Buried in New Jersey's nearly $23 billion budget was a well-deserved nugget of gold for South Jersey's arts community. New laws in the mammoth budget restore arts funding parity - something that hasn't been a priority for the New Jersey State Council on the Arts, which doles out government funds to cultural groups.

South Jersey can thank the diligence of its legislative delegation, which held together to ensure that this inequity would be abolished. And what better way to get the funding restored than to bargain with the state's budget on the table?

For too long, the Arts Council has unfairly treated South Jersey arts groups, directing a disproportionate amount of cash to those groups in the North. This region was supposed to get 25 percent of the funds the Arts Council had to distribute.

It failed terribly to meet its mandate, and perhaps not by accident.

As the Courier-Post reported in April, the state budget' s loose wording gave the Arts Council enough wiggle room to divert more than $495,300 of South Jersey's money to arts groups in North Jersey.

The Arts Council even had the chutzpah to dish out cash to North Jersey groups for them to stage shows in South Jersey; as if there aren't scores of South Jersey groups to perform in their own neighborhoods.

Outrageous!

Come to think of it, what South Jersey got wasn't golden at all. It merely was given what was due. This wasn't a case of legislators bringing the spoils home during an election year. This was a case of South Jersey's representatives standing up for what their region deserves.

When Secretary of State DeForest B. Soaries Jr. last month released the results of his investigation into this matter, he confirmed the inequities on which the Courier-Post reported. But he didn't go so far as to call for more stringent rules.

No matter.

South Jersey lawmakers confronted this issue head on, and didn't waste any time to ensure that cultural groups in the southern part of this state would not be mistreated by a geographically biased state arts bureaucracy.