Lobbying spending in Trenton tops $100M after recent declines

Spending on lobbying in New Jersey surpassed $100 million for the first time since 2020 last year, the New Jersey Election Law Enforcement Commission announced Thursday.

The $103 million spent on lobbying in 2024 is the second highest on record before adjusting for inflation, eclipsed only by the $106.8 million spent to influence lawmakers in 2020. The rebound, which marks the second consecutive year of 4% growth in spending on lobbying, follows a pandemic slowdown.

“My general sense in tracking these numbers is that we have settled into a more normal pattern after COVID,” said Joe Donohue, the commission’s deputy executive director.

Lobbyists must disclose communications with officials that touch on legislation, regulation, or other governmental processes. Lobbying contacts do not necessarily capture the breadth of any outreach — a conversation with a single legislator and an email sent to all 120 members of the Legislature could each be recorded as a single contact, the commission said.

Lobbying from individual groups varies based on the legislative agenda in a given year. Lobbying on marijuana and school measures surged in 2020, spurred by the legalization efforts and pandemic school closures, but both issues have since receded.

As ever, the state’s annual budget was subject to the most lobbying contacts in 2024. Apart from the budget, a bill narrowing access to public documents under the Open Public Records Law received the most lobbying attention, with 159 contacts.

Just seven of those contacts promoted the bill, which passed both chambers in narrow votes before being signed into law last June. Eleven contacts reported mixed views, while the remainder sought to block or amend the bill.

Lawmakers received 53 contacts urging amendments to the bill from a broad array of groups, according to lobbying records.

The number of contacts does not necessarily reflect lobbying spending, as salaries and compensation paid to outside lobbyists account for an overwhelming majority of annual lobbying spending, and such compensation can vary broadly between issues and sectors.

“Abortion, there’s hardly any money spent on it,” Donohue said. “And yet a couple years ago, it was the second top issue after the budget.”

Engineers Labor-Employer Cooperative Local 825 topped lobbying spending for the second consecutive year with $833,169 spent in 2024, including $620,669 in communications spending, chiefly on digital and cable ads.

The union’s lobbying focused mainly on opposition to renewable energy measures, including bills to prohibit new fossil fuel plants, make fossil fuel companies liable for damages related to climate change, and establish heat stress standards for workers, among others.

The heat standards bill, which stalled after being sent to appropriations panels in either chamber, was the third most lobbied bill of 2024.

Verizon was the runner-up in lobbying spending. The firm more than doubled lobbying spending from the previous year, to $753,036, catapulting itself up from 19th place in 2023.

The Chemistry Council of New Jersey ($673,765), the New Jersey Business and Industry Association ($643,792), PSEG ($620,501), and Horizon Blue Cross Blue Shield ($555,226) were among the state’s other top lobbying spenders in 2024.

Other top-lobbied bills last year included measures limiting packaging waste, capping medical debt interest, raising the gas tax and adding a new registration fee for electric vehicles, and imposing a 2.5% surtax on businesses with more than $10 million in profit.

Of the 10 most-lobbied bills, six have been signed into law and four have stalled in the Legislature, including the heat standards and packaging waste measures.

Teachers union the New Jersey Education Association, historically the state’s top influence spender, in 2024 continued the slower lobbying pace it first adopted in the years following the pandemic.

Analysis by the Election Law Enforcement Commission shows the union spent more than $52.5 million on lobbying between 2000 and 2022. It spent only $373,638 on lobbying in 2024.

The union was the state’s top lobbying spender in six years since 2010, but it has not breached the top ten since 2020, when its $6.3 million in influence spending won it first place.

Micah Rasmussen, director of Rider University’s Rebovich Institute for New Jersey Politics, explained that education has “not been the forefront of legislative activity for the last few years.”

“Many of the discussions in recent years have been about rebalancing state aid. It hasn’t been about an influx of new money. It’s been about shuffling money, sending it from one district to another,” Rasmussen said.