With slim revenue growth, Oklahoma lawmakers, AG worry about Gov. Stitt's push for tax cuts
Call it a good news/bad news sort of meeting.
Friday's meeting of the Oklahoma State Board of Equalization was filled with numbers and analysis and, depending on who you were, either good or bad news.
The good news? Oklahoma's tax revenue — including both personal income tax and corporate income tax — was up by higher than expected margins.
The bad news? That "up margin" didn't go very far, roughly $72 million.
And though $72 million seems like a lot of money in some areas, in state government, it's not. Especially when considered growth revenue.
Last year the Legislature appropriated $12.47 billion, including more than $8 billion in state funds and roughly $4 billion in reserves. In 2024, lawmakers spent $13.18 billion.
This year, the board certified $8,273,961,689 and federal funds of $175,099,470. Those funds would be on top of the more than $4 billion in reserves, which lawmakers say should only be used for one-time funding projects.
Since December, both state lawmakers and Republican Gov. Kevin Stitt have been waiting on the second report from the Board of Equalization. However, unlike the December 2024 report, the February release of the board's revenue details gives lawmakers a much clearer picture just how much money they have to spend for the 2026 fiscal year.
Lawmakers said they want to make sure they pass a responsible budget. At the same time, the governor doubled down on his push to cut the personal income tax, and eventually phase it out. Earlier this year, both houses of the Legislature pushed back against the governor's $202 million price tag for another tax cut, saying the actual cost was closer to $300 million per year.
Friday afternoon, the numbers presented by the Board of Equalization show that another tax cut may be difficult to pull off.
'The Board of Equalization's certification of lower revenues for FY 2026 is a clear signal that we must approach this budget cycle with both caution and optimism," said state Sen. John Haste, the Broken Arrow Republican who serves as vice chairman of the Senate's Appropriation Committee.
Haste said lawmakers must be mindful of the long-term impact of their budget decisions so those changes do not put the state on a bad fiscal trajectory for future budget years.
"With significant funding requests before us, it is more important than ever to practice fiscal discipline by prioritizing core government services and identifying opportunities to eliminate waste and inefficiencies," he said.
State Rep. Trey Caldwell, chairman of the House Appropriations and Budget Committee, echoed Haste.
"We we have slow revenue growth, we have to be very careful with how we write a budget," he said. "The math doesn't math on the savings numbers."
Caldwell and Haste aren't the only ones with concerns. About an hour before Friday's meeting, Attorney General Gentner Drummond, a member of the Board of Equalization, issued a news release saying he doesn't trust the numbers.
Drummond didn't attend the meeting; neither did state schools Superintendent Ryan Walters, the seventh member of the board.
Drummond said Stitt has taken what should be a serious, thoughtful and collaborative gathering of constitutional officers and "turned it in to a scripted event that is mostly for show. I will not be participating in that.'
Drummond said that he has no confidence in "Gov. Stitt's manufactured budget numbers" being used to justify his proposed tax plan.
Be the first to know: Sign up for breaking news email alerts
'I am disappointed but not surprised the Governor refused to increase legislative involvement in this process, which is far too important to the future of Oklahoma to be monopolized by a single politician,' Drummond said. 'The budget certification process is in dire need of reform. The status quo allows the Governor to manufacture budget numbers that support his policy agenda, rather than a consensus approach that would reflect legislative input.'
The announcement by Drummond comes a year after he was the lone 'no' vote in the Board of Equalization meeting last February. At the time, his office said that vote was 'a reflection of his lack of confidence in certain revenue estimates that were provided.'
As an example, Drummond pointed to last year's budget certification numbers as evidence the process is rigged.
In December 2023, the Board of Equalization was told there would be $8.98 billion available for appropriation in Fiscal Year 2025. By last February — 10 days after Gov. Stitt laid out his budget priorities — that number had ballooned to $9.04 billion. This increase bolstered the governor's argument for a proposed income tax cut last session, Drummond said.
Now, a year later, the Fiscal Year 2026 numbers are projected to be $295 million less, and the Oklahoma Tax Commission is reporting that expected revenue will drop by $408 million.
