In our spotlight on Business Report tonight.

New Jersey has an approved budget for the 2025 fiscal year, but the details of that budget are still unknown.

What is known is that $600 million was added in the final days of negotiations, pushing the state's total to a record $56.7 billion.

But lawmakers haven't yet revealed where those dollars were dedicated and who is benefiting from them.

Budget and finance writer John Reitmeyer has been pressing lawmakers for more details and he joins me now.

Jon, great to have you here.

What do we know?

What don't we know about the 600 million that was added at the end of the budget process?

That got us to a historic $56.7 billion?

Yeah, that's right.

It's great to be with you today.

So we know the grand total and we could probably guess who the sponsors are, but we don't actually have the documentation that is submitted by lawmakers when there's this flurry of activity at the end of June where the the total size of the budget tends to grow.

We don't usually see it go down at the end.

And we know from looking at the budget itself that there were hundreds of additional line items put in at the end of June.

We know what they added up to, but we don't know importantly who sponsored them.

We don't know the reason these items made it into the budget.

What, if any, argument was made to get funding to these types of line items?

And then also importantly, we don't know whether the lawmakers who added the funding who sponsored these items had any conflicts.

So do they do they work with somebody at an outlet that got increased funding?

Do they have any family ties?

Anything like that?

They're supposed to fill out a disclosure and that's supposed to be made public.

And that's one of the things we still don't have.

Yeah.

What does state law require in terms of the timing of those disclosures and when lawmakers have to present the details of their budget?

Well, the state constitution really sets a deadline for when the budget itself has to be enacted and signed into law.

The disclosures are part of legislative rules, but there's a history to these rules.

They were created in response to some corruption scandals that occurred in the mid 2000 where we actually had lawmakers go to jail over corruption that involved the state budget.

And you're talking about the Senate Budget Committee chair at the time, Wayne Bryant.

That's right.

He was one example where they wrote these rules and followed a different process early on, right after.

And it seems as the years have gone by, the lawmakers have sort of gotten away from following this procedure as strict as they may have at the beginning.

And so now we're not getting these things until weeks, even months after the budget comes out, instead of getting these disclosures prior to in the budget as enacted.

In your reporting, you highlight that Republicans have long called for more disclosure.

They are not in control of any faction of government here in New Jersey at the moment.

What would they like to see?

And does this need to be a legislative response?

Yeah, and we should make clear that this is a time honored tradition in Trenton to Democrats since they've become the majority, have invented this idea of inserting a lot of last minute spending in.

But the Republicans now in the minority, would like to see these types of things disclose before the budget is adopted.

So lawmakers, when they're voting on the budget, they're seeing what the explanation is for these added items.

Maybe they agree with it, but they just don't have that opportunity now because it comes out well after the budget itself is enacted.

So I don't want to speak for the Republicans, but I know they've been calling for disclosure ahead of time and those explanations to be made public.

Specifically, is there any details that you can share right now about some of those pet projects that were approved?

Well, we know the items themselves and we're waiting on those sponsors and some of the other things.

But we know some examples.

There are funding for parks.

There are funding for soup kitchens and food banks.

Ballpark.

Scott Funding.

Hundreds of items.

Some of them ranging from several hundred thousand dollars up into the millions.

So we have a good sampling of the items themselves and they do make it into the budget bill before it's enacted.

County colleges were in there as well.

Exactly.

And that's the type of thing.

Remember, lawmakers constitutionally do write the budget bill, so it's within their rights to add things that they think are priorities that maybe weren't a priority for the governor.

It's really the disclosure and the transparency of the process that's gotten away from practices from, say, almost two decades ago, where, again, now we're finding this stuff out well after the fact.

And again, that that gives lawmakers no opportunity to look at those justifications and to see if anyone has a conflict of interest in real time while they're voting on the budget.

All right, John Reitmeyer, great stuff.

Thanks for coming in.

You're welcome.