They warned NJ needed to borrow billions. Now there’s a booming surplus. What happened?

Pitched as a ‘last resort,’ borrowing nearly $4 billion to deal with COVID-19 made a significant boost to the bottom line

They warned “winter is coming” and said then-President Donald Trump’s administration deserved “shame” for not sending New Jersey more robust federal aid.

Democrats who control both houses of the state Legislature last year said they needed an emergency borrowing issue — bypassing the constitutional mandate for voter approval — as a “last resort” to deal with the COVID-19 pandemic. Their goal: address what Gov. Phil Murphy’s administration was calling a “historic fiscal crisis.”

But now the state’s fortunes are nowhere near as dire as predicted. A revenue collapse that at one point was being forecast by Murphy to be on par with the Great Depression has not fully materialized.

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