'Last December, we were told one amount, then two months later it was a new number that magically was enough to help pay for the Governor's tax cut,' Drummond said. 'Now the Governor is pushing an even more precarious tax plan, using unreliable economic projections and one-time cash on hand to pay for it.'
Drummond called on the Legislature to revise Stitt's proposed tax plan into a more responsible package that provides tax relief while preserving critical funding.
'While I certainly support lowering the tax burden on working families, this tax plan is irresponsible and will drastically harm our ability to fund vital priorities like public education, roads and bridges, and public safety,' Drummond said. 'I have no confidence in the Governor's approach to this matter, but I do believe our legislative leaders will negotiate the best plan for our future. The legislative session is just beginning, and our state senators and state representatives have repeatedly demonstrated their willingness to check the Governor's worst ideas.'
While Stitt said little about Drummond's criticism and the questions raised by the AG about the FY 2026 numbers, Abegail Cave, the governor's spokeswoman, was more direct.
"If Drummond has questions or concerns about the numbers, he should have attended the BOE meeting," she said in a text message to The Oklahoman.
With the debate over just how much there is to spend continuing, Senate Appropriations Chairman Chuck Hall said he wasn't surprised by the dip in revenue.
"It reminds us to be careful and deliberate while reviewing proposals for further revenue cuts," Hall said in a news release. "We currently have around $1.2 billion in new funding requests from executive branch agencies to consider and nearly $500 million in new capital project requests. This Legislature has a track record of passing sound fiscal policies that have set Oklahoma up for success, breaking a cycle of crippling budget shortfalls like we saw in past years."
Hall said he saw the 2026 fiscal year as a chance for Oklahoma to eliminate wasteful spending and focus on making government more efficient.
"I'm confident the Senate, working alongside the House and the governor, will pass a responsible, balanced budget this year that keeps our state government funded, as the constitution requires.'
Lawmakers have until Friday, May 30, to finish their work.
This article originally appeared on Oklahoman: Oklahoma lawmakers worry about tax cuts with newest budget report
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Los Angeles Times
an hour ago
- Los Angeles Times
A U.S. territory's colonial history emerges in disputes over voting and citizenship
WHITTIER, Alaska — Squeezed between glacier-packed mountains and Alaska's Prince William Sound, the cruise-ship stop of Whittier is isolated enough that it's reachable by just a single road, through a long, one-lane tunnel that vehicles share with trains. It's so small that nearly all its 260 residents live in the same 14-story condo building. But Whittier also is the unlikely crossroads of two major currents in American politics: fighting over what it means to be born on U.S. soil and false claims by President Trump and others that noncitizen voter fraud is widespread. In what experts describe as an unprecedented case, Alaska prosecutors are pursuing felony charges against 11 residents of Whittier, most of them related to one another, saying they falsely claimed U.S. citizenship when registering or trying to vote. The defendants were all born in American Samoa, an island cluster in the South Pacific roughly halfway between Hawaii and New Zealand. It's the only U.S. territory where residents are not automatically granted citizenship by virtue of having been born on American soil, as the Constitution dictates. Instead, by a quirk of geopolitical history, they are considered 'U.S. nationals' — a distinction that gives them certain rights and obligations while denying them others. American Samoans are entitled to U.S. passports and can serve in the military. Men must register for the Selective Service. They can vote in local elections in American Samoa but cannot hold public office in the U.S. or participate in most U.S. elections. Those who wish to become citizens can do so, but the process costs hundreds of dollars and can be cumbersome. 'To me, I'm an American. I was born an American on U.S. soil,' said firefighter Michael Pese, one of those charged in Whittier. 'American Samoa has been U.S. soil, U.S. jurisdiction, for 125 years. According to the supreme law of the land, that's my birthright.' The status has created confusion in other states as well. In Oregon, officials inadvertently registered nearly 200 American Samoan residents to vote when they got their driver's licenses under the state's motor-voter law. Of those, 10 cast ballots in an election, according to the Oregon secretary of state's office. Officials there determined the residents had not intended to break the law and no crime was committed. In Hawaii, one resident who was born in American Samoa, Sai Timoteo, ran for the state Legislature in 2018 before learning she wasn't allowed to hold public office or vote. She had always considered it her civic duty to vote, and the form on the voting materials had one box to check: 'U.S. Citizen/U.S. National.' 