OKPOLICY.ORG
Attorney General Gentner Drummond is raising a troubling issue regarding the certification of funds available for appropriation by the legislature. Drummond refused to attend the Dec. 20 State Board of Equalization meeting saying he did not have confidence in the “accuracy or completeness of the Governor’s budget numbers.” Drummond pointed out last year the final certification in February increased the December estimate, which bolstered Gov. Kevin Stitt’s call for an income tax cut.
At this year’s December meeting, the board projected the legislature will have $191 million less to appropriate next session with year-over-year appropriation authority dropping for next year by about $528 million. The loss is due primarily to the elimination last session of the state’s portion of the sales tax on groceries and an increase in funding for the school voucher program for private schools. The millions in private school money comes “off the top” and never gets counted as revenue available for appropriation.
Gov. Stitt chalked up Drummond’s comments to politics, reportedly saying, “You have got to remember, when somebody is running for governor, anything they can do to try to get their name in the paper, they want to try to do.” The governor should know. He ran for governor twice.
However, the increased appropriation authority of about $61 million between the December and February board meetings last year could be easily justified by the state’s volatile economy. After all, the board estimates are just that, estimates. They are never going to be perfectly accurate, and a change of $61 million in the estimate is not out of line for a $9 billion budget estimate.
Interestingly, the Attorney General suggested increased legislative involvement in the development of budget projections, saying it would produce a better and more transparent product. That, of course, would take a constitutional amendment. The current State Board of Equalization is made up solely of executive officers: The Governor, State Auditor, State Treasurer, Lieutenant Governor, Attorney General, Superintendent of Public Instruction, and President of the Board of Agriculture. Six of the seven officers are independently elected statewide.
I was privileged to serve on the conference committee that wrote the legislative referendum which passed by vote of the people in 1985 creating the current method to certify how much the legislature will be allowed to appropriate each year. There have been some minor changes since then.
There was some sentiment on the conference committee then to change the Board of Equalization membership to add legislative representation on the board. I was opposed to that at the time, feeling that since the legislature gets to spend the money, it shouldn’t have a hand in determining how much money it gets to spend. I frankly felt the executive officers would have less incentive to tamper with the numbers.
I think the current method has worked well for the past 40 years, although there have been times the estimates have missed the mark, sometimes by quite a bit. But for the most part there has been no reason to believe the numbers were intentionally inaccurate.
However, times do change. The legislature has given the governor more power over the executive branch, and in 1985 there was no super agency like Oklahoma Office of Management and Enterprise Services (OMES) controlled by the governor. Its predecessor, the Office of State Finance, was a smaller operation, and the Oklahoma Tax Commission was sensitive to legislative prerogatives, especially the Senate. It will be interesting to see if the attorney general’s suggestion gets any traction.
