It’s that time of year when special interests beg NJ lawmakers for money

TRENTON — It’s a sure sign that spring is right around the corner. For folks in the state's capital, anyway.

The Assembly budget committee has begun holding a series of public hearings around the state, giving individuals, groups and organizations the opportunity to make suggestions, plead for money or deliver a short speech about anything connected to New Jersey’s fiscal 2017 spending plan, which must be ratified by the end of June.

“It reminds us of Girl Scouts coming and selling cookies at the front door," said Brigid Harrison, a political science professor at Montclair State University. "It’s the absence of rational policymaking and the absence of budgetary decision making in which merit rather than emotion rules the day,”

While Harrison doubts members of the committee are going to change their minds about allocating significant funding based on what they hear during this process, she does think  “it enables these varied interests to get their message out to the public through the media, which may in turn put pressure on policymakers, including members of the budget committee, to consider their actions.”

Fairleigh Dickinson University political science professor Peter Woolley said the process gives petitioners the impression that they have access to their lawmakers.

"It is superficial, but it has good symbolic importance," he said. "However, it’s very likely that these complaints and ideas that people come up with will have no influence over the budget process or its outcome at all.”

Harrison believes the process is actually kind of embarrassing because people may come before the committee and essentially beg for money, but “I think that has become part of the narrative of how budgets get made.”

She said having this process played out in public is in part designed to let the public see the kinds of pressures legislators are facing and “it also allows these various constituent groups to kind of vent their needs and their interests.”

The next Assembly budget committee hearing takes place next week in Trenton.