'I checked that box my entire life,' she said. She also avoided charges, and Hawaii subsequently changed its form to make it more clear. Amid the storm of executive orders issued by Trump in the early days of his second term was one that sought to redefine birthright citizenship by barring it for children of parents who are in the U.S. unlawfully. Another would overhaul how federal elections are run, among other changes requiring voters to provide proof of citizenship. Courts so far have blocked both orders. The Constitution says that 'all persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States.' It also leaves the administration of elections to the states. The case in Whittier began with Pese's wife, Tupe Smith. After the couple moved to Whittier in 2018, Smith began volunteering at the Whittier Community School, where nearly half of the 55 students were American Samoan — many of them her nieces and nephews. She would help the kids with their English, tutor them in reading and cook them Samoan dishes. In 2023, a seat on the regional school board came open and she ran for it. She was the only candidate and won with about 95% of the vote. One morning a few weeks later, as she was making her two children breakfast, state troopers came knocking. They asked about her voting history. She explained that she knew she wasn't allowed to vote in U.S. presidential elections, but thought she could vote in local or state races. She said she checked a box affirming that she was a U.S. citizen at the instruction of elections workers because there was no option to identify herself as a U.S. national, court records say. The troopers arrested her and drove her to a women's prison near Anchorage. She was released that day after her husband paid bail. 'When they put me in cuffs, my son started crying,' Smith said. About 10 months later, troopers returned to Whittier and issued court summonses to Pese, eight other relatives and one man who was not related but came from the same American Samoa village as Pese. One of Smith's attorneys, Neil Weare, grew up in another U.S. territory, Guam, and is the co-founder of the Washington-based Right to Democracy Project, whose mission is 'confronting and dismantling the undemocratic colonial framework governing people in U.S. territories.' He suggested the prosecutions are aimed at 'low-hanging fruit' in the absence of evidence that illegal immigrants frequently cast ballots in U.S. elections. Even state-level investigations have found voting by noncitizens to be exceptionally rare. 'There is no question that Ms. Smith lacked an intent to mislead or deceive a public official in order to vote unlawfully when she checked 'U.S. citizen' on voter registration materials,' he wrote in a brief to the Alaska Court of Appeals, after a lower court judge declined to dismiss the charges. Prosecutors say her false claim of citizenship was intentional, and her claim to the contrary was undercut by the clear language on the voter application forms she filled out in 2020 and 2022. The forms said that if the applicant did not answer yes to being over 18 years old and a U.S. citizen, 'do not complete this form, as you are not eligible to vote.' The unique situation of American Samoans dates to the 19th century, when the U.S. and European powers were seeking to expand their colonial and economic interests in the South Pacific. The U.S. Navy secured the use of Pago Pago Harbor in eastern Samoa as a coal-refueling station for military and commercial vessels, while Germany sought to protect its coconut plantations in western Samoa. Eventually the archipelago was divided, with the western islands becoming the independent nation of Samoa and the eastern ones becoming American Samoa, overseen by the Navy. The leaders of American Samoa spent much of the late 19th and early 20th centuries arguing that its people should be U.S. citizens. Birthright citizenship was eventually afforded to residents of other U.S. territories — Puerto Rico, the U.S. Virgin Islands, Guam and the Northern Mariana Islands. Congress considered it for American Samoa in the 1930s, but declined. Some lawmakers cited financial concerns during the Great Depression while others expressed patently racist objections, according to a 2020 article in the American Journal of Legal History. Supporters of automatic citizenship say it would particularly benefit the estimated 150,000 to 160,000 nationals who live in the states, many of them in California, Hawaii, Washington, Oregon, Utah and Alaska. 'We pay taxes, we do exactly the same as everybody else that are U.S. citizens,' Smith said. 