Determining how approximately $58 billion will be spent – which is one way to look at the current state budget negotiations — is never easy. And it’s often confusing. Especially to those not involved in the process.
That’s why Garden State Initiative recently launched “Between the Lines” — what the group is calling a user-friendly budget transparency website.
The right-of-center think tank said njbudget.com will have easy-to-use tools designed to provide transparency to the state budget for citizens and journalists curious about how and where taxpayer dollars are being directed.
GSI Chair Regina Egea – a former state treasurer – broke down the process and the need for such a site.
“Each year special line-items are embedded within the governor’s budget proposal and then, near the end of the budget negotiations, the legislature unveils their own special funding for specific nonprofits and local government projects,” she said. “Last year’s state budget was 583 pages long and included nearly five-hundred specific line items representing almost $800 million in funding for local governments and nonprofit organizations without any public process or merit-based criteria.
“Resolutions, which are required in order to explain and justify this special treatment, were not made available last year until well after the budget was adopted. Even more frustrating, these bare-bones resolutions never explain why it is necessary to direct funds to these special organizations circumventing their own government department’s review process.”
The site allows anyone to search how much their county, their legislative district, their municipality, or any individual organization receives in tax dollars from this unsupervised portion of the state budgets in 2024, 2025, and the governor’s proposed 2026 budget.
GSI President Audrey Lane said this new tool will allow for greater scrutiny on the funding of these special line items and assist citizens who want to provide feedback to their legislators on the proposed budget resolutions prior to final adoption in June.
“Last year there was much consternation about hundreds of earmarks in Trenton — that were added by individual legislators, but lacked any standard applications or criteria,” she said.
According to Lane, the project was the result of conversations with journalists and other good government advocates around the state about the limited transparency around New Jersey’s FY2025 budget, particularly in the wake of revisions to the state’s Open Public Records Act.
Lane said she hopes the site will provide more transparency around the budget and that GSI has plans to expand the site with more budget analysis in the future.
“New Jerseyans deserve to understand how their tax dollars are being directed,” she said. “We believe that this website will play a key role in providing that transparency and accountability to our citizens.”
The funding for the website was made possible by a grant from the NJ Civic Information Consortium, an independent, 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization funded by the legislature, aimed at meeting the evolving information needs of New Jersey’s communities.
