NJ Spotlight is reporting that there was a little mix-up by the Office of Legislative Services: turns out that the OLS’s original estimate of how much money it would take to fully fund our 31 needy Abbott districts was off by about $52 million. It will take $447 million, not the $500 million originally estimated and, ergo, ordered by the State Supreme Court. From the OLS letter dated yesterday:
We have been reviewing the assumptions and formulaic operations of our simulation. It appears that the original simulation had an error in the part of the formula that calculated the at-risk weights for certain districts. The effect of this error was to overstate the full cost of SFRA for the former Abbott districts in FY2012 by $52 million or 1.2%. As a consequence, it is our belief that complying with the term of the court decision will require the appropriation of $447 million above the level required in the Governor’s Budget Message.