'It would be nice for us to have the same rights as everybody here in the states.' But many in American Samoa eventually soured on the idea, fearing that extending birthright citizenship would jeopardize its customs — including the territory's communal land laws. Island residents could be dispossessed by land privatization, not unlike what happened in Hawaii, said Siniva Bennett, board chair of the Samoa Pacific Development Corporation, a Portland, Ore.-based nonprofit. 'We've been able to maintain our culture, and we haven't been divested from our land like a lot of other indigenous people in the U.S.,' Bennett said. In 2021, the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals declined to extend automatic citizenship to those born in American Samoa, saying it would be wrong to force citizenship on those who don't want it. The Supreme Court declined to review the decision. Several jurisdictions across the country, including San Francisco and the District of Columbia, allow people who are not citizens to vote in certain local elections. Tafilisaunoa Toleafoa, with the Pacific Community of Alaska, said the situation has been so confusing that her organization reached out to the Alaska Division of Elections in 2021 and 2022 to ask whether American Samoans could vote in state and local elections. Neither time did it receive a direct answer, she said. 'People were telling our community that they can vote as long as you have your voter registration card and it was issued by the state,' she said. Finally, last year, Carol Beecher, head of the state Division of Elections, sent Toleafoa's group a letter saying American Samoans are not eligible to vote in Alaska elections. But by then, the voting forms had been signed. 'It is my hope that this is a lesson learned, that the state of Alaska agrees that this could be something that we can administratively correct,' Toleafoa said. 'I would say that the state could have done that instead of prosecuting community members.' Thiessen, Bohrer and Johnson write for the Associated Press. Bohrer reported from Juneau, Alaska, and Johnson from Seattle. Claire Rush in Portland and Jennifer Sinco Kelleher in Honolulu contributed to this report.
Los Angeles Times
2 hours ago
- Los Angeles Times
Trump officials are vowing to end school desegregation orders. Some parents say they're still needed
FERRIDAY, La. — Even at a glance, the differences are obvious. The walls of Ferriday High School are old and worn, surrounded by barbed wire. Just a few miles away, Vidalia High School is clean and bright, with a new library and a crisp blue 'V' painted on orange brick. Ferriday High is 90% Black. Vidalia High is 62% white. For Black families, the contrast between the schools suggests 'we're not supposed to have the finer things,' said Brian Davis, a father in Ferriday. 'It's almost like our kids don't deserve it,' he said. The schools are part of Concordia Parish, which was ordered to desegregate 60 years ago and remains under a court-ordered plan to this day. Yet there's growing momentum to release the district — and dozens of others — from decades-old orders that some call obsolete. In a remarkable reversal, the Justice Department said it plans to start unwinding court-ordered desegregation plans dating to the Civil Rights Movement. Officials started in April, when they lifted a 1960s order in Louisiana's Plaquemines Parish. Harmeet Dhillon, who leads the department's civil rights division, has said others will 'bite the dust.' It comes amid pressure from Republican Gov. Jeff Landry and his attorney general, who have called for all the state's remaining orders to be lifted. They describe the orders as burdens on districts and relics of a time when Black students were still forbidden from some schools. The orders were always meant to be temporary — school systems can be released if they demonstrate they fully eradicated segregation. Decades later, that goal remains elusive, with stark racial imbalances persisting in many districts. Civil rights groups say the orders are important to keep as tools to address the legacy of forced segregation — including disparities in student discipline, academic programs and teacher hiring. They point to cases like Concordia, where the decades-old order was used to stop a charter school from favoring white students in admissions. 'Concordia is one where it's old, but a lot is happening there,' said Deuel Ross, deputy director of litigation for the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. 'That's true for a lot of these cases. They're not just sitting silently.' Last year, before President Trump took office, Concordia Parish rejected a Justice Department plan that would have ended its case if the district combined several majority white and majority Black elementary and middle schools. At a town hall meeting, Vidalia residents vigorously opposed the plan, saying it would disrupt students' lives and expose their children to drugs and violence. An official from the Louisiana attorney general's office spoke against the proposal and said the Trump administration likely would change course on older orders. Accepting the plan would have been a 'death sentence' for the district, said Paul Nelson, a former Concordia superintendent. White families would have fled to private schools or other districts, said Nelson, who wants the court order removed. 