Meanwhile, the gears keep turning in Trenton.

With budget hearings underway this week, key executive branch officials are testifying before the legislature starting with the state treasurer today who faced tough questions about how the Murphy administration plans to spend more than the state will take in during the next fiscal year.

Senior correspondent Joanna Gagis reports.

The governor has outlined his proposed budget for his fiscal year 2025, And now it's our responsibility as the legislature to have a robust overview of it.

The Assembly Budget Committee got to ask some hard questions about the governor's proposed budget during a hearing today where they heard testimony from the office of Legislative Services and directly from State Treasurer Elizabeth Maher Muoio, who highlighted key funding efforts for the next fiscal year.

Being the first to fully fund the K-12 school funding formula.

The proposed increase of 9 to 908 million in Formula aid brings the total investment to $11.7 billion.

And Governor Murphy fully funding the pension payment.

A $7.1 billion investment.

Would bring Governor Murphy's total pension contributions to $39.9 billion, more than triple the total contributions made by the previous six administrations combined.

Muoio also highlighted property tax rebate programs like Anchor and Stay NJ, a property tax freeze for seniors who remain in the state all while keeping a surplus in the budget.

When Governor Murphy first took office six years ago.

We inherited a budget that included a surplus of less than 2% and one that allocated a small fraction of the required pension payment.

Even though this budget does have a $6.1 billion surplus, it doesn't meet the recommended 12% surplus that states should have.

According to the office of Legislative Services.

And that topic took up much of the discussion today.

The end of the road for the current financial trajectory is looming on the horizon.

The anticipated 6.1 billion FY 25 closing surplus, which represent only about 11.1% of total recommended 4025 expenditure from the General fund and the Property Tax Relief fund.

The last three budgets have had a structural deficit of you're spending more than you're bringing in, which is a start.

That's how you define a structural deficit.

If we continue in this manner and indications are that we may do that, would you agree that in two years we would be in a financial crisis.

If we didn't take more efficiencies, if if we took no more cuts to the budget?

As I said, we we put $1,000,000,000 in cuts in this budget.

Assemblywoman Carol Murphy questioned the Treasurer on one of those cuts, 20 million to community colleges.

Could you just talk a little bit how we can justify that $20 million cut to our community colleges, especially when we are still dealing with affordability issues?

I think overall in higher ed funding, we've got 3.144 billion.

This budget proposes we've heard many, you know, remarks already today about the issue of the structural deficit that we have to address and everything else.

That and it goes into putting these numbers together.

And this is one you know, another one of those tough decisions.

Another major topic was the corporate transit fee, a proposal that could raise nearly $1 billion for NJ Transit.

But so far, no bill has been introduced to guide how that money would be spent.

How of the billion dollars that we collect in this upcoming budget are we how are we helping transit in this upcoming year, and are we going to find ourselves in years in difficulty with the fact that we didn't allocate this money towards transit.

For the corporate transit fee?

A lot will depend on the legislative language that we work on together.

And a lot will depend on how the legislature works with Treasury to iron out the details of what actually remains in this proposed budget.

In Trenton, I'm Joanna Gagis NJ Spotlight News.