lawmakers are edging closer to the deadline to finalize New Jersey's annual budget At 58 billion Governor Murphy's spending proposal is the largest in state history and it's likely to look quite a bit different once the legislature is done making their changes to it A couple of key programs could take a hit in order to pay for it For more on that I spoke with our budget and finance writer John Wright as part of our under the dome series Uh John here we are It's mid June Uh still no budget bill introduced What are you hearing when might we see this thing i'm basically hearing hurry up and wait You know we're at the part in the budget approval process where we know things have to happen by a certain time or we have a state government shutdown So we know what's going to happen We just don't know when it's going to happen yet on the calendar And we don't know key things like will there be tax hikes how much are we going to spend how much money is going to go to direct property tax relief We know what the governor's proposed because that has been out for quite a while now We just don't know where the lawmakers are going to land with the specifics when they come forward with an actual spending bill which has yet to be introduced Yeah The governor's called for about a billion dollars in new taxes but there are some programs like Stanj uh which are are new and I'm wondering is that what's holding things up are you hearing that that's where negotiations are maybe stalled or or still in the midst of it i'm not hearing to that level of specificity although it's not an area that we shouldn't be looking at because the state's preparing to spend $600 million uh on a on a new program uh largely to benefit senior homeowners at the higher income level And that's drawing a lot of attention from other groups in New Jersey who are raising concerns about how costly it is for people who have not yet gotten to the achievement of owning a home and maybe not at the income levels that some of these seniors are at So there is a little bit of a tugof-war publicly There was just a report that came out suggesting that that program be scaled back but I don't know that that's necessarily one of the sticking points A lot of times lawmakers and the governor like to take these negotiations down to the wire Yeah For reasons that seem after the fact pretty trivial So we'll we'll we'll just have to see how it plays out this year Um one item that will not be trivial is potential federal cuts especially to safety net programs Is there a plan does the state have a plan are lawmakers talking about building that in to this budget to help fund things like Medicaid it's a really good question and I think right now the plan is to have a robust budget surplus which is sort of a savings account in case cost shifts do occur Uh and we don't know what is going to happen yet in Washington DC but from everything we're hearing it looks like the state could have a really hard decision to make in a few weeks which could be either tell a lot of people you won't get things like health care or food assistance or if the state wants to continue to provide those things those costs which total in the billions get put onto the state So I think the idea is to keep a big surplus But when we just talked about proposed tax hikes lawmakers are not very happy This is an election year for the assembly to embrace some of these tax hikes So the state has been for the last few years spending more than it takes in in taxes That's partly why Murphy wants to enact tax hikes If lawmakers reject them that puts pressure on the same surplus that might be the safety net for whatever happens at the federal level Sure Which by the way then all of this could be blown up No Because of changes at at the federal level It would it would be a big big problem for the state to have to take on even as they're trying to figure out their own uh problems Let me ask you very quickly with the time we have left Um this time of year we see last minute add-ons We call it pork we call it Christmas tree items we have all kinds of nicknames but these are things that lawmakers that are priority in their districts sometimes pet projects What are you hearing there yeah not too much right now And it'll be really interesting to see sometimes the restored funding the add-ons for things like county colleges So we have to keep that in mind as well Often for these PET projects there just might not be enough money for him this year All right John Wright's reporting on our website njspotlightenews.org John thanks for coming in You're welcome Under the Dome is made possible in part by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting a private corporation funded by the American people