'It's time to move on,' said Nelson, who left the district in 2016. 'Let's start looking to build for the future, not looking back to what our grandparents may have gone through.' At Ferriday High, athletic coach Derrick Davis supported combining schools in Ferriday and Vidalia. He said the district's disparities come into focus whenever his teams visit schools with newer sports facilities. 'It seems to me, if we'd all combine, we can all get what we need,' he said. Others oppose merging schools if it's done solely for the sake of achieving racial balance. 'Redistricting and going to different places they're not used to ... it would be a culture shock to some people,' said Ferriday's school resource officer, Marcus Martin, who, like Derrick Davis, is Black. The district's current superintendent and school board did not respond to requests for comment. Concordia is among more than 120 districts across the South that remain under desegregation orders from the 1960s and '70s, including about a dozen in Louisiana. Calling the orders historical relics is 'unequivocally false,' said Shaheena Simons, who until April led the Justice Department section that oversees school desegregation cases. 'Segregation and inequality persist in our schools, and they persist in districts that are still under desegregation orders,' she said. With court orders in place, families facing discrimination can reach out directly to the Justice Department or seek relief from the court. Otherwise, the only recourse is a lawsuit, which many families can't afford, Simons said. In Concordia, the order played into a battle over a charter school that opened in 2013 on the former campus of an all-white private school. To protect the area's progress on racial integration, a judge ordered Delta Charter School to build a student body that reflected the district's racial demographics. But in its first year, the school was just 15% Black. After a court challenge, Delta was ordered to give priority to Black students. Today, about 40% of its students are Black. Desegregation orders have been invoked recently in other cases around the state. One led to an order to address disproportionately high rates of discipline for Black students, and in another a predominantly Black elementary school was relocated from a site close to a chemical plant. The Trump administration was able to close the Plaquemines case with little resistance because the original plaintiffs were no longer involved — the Justice Department was litigating the case alone. Concordia and an unknown number of other districts are in the same situation, making them vulnerable to quick dismissals. Concordia's case dates to 1965, when the area was strictly segregated and home to a violent offshoot of the Ku Klux Klan. When Black families in Ferriday sued for access to all-white schools, the federal government intervened. As the district integrated its schools, white families fled Ferriday. The district's schools came to reflect the demographics of their surrounding areas. Ferriday is mostly Black and low-income, while Vidalia is mostly white and takes in tax revenue from a hydroelectric plant. A third town in the district, Monterey, has a high school that's 95% white. At the December town hall, Vidalia resident Ronnie Blackwell said the area 'feels like a Mayberry, which is great,' referring to the fictional Southern town from 'The Andy Griffith Show.' The federal government, he said, has 'probably destroyed more communities and school systems than it ever helped.' Under its court order, Concordia must allow students in majority Black schools to transfer to majority white schools. It also files reports on teacher demographics and student discipline. After failing to negotiate a resolution with the Justice Department, Concordia is scheduled to make its case that the judge should dismiss the order, according to court documents. Meanwhile, amid a wave of resignations in the federal government, all but two of the Justice Department lawyers assigned to the case have left. Without court supervision, Brian Davis sees little hope for improvement. 'A lot of parents over here in Ferriday, they're stuck here because here they don't have the resources to move their kids from A to B,' he said. 'You'll find schools like Ferriday — the term is, to me, slipping into darkness.' Binkley and Lurye write for the Associated Press. T
3 hours ago
South Dakota is on track to spend $2 billion on prisons in the next decade
