Just last November, he says, a similar survey found that the industry was planning only a 1 percent spending increase for this year.

His Government planned a 9.3 percent social spending increase in real terms for 1997.

The new estimate is down from the 5.5 percent spending increase that businesses said they planned in the previous survey completed in May.

The budget represents a 3.9 percent spending increase, the smallest since Bergen adopted the executive style of government in 1986.

It includes a 21 percent spending increase, which many consider to be unaffordable.

Back in March, for example, the respondents were forecasting a 7.7 percent spending increase over the next 12 months.

Voters there rejected a 6 percent spending increase in a $74 million budget, which would have meant raising property taxes by 11 percent.

It proposes an 8 percent spending increase and total expenditures of $44.2 billion.

Yet the district wound up cutting only two administrative positions and put forward a budget with a 7 percent spending increase, she said.

And he and others said that the budget represented a 1.9 percent spending increase from this year, one of the smallest in state history.