It's that time again budget season in New Jersey, which means all the pundits and advocates the business and industry leaders come out to ask for their share.

Senior political correspondent David Cruz sat in on the first budget hearing of the season to see who's showing up and who's asking for more.

Like the start of baseball season, with which it roughly coincides.

The first day of budget season draws enthusiastic audiences, eager lobbyists and leaders of nonprofits and trade groups.

It's standing room only, and there's a cheerfulness to things.

And then the hearings begin.

That's when things get real and long and often repetitive and predictable.

This year's budget is far worse.

We have a $585 million.

Economic impact on the economy.

And, Chris, I'm going to I'm going to bring you up altogether.

South Jersey based businesses are being taxed for public services that they desperately want and need, but have limited access to.

The Main Street recovery fund, a critical resource for small business was cut by 66%.

It's extremely rare for any of the groups to testify before the Assembly Budget Committee.

They'll read mostly the same statements before the Senate Budget Committee next week to say that business conditions are great or that the state has given too much to their nonprofit.

It's like that in good times and bad.

Lawmakers are aware that this budget, even that $58 billion, is going to be difficult to fund in these uncertain times.

Registered some impatience and perhaps some defensiveness.

There's one thing that I constantly wonder, and I'm sure that many other people in this room do as well, and that is the additional programs that we're talking about, lowering the taxes where where possible.

Where is the offset?

We talk about needing to reinvigorate the economy with additional funds, where those funds coming from.

And I will say that if you look through and the things that were added, there weren't programing.

Yes, we had additions to county colleges and education.

Education was a big, big bucket of where we put a lot of money into, but a lot of it were capital spent, were projects for things to keep the economy going, especially in local places.

I also got a little bit of a sense of some defensiveness from lawmakers who were like, Well, we're going to have a tough time, etc.. Did you sense that, too?

And what's your feeling about that?

I, I understand the defensiveness because the Assembly Budget Committee, they they own the budget.

They own this process.

But where I would push back is that I don't think anybody's out there going to say we're a low tax state or a low spending state.

And I think finding some cuts should be doable in a way that's not necessarily impacting people.

And we shouldn't, in a state that has the highest sales, the highest property taxes, the highest corporate taxes in the nation, a very high income tax rate, a sales tax in the top third of the nation.

To say that we need another $1.2 billion in new taxes is hard to hard to justify.

It's the kind of stuff a lot of this crowd, many of whom left after their group testified, haven't heard before.

But sometimes you got to speak your piece.

That's how first time tester to William Aaron, now an advocate for augmentative and alternative communication devices, put it.

Do you think that they are listening to you when you testified today?

I don't know.

But if I don't think I can't complain, this process will run through the end of June when, if passed, budget seasons are any indication.

The governor, the Speaker of the Assembly and the Senate president will get into a room and decide after hours and hours of earnest testimony what the final state budget will look like.

I'm David Kruse.

NJ Spotlight News.