Tagged: Financing Terms

Innovation Brewing in the New Jersey Legislature

Every summer, New Jersey legislators travel to the annual conferences of the National Conference of State Legislators (“NCSL”), the Council of State Governments (“CSG”), and the American Legislative Exchange Council (“ALEC”) to educate themselves about policy innovations occurring throughout the United States. While we wait to learn about their experiences, right now is a good opportunity to focus on innovative legislation currently before the New Jersey Legislature. As of August 15, 2016, 7,068 bills have been introduced in the New Jersey Legislature, 4,379 in the Assembly and 2,689 in the Senate, and only 87 have been signed into law. The following list of bills currently in committee represent examples by legislators looking to encourage innovation in New Jersey: S158 (Madden)/A3631 (Quijano) would promote investment in New Jersey by broadening the types of New Jersey emerging technology businesses that are eligible to receive investments under the New Jersey Angel Investor Tax Credit Act; A3187 (Munoz)/ S948 (Singer) would create a program within the New Jersey Economic Development Authority that would create a pathway to the commercial market for technology developed at a New Jersey college or university. Under this legislation, New Jersey would stimulate the economy while recapturing the state’s investment in higher education; and S348 (Kean) would utilize funds from the Workforce Development Partnership Fund,...

Privately Financing the Public Good: Using Public-Private Partnerships to Inject Private Financing into Public Projects in New Jersey

New Jersey has a higher inventory of worthy infrastructure projects than it has money to fund sorely needed improvements. Although New Jersey has the seventh highest revenue of any state, the pressures of being a densely populated commuter state often impose significant liabilities on those revenues such that the State is often faced with having to choose between worthy projects because available financing is limited. One common sense solution gaining significant traction is the injection of private financing into public projects in order to relieve some of the State’s financing burdens. Often referred to as public-private partnerships or P3s, these agreements trade a limited, future revenue stream over time to a private corporation in exchange for a fiscal commitment allowing a project to put shovels in the ground. These projects can take various forms: construction of state college dormitories in exchange for rents, maintenance of highways in exchange for availability payments, or construction of a bridge in exchange for toll rights, to name a few. The State entity receives an influx of capital to address infrastructure needs and the private entity receives a long term profit from rents, tolls, availability payments, or maintenance agreements. The elegance of this type of solution is that design, procurement, and initial construction can all overlap because they are being...