Budget documents show that environmental and clean-energy programs designed to reduce New Jersey household and commercial utility bills are being hit particularly hard, with about $400 million rerouted into the state's general fund.
The state raided $128 million from the Retail Margin Fund, which is generated by fees from commercial and industrial users, in the fiscal year that ended June 30, and will take $14 million under the $29.4 billion budget signed into law last week.
Greg Reinert, spokesman for the Board of Public Utilities, said the fund had never spent the money collected over the years.
Today, he said, "there's nothing left in it."
Just last year, the state enacted a law authorizing the fund to spend $60 million on combined-heat-and-power grants for businesses. The program aimed to help the state develop 1,500 megawatts of cogeneration capacity by 2020.
Assemblyman Upendra Chivukula (D., Somerset), a primary sponsor of the 2009 law, criticized the shift of $15 million in stimulus money to fund the cogeneration program as a one-shot fix.
The fund is paid into by business customers "who are hurting with higher energy costs. By taking their money away and not giving it back to them, to balance the budget, it's totally inappropriate," he said.
Chivukula grilled the sponsor of the bill authorizing the diversions from that and other environmental funds on the Assembly floor during last Monday's marathon legislative session. Yet Chivukula provided one of the handful of Democratic votes needed to pass the measure, citing "the spirit of bipartisanship."
"Given the dire circumstances we're facing in New Jersey with revenue shortfalls, we have little or no choice" but to look to other areas "to make this budget balanced," Assemblyman Joseph Malone (R., Burlington), the bill's sponsor and a previous critic of budget raids, told Chivukula.
