OKPOLICY.ORG
Legislative investigative committees in Oklahoma are rare, as they should be. The legislature has only four months to enact laws and policy for state government and to write a balanced budget for the coming year. Time spent taking testimony under oath and trying to discern the who, what, when, why, and how of past behavior is usually better left to the executive or judicial branches and legislative monitoring during the interim between sessions.
Having said that, it seems to have been a good move for House Speaker Kyle Hilbert to appoint a special committee to investigate financial issues with the Oklahoma Department of Mental Health and Substance Abuse Services (ODMHSAS). The agency has reported an unanticipated funding shortfall in the current fiscal year with various gaps ranging from $63 million to the current figure of $6.2 million after various bookkeeping discoveries.
Speaker Kyle Hilbert couldn’t have chosen a better chair for the committee than House Majority Leader Mark Lawson, R-Sapulpa, who has focused his legislative career on budget and policy measures to help troubled children, youth, and families. Lawson and the committee are positioned to help the legislature analyze the financial situation at ODMHSAS and to recommend budget and organizational priorities to set a better path forward.
It’s hard to know from the outside exactly how the funding picture got muddled and why mental health and substance abuse services have possibly been damaged. Publicly available information indicates that ODMHSAS has faced consistent underfunding and has sometimes utilized internal fund transfers to manage its expenses without requesting additional funding when required.
Sometimes in the past, such as the 2008 to 2018 decade, agencies like ODMHSAS were underfunded because state revenues simply were insufficient to provide adequate services. But observers of the budget process over the past seven years have seen Gov. Kevin Stitt, early in his administration, make it difficult for legislators to get needed budget information from state agencies. Throughout his time in office, he has insisted on flat or austere budget requests that fail to reflect what agencies need.
With the governor having been given hiring and firing power over directors of agencies like ODMHSAS, the directors have little choice but not to properly voice their needs, but to make it work. Their only remedy is to answer questions from legislators later, if the legislators can figure out the right questions to ask. But then, when it all comes to a head because of poorly delivered services or funding gaps, it’s the directors who take the heat.
The governor was given hiring and firing power over agency directors on the theory that this was a more transparent way to hold state government accountable, that when things go wrong the voters would know whom to blame. But modern elective politics doesn’t work that way, if it ever did. Rarely, if ever does an incumbent elected official — short of indictment, outrageous personal scandal, or failure to engage with constituents — get defeated for doing a bad job.
There may have been a time when appointed leaders of public organizations had a grace period to figure out what is going on and then to make their impact on the organization. But nowadays it seems they had better be aggressive from the beginning in recognizing any shortcomings and dealing with them. Even if the problems stem from longstanding structural issues or events that happened before they arrived, appointed leaders are likely to be the ones under public scrutiny when the proverbial stuff hits the fan.
