Late last week, the President signed the Omnibus Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2018 into law. As we reported last week, the bill includes significant increases in some key municipal priorities.
We want to thank all of you who reached out to your colleagues in Federal office on this long-awaited, bipartisan compromise. We also want to thank our friends at the National League of Cities (NLC) for their advocacy, on our behalf, day in and day out, in our Nation’s Capital. And especially, we want to thank all the Members of our State’s Congressional delegation for their efforts to protect and strengthen the Federal-State-Municipal partnership of service to our citizens and businesses.
We’ve come a long way from last March when the new Administration proposed a FY 2018 budget that would have eliminated $54 Billion from programs that municipalities use to better serve their citizens and businesses. In response to that proposal, NLC launched its #FightTheCuts campaign. After six months of stalemate and a series of Continuing Resolutions, Congress rejected the austerity budget and approved The Bipartisan Budget Act of 2018, which increased the overall amount of federal funding available for fiscal years 2018 and 2019 by nearly $300 billion.
For more, please see our Town Crier blog post of March 29.
Contact: Jon Moran, Senior Legislative Analyst, jmoran@njslom.org, 609-695-3481, x121.