If you’re reading this, chances are you depend on blogs for at least part of the information you consume on a daily or weekly basis. Yet if you’re an Oklahoman interested in state politics and policy, it’s not easy to know which blogs provide good information and interesting perspectives on the issues you care about – besides, of course, this one.

Here’s a list of and brief description of 15 blogs that : 1) are written by Oklahomans; 2) have a political or policy focus; 3) are likely to keep you informed, amused, enlightened or outraged. They’re grouped based on my sense of their ideological leanings – left, right, and center/apolitical. If you disagree with my take, or think I’ve missed a notable site, please jump in with a comment. Read the rest of this entry »

My decision to take vacation over the final week of July and first week of August allowed me to avoid not only some of the worst of the summer heat wave here in Oklahoma but also much of the heated controversy that followed the release of OK Policy’s issue brief on State Question 744, the ballot measure that would peg education funding in Oklahoma to per pupil expenditures in neighboring states. We set out four main arguments that have led us to take a position opposing the measure, the most compelling of which is the strong likelihood that mandating an estimated $1.7 billion increase in funding for common education over three years without a new revenue source would set the state even  further behind in our other areas of public investment that all Oklahomans, including our schoolchildren and teachers, depend on.

Our position was strongly praised by the Oklahoman in a written editorial and this video editorial by editor Ed Kelly (you’ll first get a short commercial for an investment company):

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Each year, the State Board of Equalization meets three times to review and approve projected revenues for the upcoming fiscal year – in December, February and June. At this year’s June meeting, which took place earlier this week, the Board approved a packet that included revised revenue projections that are extremely important for the new fiscal year set to begin July 1st. Read the rest of this entry »

Once bitten, twice shy. Or is it twice bitten, thrice shy?  Oklahoma’s budgeting laws try to protect against mid-year budget shortfalls by allowing the Legislature to appropriate only 95 percent of the certified estimate of General Revenue (GR) fund collections for the upcoming year. However, in each of the past two years, revenue collections have failed to reach the amounts appropriated by the Legislature. In FY’09, things started off well, but then revenues plunged  to such an extent that the final monthly GR allocation to each agency was cut by 5 percent (those cuts were later restored) . This fiscal year, which began last July 1, revenues immediately came in far below appropriated levels. Budgets were cut 5 percent a month beginning in August and then 10 percent each month since November; only large-scale borrowing, followed by an agreement to supplement collections with hundreds of millions from the Rainy Day Fund, additional stimulus dollars, and some available cash prevented mid-year budget cuts being even more drastic.

It is not surprising, then, that the funding levels announced in the FY ’11 budget agreement have been greeted with a certain amount of skepticism by some state agencies and school districts. A Tulsa World article on funding for common education, for example, included these reactions from Tulsa-area Superintendents:

“It will be good news if, when you get the details, if it is that type of cut,” Broken Arrow Superintendent Gary Gerber said, referring to the 2.9 percent budget cut. “But we have to take it with a grain of salt because we had a budget agreement last year and they proceeded to cut us every month of the entire school year…”

Union Superintendent Cathy Burden said that while she was pleased the district now has a number to work with, their budget will require careful scrutinizing before any major decision on staffing or plans for next year can be made.

Burden said her “cautiousness is based on the history of what happened this year” of promised 3 percent cuts almost doubling by year’s end.

Yet if this skepticism – which seems to be broadly shared, based on  conversations I’ve had in recent days  – is understandable,  it is also likely unwarranted. At least a decade of history suggests that the state’s forecasters tend to underestimate both how bad things will be in bad times and how good they’ll be in good times. Specifically, the revenue projections on which annual appropriations are based tend to consistently underestimate how much revenues will fall when the economy turns bad, but also underestimate how quickly and strongly revenues will recover once the economy improves. Read the rest of this entry »

With state revenue collections seeing their steepest plunge in a generation, Oklahoma is enduring a tough year of state budget cuts that are already having a harmful effect on families, communities and the economy. However, while the severity of this year’s cuts has been mitigated, the outlook for next year’s budget is substantially worse. In the absence of new revenue, we should expect additional budget cuts of 10 to 12 percent across the full range of state agencies beyond those cuts already enacted this year. While we know far too little about how deeper cuts will be absorbed by state agencies and school districts, we are certain that if  the budget were to be balanced exclusively by cuts, the impact will be devastating to our schools, safety net programs, infrastructure, and public safety.

In this context, there is an urgent need for a balanced approach to the state’s budget shortfall that includes identifying possible sources of additional one-time or ongoing revenue. Governor Henry, in his FY ’11 Executive Budget,  proposed over $700 million in revenue enhancing measures, along with additional cuts across all of state government, savings from efficiencies and consolidation, and the use of remaining stimulus and reserve fund balances. Not all of the Governor’s ideas are likely to gain traction, but they provide a good starting point for an urgently-needed  discussion. In this and subsequent blog posts, OK Policy will explore some of the most promising policy ideas for generating additional revenue that would go at least part of the way to closing the budget deficit.

One straightforward revenue-generating idea involves limiting the discount that the state pays retailers for collecting the state sales tax. Currently Oklahoma is among 26 states that provides vendors some form of compensation, or discount, for collecting and remitting sales tax. As the policy organization Good Jobs First has noted: Read the rest of this entry »

This month’s announcement of December General Revenue collections didn’t seem to provide much in the way of good news. Revenues for the month again came in around 30 percent below levels of one year ago (graph) and 30 percent below the certified estimate upon which this year’s initial budget was developed (see our Budget Hilites for an overview of the state’s budget situation).

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In writing about the state’s current budget woes, I’ve tended to say that Oklahoma is in the midst of its worst fiscal crisis since the oil bust of the 1980′s. Whether we were around during those days or not, I think most of us have a sense that the situation back then was genuinely catastrophic for state finances. So it came as something of a surprise to go back through historical data on state revenue collections and discover the following: Read the rest of this entry »