OKPOLICY.ORG
Steve Lewis served as Speaker of the Oklahoma House of Representatives from 1989-1991. He currently practices law in Tulsa and represents clients at the Capitol.
The way legislators are talking now, the top agenda item for next session will be finding a way to give teachers a pay raise. No doubt those running for election this year got an earful from their constituents about the condition of our schools. Lawmakers seem to be interpreting the failure of SQ 779 as a message that people want a pay raise for teachers but they don’t want a tax increase.
At the state chamber legislative forum last week, Speaker-elect Charles McCall expressed support for education but said new taxes would not be on the table. Senate President Pro-Tempore-elect Mike Schulz said he wants a teacher pay raise, and it will likely be incremental. These two statements together point to a continuation of the budget policies of the past few years. That is, when a budget issue reaches a perceived crisis level, the Legislature earmarks revenue from incremental growth in the economy to “solve” the problem without any new revenue sources. This has happened twice recently, once to fix roads and once to fund state retirement systems.
What’s interesting is that for the past several years both legislators and the governor have been complaining about a “structural budget problem” due to “off-the-top” money being pulled out of the general revenue fund thereby causing budget deficits. This is a problem of their own making when they earmarked growth money for roads and retirement funds rather than letting it flow into the general revenue fund where it was originally intended. Lawmakers wanted to meet a need without the political pain of providing a new revenue source. Now it looks like we are poised to do it again, this time for a teacher pay raise.
At least when this was done before, there was a reasonable hope there would be enough growth money to “solve” the crisis and at least maintain the remainder of state services. But now it’s hard to say that’s likely in the near term. This is a shell game. We’ll take money from people providing other services that are already underfunded to pay for a teacher pay raise. Frankly I doubt this will make most teachers happy. They are often the first to see the negative effects of poor health care, mental health and social services on the families of the children they are teaching. The “structural budget problem” is that there’s not enough money to pay for what the people and the legislature know we need to do.
