in our Spotlight on Business Report a nice bump for governor Murphy as lawmakers start the budget review process treasury officials are now expecting to collect about 3.7 billion dollars more in Revenue this fiscal year than the originally forecast that money is thanks to consumer spending and wage growth and will be in state coffers by June I'm joined Now by budget and finance writer John reitmeyer to talk about where this cash infusion will go hey John good to see you so a bit of good news for the governor as he rolled out his budget address this week it's always nice to have extra money this is a big pot of extra cash yeah that's right Brianna and this is the time of the year when these types of adjustments to the budget for the current fiscal year are made and so the fiscal year runs until June 30th and you know we're coming into the final crucial months of it it's just that this year the adjustments are quite remarkable in the sense that so much has been added to the revenue forecast for the the full fiscal year and I think what this shows is continued economic Tailwinds for the state which has really been on a roll at least when it comes to tax collections for really the last few years after that initial downturn occurred during the first few months of the covid-19 pandemic and so this role it appears to be continuing so it's 3.7 billion dollars how does the administration plan to spend it well what we know from looking at budget documents it's not quite so linear but we do see some adjustments that have been made on the spending Side Of The Ledger there are there's about a billion dollar in supplemental spending that's planned before the end of June 30th and was originally authorized when the Appropriations Act was approved back at the end of June and so we don't have the individual line items yet for those Appropriations but that's a pretty big number it's a small percentage relative to Total spending because the state budget is up above 50 billion dollars now but still about a billion in in a supplemental Appropriations and then we also see Governor Murphy apparently asking for more money to be deposited into a state fund that's used to address New Jersey's significant level of bonded debt yeah and that can be used to both pay down existing debt but also to pay projects on what's known as a pay-as-you-go basis so you don't have to issue that costly debt in the first place and then we also see some evidence of the the state's budget reserves being inflated already at a high level relative to historical surpluses but now pushing up closer to that 10 billion dollar Mark that we've heard the governor talk about this week well which is interesting because it's another case of More Money More Problems Republicans are saying we've got all this extra money let's give a little bit of it back to taxpayers and to people who are really shouldering the high costs of living right now any indication that the administration will consider some type of direct more direct relief I don't think we're seeing any any signs of that quite yet you know there's always a little bit of attention in terms of money that goes out versus money that comes in and keeping money socked away in reserve and really what that enables the state to do is whenever there's a downturn or a recession and revenue start to plummet it means we don't see big spending cuts when those revenues drop off we don't see things like property tax relief funding for schools held back and instead that can be absorbed because you have these big budget Reserves all right John reitmeyer for us thanks John you're welcome you can get more details on the revenue boost and the state's plans for the money by checking out John reitmeyer's full story on NJ spotlightnews.org support for the business report provided by the New Jersey Chamber of Commerce announcing its renewed Jersey business Summit and Expo March 14th and 15th at Harrah's in Atlantic City event details online at njchamber.com thank you