Local Budget Law

Local Budget Law governs how local units of government — chiefly municipalities — prepare, adopt, and administer their annual operating budgets. It prescribes the form and content of the budget, requiring anticipated revenues (surplus, miscellaneous revenues, receipts from delinquent taxes, and the like) and appropriations to be stated in separate, itemized sections, with utility or enterprise operations accounted for apart from general operations, and it fixes the amount that must be raised by taxation for local and school purposes. It also establishes the procedure surrounding adoption: public inspection of the proposed budget, transmission to and review by county and state officials, certification of the tax levy, consequences and corrective steps when a budget is approved late, authority for temporary and emergency appropriations before a budget takes effect, and rules governing which fiscal year a municipality operates under.

Editorial summary generated from the text of this act. It is not part of the statute — read the sections below for the operative language.