Tulsa lawmakers talk schools, how to put $3.9 billion in reserves to best use

“We need to give those funds back, but we need to think about how we do it,” said Rep. Jeff Boatman, R-Tulsa.

The discussion — also including Rep. Meloyde Blancett, D-Tulsa; Sen. Kevin Matthews, D-Tulsa; and Sen. Dave Rader, R-Tulsa — was the main event on a Tulsa Regional Chamber breakfast menu that also included 1st District Congressman Kevin Hern, Lt. Gov. Matt Pinnell, state Energy Secretary Ken McQueen and brief remarks from more than a dozen other area lawmakers.

Panel moderator Devery Youngblood, executive director of the Oklahoma Aggregates Association, asked a series of questions dealing mainly with education, taxes and the state’s cash reserves.

Rader, chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, said the state’s tax structure is being reviewed but that he feels no great urgency to make sudden, drastic changes. The state “is in a good position,” he said, with a nice surplus and a relatively low tax burden.

“What I would like to see us do is take this broad look at: What are our tax incentives? What are our taxes? Is there a way to simplify it? Is there a way to make it more fair? And let’s see if we can go do that,” said Rader. “We have some time here. Let’s get together and see if we can pound it out, and if we can’t find a better way to do it, we’ll just keeping doing (the same).”

Boatman said there are ways to return value to taxpayers besides just cutting taxes.

“Sure, there’s going to be some tax cuts,” he said. “There’s going to be some things we invest in through agencies and through services we do as a state. We can give money back that way.”

Boatman then suggested using some of the reserves to fund “some pretty incredible” community projects that didn’t make the cut for American Rescue Plan distributions.

Blancett and Matthews, the two Democrats, recommended putting more money into public schools, workforce development and quality-of-life improvements.

“We have an education system, in terms of common ed and higher ed, that’s still not funded to where it needs to be,” said Blancett. “We have a couple of agencies that are under-resourced and could be so much better utilized if they were like OCAST (the Oklahoma Center for the Advancement of Science and Technology). Strategic investment is important.”

Asked about school vouchers, Blancett replied, “Not only ‘no’ but ‘hell no.’”

Matthews said he is disappointed in Gov. Kevin Stitt’s attacks on diversity and on Tulsa Public Schools.

The Tulsa Fire Department’s chief personnel officer before entering politics, Matthews said: “When we had a firefighter we didn’t think was doing a good job, or a fire station, we learned the (best) way of dealing with it that was corrective rather than punitive. We should not put down public schools and say, ‘Vouchers are the only good, and you guys are terrible.’

“To just demonize the public school system where I went — where my kids went, where my parents and grandparents went and where my nieces and nephews go right now — is not right,” he said.

Hern, who has concentrated much of his attention on federal spending, reiterated his position that it must be slowed.

“We’ve got to do something about this,” Hern said. “For us to say that we shouldn’t have any conversation about spending or a debt limit crisis — I’ve asked reporters to point out one Republican who’s said we don’t want to pay our debt. What we’ve said is we should have a conversation … about how we’re going to stop this spending so we don’t see this debt limit crisis we’re seeing right now.”