Republican Members of the Assembly Budget Committee said on Tuesday they will focus their efforts during the budget process in the next three months on making significant spending reductions, but they said those reductions must be fair cuts targeted at wasteful and unnecessary spending.
“Our responsibility is to look at the budget the Governor has proposed and find ways to make it better,” said Assemblyman Joseph Malone, R-Burlington, Ocean, Monmouth and Mercer. “Our challenge is to make changes to this budget without doing anything to exacerbate our fiscal problems, and our goal should be to pass a budget this June that will actually help get our state back on the right fiscal course.”
The budget committee hearings opened on Tuesday with revenue forecasts from the non-partisan Office of Legislative Services (OLS) and the Treasurer. The revenue projections indicate that there may be $134 million less available for the FY2009 budget than was anticipated when Governor Corzine addressed the Legislature in February.
“Today’s revenue projections only reinforce why it is vital that we go beyond the level of cuts proposed by the governor and make even deeper cuts to this budget,” said Assemblywoman Alison Littell McHose, R-Sussex, Morris and Hunterdon. “This means finding additional areas where we can eliminate spending, but it also may mean replacing some counterproductive cuts the governor has proposed with cuts that will have a real long-term impact on getting our budget under control.”
Assemblywoman Marcia Karrow said that she is concerned by the impact the Corzine budget will have on rural areas of New Jersey with cuts in aid to small towns, cuts to State Police coverage for rural municipalities, and the elimination of the Department of Agriculture.
“A serious effort at cutting spending would involve fair cuts across the entire state budget that ask everyone to share the burden equally,” said Assemblywoman Marcia Karrow, R-Hunterdon and Warren . “It is not acceptable to protect funding for unnecessary state programs and for large, inefficient urban municipalities while squeezing rural and suburban regions of the state for more money. All cuts must be fair and defensible. These are neither.”
Referring to reports that the Corzine administration moved $300 million in funding off-budget so that it wouldn’t be included in the $33 billion budget figure the governor announced in February, Assemblyman Declan O’Scanlon, R-Monmouth and Mercer, said that dealing with the budget problem will require an honest assessment of the problem.
“We are facing a very complex and difficult fiscal situation and the only way we can tackle this problem is by making significant spending cuts,” O’Scanlon said. “That means making real spending cuts, not playing games with the books to make the budget appear smaller than it actually will be next year.”