Businesses are in store for some economic assistance as the governor will lay out a new spending plan with ways to help them bounce back from the pandemic.

“This is a day toward which our entire staff has been planning, working and looking forward to for the past 11 months. Those who enter the building will feel confident that our process and protocols are focused on making their safety the number one priority," said New Jersey Devils President Jake Reynolds.

After three years of back and forth discussions, the governor signed a trio of laws making good on his campaign promise.

Sole proprietors, independent contractors and self-employed individuals, applicants with non-fraud felony convictions or arrests in the past year, those who are delinquent on their student loans, and non-citizen business owners - like green card holders - can now take part in the program.

A program expanded to eight of the state's poorest cities will be aimed at helping to keep Black and Brown-owned businesses they say have been left out of federal COVID-relief programs afloat.

As of the week ending Feb. 13, 10,962 New Jerseyans filed for unemployment, according to data from the federal Department of Labor - a far cry from the 155,815 and 206,253 jobless claims filed the weeks ending March 21, 2020, and March 28, 2020, respectively.

NJ Transit’s so-called “Innovation Challenge” is aimed at garnering ideas on how to increase transit capacity between the Secaucus Junction train station which sits on the Northeast Corridor line, and the Meadowlands Complex station just outside MetLife Stadium.

The lengthy stay has resulted in opportunity loss as 2019 RFA awardees don't get any real first-mover advantage in the soon-to-be-legal adult-use market.

The governor now has until Friday, Feb. 19 to decide whether he will approve the two bills on his desk - one legalizing marijuana and the other decriminalizing it - or have them automatically become law as written.

Funding through the pre-apprenticeship in career education, or PACE training program provides education and training that prepare participants for placement into a registered apprenticeship program, into a post-secondary college or occupation-specific career training program, or into the workforce.

The governor said a continued drop in hospitalizations would inevitably trigger the loosening of more restrictions. Indeed many of the key metrics used to gauge the spread of the virus have all gone down. “But I think we will be more cautious than we otherwise would have been absent the variants,” Murphy added.

The state logged 3,786 new cases on Feb. 17 with a seven-day average of 2,804, down 48% from a week ago. The rate of transmission has been below 1 for five days and a row.