It’s seemingly a Trenton tradition: passing the state’s annual budget at the last minute, with the pressure of a possible government shutdown looming. This year saw state leaders adopt a record-setting $54-plus billion budget in time to beat that deadline, but with plenty of frantic edits to the bill as the process culminated. That led to budget committees in both chambers voting to advance the bill without actually having a copy available for all members to review, a hastily assembled score card with errors, and a lack of public comment.
“Really, at the last minute, you had hundreds of millions of dollars, totaling more than a billion dollars. We have no idea who advocated for them, where they came from. That was one big ludicrous thing, and just the process — the fact that we all voted in committee on a budget that did not exist, despite pronouncements from the other side,” said Sen. Declan O’Scanlon (R-Monmouth). “The score sheets we were given were off by a billion dollars. I know for a fact that line items changed or were added between the night we voted in committee and what we voted on Friday.”
Open-government advocates say the opaque process is harmful and embarrassing and doesn’t have to be this way.
“It’s impossible not to see that the Legislature really doesn’t want the public involved in this process … They don’t want the public to be able to see what’s going on and that’s a problem,” said Micah Rasmussen, director of the Rebovich Institute for New Jersey Politics at Rider University.
