NJ Spotlight: A River of Cash, Analyzing NJ’s Multibillion-Dollar Revenue Streams

NJSpotlight.com’s John Reitmeyer took a deep-dive into Garden State Initiative’s new research report – Adding It All Up: An Impartial Look at New Jersey’s $117 Billion Government:

After analyzing the budgets of over 1,000 government agencies, a right-leaning think tank found that governments in New Jersey are raising more than $86 billion annually from taxes, fees and other revenues. That number does not include federal funds or the revenues of authorities and independent bistate agencies like the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey (which alone has annual operating expenses of $3.3 billion) or the Delaware River Port Authority ($301 million).

The report, “Adding it All Up” by the Garden State Initiative, was a difficult endeavor. The decentralized governing structure of the state — with its hundreds of governments, municipalities and authorities — makes it virtually impossible for residents to get a sense of exactly how much the system costs to run on an annual basis. GSI had to analyze the budgets of numerous agencies, ranging from state and county all the way down to local sewerage authorities.

Read the full report here.