is no need to amend this budget. The budget before you is a final document.”
Republican legislators still noted their objections to the budget and the process that led to it, saying that spending is too high and that transparency needs to improve in future budgets.
“[The process] was a mess,” State Sen. Declan O’Scanlon (R-Little Silver) said. “Blaming OLS doesn’t really work… We should have gotten all of our information, all of our resolutions, weeks before, so we weren’t going down to the last minute before we’d end up technically with a government shutdown.”
Nine Republicans ultimately voted for the budget, most of them moderate Republicans from competitive districts. State Sens. Vince Polistina (R-Egg Harbor), Jean Stanfield (R-Westampton), and Bob Singer (R-Lakewood), and Assemblymembers Don Guardian (R-Atlantic City), Claire Swift (R-Margate), Beth Sawyer (R-Woolwich), Michael Torrissi (R-Hammonton), Brandon Umba (R-Medford), and Sean Kean (R-Wall), all supported it.
Every Democrat present voted for the budget, as expected. Among them was State Sen./former Gov. Richard Codey (D-Roseland), who returned to the legislature today after a period of absence.
Murphy issued a press release last night indicating that he would hold a ceremony to sign the budget sometime today after both houses of the legislature had approved it. Once he does, New Jersey will officially have a budget in place for Fiscal Year 2024.
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