After $15 million, what's another $64,000 a month?

New Jersey taxpayers continue to foot the bill for long-term storage of e-mails and other electronic evidence related to the George Washington Bridge lane closure scandal that rocked former Gov. Chris Christie's administration.

Attorney General Gurbir Grewal told lawmakers at an Assembly Budget Committee hearing this week that his office has been paying an outside firm as much as $64,000 a month to comply with retention rules involving the evidence from the Bridgegate criminal case and related legal matters.

Grewal, who was appointed by Gov. Phil Murphy in January, said his office is moving to rein in costs.

The attorney general was responding to questions from Assemblyman John Burzichelli, D-Gloucester, about an Associated Press report that put the latest Bridgegate legal bill tally at more than $15 million overall.

The lawmaker was incredulous.

"$64,000 a month just to maintain?" he asked.

"There's an extraordinary amount of data," Grewal said. "When I say data, I'm talking about e-mails and things like that -- electronic documents that are being stored by an outside vendor."

"Is the person sitting next to the computer with a gun?" Burzichelli responded. "$64,000 a month, that's a big number."

The attorney general said his office was in the process of "transitioning to another vendor, which will be much less."

A spokesman for Grewal, Lee Moore, told NJ Advance Media on Thursday that the $64,000 figure the attorney general referenced was being paid to the data forensics firm Stroz Friedberg.

The Associated Press report noted the company billed the state about $700,000 in 2017 and more than $60,000 so far in 2018.

"Needless to say, the attorney general was shocked when he learned about these bills and immediately demanded that our office find a new vendor that would cost less money while still satisfying our document retention obligations," Moore said.

That's a different position than the office took in 2016 when lawmakers expressed concern the state was being overbilled for legal work related to the scandal. At the time, officials there maintained the costs were reasonable.

Moore said the office recently retained a new vendor, RVM Enterprises, and was "moving as quickly as possible to transfer the data and begin realizing significant savings."

He said it would cost an estimated $9,300 to transfer the material from the old firm to the new one. But RVM Enterprises was expected to charge the state significantly less for storage, bringing the taxpayer tab down to $2,300 per month.

State officials did not immediately respond to questions about the disparity in cost between the two firms. At the budget hearing on Wednesday, lawmakers requested more details from Grewal's office on the procurement process for the storage contract.

S.P. Sullivan may be reached at ssullivan@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter. Find NJ.com on Facebook.