Lawmakers put final touches on 2017 efforts
The Oklahoma Legislature adjourned Friday with lingering questions about the budget it passed and the revenue it raised to avoid massive spending cuts.
House lawmakers gave final approval to the $6.8 billion budget bill on the last day the Legislature could meet in 2017. Senators approved the budget on Wednesday. The bill now heads to Gov. Mary Fallin, who is expected to act on it by June 9.
The next regular legislative session begins in February 2018.
Lawmakers faced a nearly $1 billion
budget shortfall.
They found most of the money but agencies still received a cut; most saw their budget reduced by at least another 4 percent after years of trimming.
Legislative leaders said they were relieved that the cuts weren’t higher.
“We took a $1 billion budget hole and somehow came up with a balanced budget you can vote on today,” said House Appropriations and Budget Chair Leslie Osborn said.
“Is it perfect? Guess what — there’s no perfect.”
Shawn Hime, executive director of the Oklahoma State School Boards Association, said he was hopeful when the Legislature first began meeting four months ago.
“Over-the top partisan bickering blocked reasonable compromise,” he said.
“During the four months the Legislature was in session, schools sustained $93.3 million in state funding reductions. Where was the outrage and urgency?”
Democrats have raised alarms about the budget since it was released Tuesday night.
Their concerns have been focused on where the money comes from; two major fundraising bills passed on the last day of session create a vehicle purchase sales tax and a cigarette fee.
If those and other measures are successfully challenged in court, said House Democratic Leader Scott Inman, the result could blow another hole in the budget, forcing automatic spending cuts.
“I am relatively confident that because of the unconstitutional way in which this budget was piecemealed together, that we’ll be back here sometime either this summer or early fall in a special session to address the measures such as the cigarette tax and potentially a few other measures that they passed in the last five days,” said Inman, D-Del City.
The Oklahoma Constitution prohibits revenueraising measures from being passed in the final five days of session, and Democrats also argued the measures needed 76 votes to pass instead of a simple majority.
Republicans are confident the measures can withstand a challenge, but even members of the majority party found fault with spending bill. Rep. Michael Rogers, R-Broken Arrow, said he wanted to see a separate version of the budget that included money for a teacher salary increase and steeper agency spending cuts.
That version died in a Senate committee as the session came to a close.
“I think I rise today probably more disappointed than anyone in this body that we didn’t get a teacher pay raise,” Rogers said Friday afternoon in debate on the budget.
“I could submarine and go after this budget because we didn’t get a teacher pay raise, which would have been justified. But I could also look at the total budget and see what we’ve done.”
State Sen. John Sparks, the Democratic leader in the Senate, was more cynical about the reason teacher salaries didn’t get included in the budget.
“The Republicans did this year what we do every year,” said Sparks, D-Norman. “They talk big in February and then on the last day of session, shrug their shoulders and say, ‘we wanted to, but there was just no money.’”