OKLAHOMA CITY — For the record, the Oklahoma Legislature allocated – okay, spent – an eyepopping $12,866,390,628 for the 2024 fiscal year.
That amount, records show, represents the largest budget appropriation ever made in state history. Authorized in more than 50 difference pieces of legislation, the Fiscal Year 2024 budget didn’t become public until the last week of the legislative session.
The budget also includes $590 million in supplemental funding and more than $50 million in federal American Rescue Plan Act funds.
Oklahoma’s FY 24 budget sends about 44% of state revenue ($5.65 billion) to the K-12 education system and about 15% ($1 billion) to the higher education and CareerTech systems.
The new budget also sets aside $2.34 billion (a little more than 18%) for health care and another $909 million for human services and more than $729 million for public safety, including $12.5 million to fund criminal justice reform programs passed adopted by voters under State Questions 781 in 2016.
Both houses of the Legislature, the State Treasurer, State Auditor and Inspector, Governor and Ethics Commission, Lieutenant Governor’s office and supporting agencies saw their budgets increase collectively by more than 35%, with a $314,699,106 allocation.
Oklahoma’s agricultural and natural resource systems received more than $283 million and lawmakers set aside another $349,475,339 for what they called legacy capital finance projects.
Lawmakers earmarked $250,362,938 to the state’s judicial system.
While the governor’s office announced he would allow most of the budget bills to go into effect without his signature, this year’s budget process was more contentious and difficult than those of previous sessions. The budget process also took a different approach: instead of focusing on the entire budget during the last month of the session, the Republican-controlled Legislature set the full budget aside for two weeks and, instead, focused only on developing an education package.
Along the way the fight between the Legislature and Gov. Stitt’s office became so difficult that lawmakers drafted former state Supreme Court Justice Stephen Taylor to mediate the budget dispute and, at the same time, called themselves into a special session that ran concurrently with the regular legislative session.
The special session was necessary, the Legislature’s Republican leaders said, because the governor had already vetoed 20 pieces of legislation, including a bill that reauthorized the Oklahoma Educational Television Authority and the potential for more vetoes was high.
Late in the session, lawmakers began referring to Stitt’s vetoes as the Tantrum 20 and overrode almost all of them. That process, critics of the idea said, essentially kept the budget a secret until the last week of the session and sparked a full-on range war between the House, the Senate and the governor’s office.
“The budget process was divided in a way that, in all my years out here, I have not seen,” said Senate Minority Leader Kay Floyd (D-Oklahoma City). “The problem with that plan turns out to be that the House and the Senate just couldn’t come together. So, we lost probably three weeks of session days during the entire four months by not doing any floorwork.”
Still, even with all the difficulty, lawmakers did past a budget for the next fiscal year. That budget exceeds recurring revenue by about $220 million.
Along with record-setting funding for the state’s K-12 education system, lawmakers earmarked $130 million for pay increases in the state’s higher education system and $215 million for interest-free loans to build more single-family housing in the state.
While a few tax cuts – namely a reduction in the state’s franchise tax – did make it to the governor’s desk, bigger cuts requested by Stitt, like a reduction in the state’s portion of the grocery tax and a cut in the personal income tax rate, were sidelined this year.
The Legislature also spent millions for economic development, including an addition $145 million package designed to sure Panasonic to Oklahoma. Those funds are on top of that $698 million previously set aside for Panasonic.
Oklahoma’s beleaguered Department of Veterans Affairs will receive $11.6 million for operations and an addition $10.8 million for completion of a long-term care facility in Sallisaw.
House budget chairman Rep. Kevin Wallace (R-Wellston) said he was enormously proud of this year’s budget and those who produced it.
“This budget is historic on a number of fronts,” Wallace wrote in a media statement delivered shortly after the budget bills were passed. “We’ve increased education funding by 21.5 percent, given teachers another large pay raise, and supported classroom learning and school safety.”
He said the budget protects state assets and lowers the state’s debt financing through the Legacy Capital Financing Fund.
The Senate’s budget chairman, Sen. Roger Thompson (R-Okemah) was more pragmatic in his analysis of the new budget.
“It’s not perfect,” he said. “But it does address some needs of the state.”
State lawmakers are expected to reconvene their special session on June 12.