SIOUX FALLS, S.D. -- Two years after approving a tough-on-crime sentencing law, South Dakota is scrambling to deal with the price tag for that legislation: Housing thousands of additional inmates could require up to $2 billion to build new prisons in the next decade. That's a lot of money for a state with one of the lowest populations in the U.S., but a consultant said it's needed to keep pace with an anticipated 34% surge of new inmates in the next decade as a result of South Dakota's tough criminal justice laws. And while officials are grumbling about the cost, they don't seem concerned with the laws that are driving the need even as national crime rates are dropping. 'Crime has been falling everywhere in the country, with historic drops in crime in the last year or two,' said Bob Libal, senior campaign strategist at the criminal justice nonprofit The Sentencing Project. 'It's a particularly unusual time to be investing $2 billion in prisons.' Some Democratic-led states have worked to close prisons and enact changes to lower inmate populations, but that's a tough sell in Republican-majority states such as South Dakota that believe in a tough-on-crime approach, even if that leads to more inmates. For now, state lawmakers have set aside a $600 million fund to replace the overcrowded 144-year-old South Dakota State Penitentiary in Sioux Falls, making it one of the most expensive taxpayer-funded projects in South Dakota history. But South Dakota will likely need more prisons. Phoenix-based Arrington Watkins Architects, which the state hired as a consultant, has said South Dakota will need 3,300 additional beds in coming years, bringing the cost to $2 billion. Driving up costs is the need for facilities with different security levels to accommodate the inmate population. Concerns about South Dakota's prisons first arose four years ago, when the state was flush with COVID-19 relief funds. Lawmakers wanted to replace the penitentiary, but they couldn't agree on where to put the prison and how big it should be. A task force of state lawmakers assembled by Republican Gov. Larry Rhoden is expected to decide that in a plan for prison facilities this July. Many lawmakers have questioned the proposed cost, but few have called for criminal justice changes that would make such a large prison unnecessary. 'One thing I'm trying to do as the chairman of this task force is keep us very focused on our mission,' said Lieutenant Gov. Tony Venhuizen. 'There are people who want to talk about policies in the prisons or the administration or the criminal justice system more broadly, and that would be a much larger project than the fairly narrow scope that we have.' South Dakota's incarceration rate of 370 per 100,000 people is an outlier in the Upper Midwest. Neighbors Minnesota and North Dakota have rates of under 250 per 100,000 people, according to the Sentencing Project, a criminal justice advocacy nonprofit. Nearly half of South Dakota's projected inmate population growth can be attributed to a law approved in 2023 that requires some violent offenders to serve the full-length of their sentences before parole, according to a report by Arrington Watkins. When South Dakota inmates are paroled, about 40% are ordered to return to prison, the majority of those due to technical violations such as failing a drug test or missing a meeting with a parole officer. Those returning inmates made up nearly half of prison admissions in 2024. Sioux Falls criminal justice attorney Ryan Kolbeck blamed the high number of parolees returning in part on the lack of services in prison for people with drug addictions. 'People are being sent to the penitentiary but there's no programs there for them. There's no way it's going to help them become better people,' he said. 'Essentially we're going to put them out there and house them for a little bit, leave them on parole and expect them to do well.' South Dakota also has the second-greatest disparity of Native Americans in its prisons. While Native Americans make up one-tenth of South Dakota's population, they make up 35% of those in state prisons, according to Prison Policy Initiative, a nonprofit public policy group. Though legislators in the state capital, Pierre, have been talking about prison overcrowding for years, they're reluctant to dial back on tough-on-crime laws. For example, it took repeated efforts over six years before South Dakota reduced a controlled substance ingestion law to a misdemeanor from a felony for the first offense, aligning with all other states. 'It was a huge, Herculean task to get ingestion to be a misdemeanor,' Kolbeck said. Former penitentiary warden Darin Young said the state needs to upgrade its prisons, but he also thinks it should spend up to $300 million on addiction and mental illness treatment. 'Until we fix the reasons why people come to prison and address that issue, the numbers are not going to stop,' he said. Without policy changes, the new prisons are sure to fill up, criminal justice experts agreed. 'We might be good for a few years, now that we've got more capacity, but in a couple years it'll be full again,' Kolbeck said. 'Under our policies, you're going to reach capacity again soon.'
