OKLAHOMA CITY — What is being described as an “honest mistake” ratcheted up the tension in a state Capitol already on edge Tuesday.
Speaker Jeff Hickman, R-Fairview, said two bills released Tuesday morning that call for boosting teacher pay by up to $10,000 a year while cutting benefits and raising the state sales tax, were early drafts of legislation that has been worked on this session, and he said final versions may or may not be heard in the coming days.
“We’ve been working on a teacher pay-increase plan,” Hickman said Tuesday night. “My hope is that we can come up with something.”
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He said the basic elements of the plan were in the bills that surfaced briefly Tuesday but that the details remain troublesome.
Essentially, the proposal is for salary increases of $5,000 to $10,000 a year to be paid by broadening the state sales-tax base, raising the rate to 4.9 percent from 4.5 percent, and capping employer payments for educators’ health insurance premiums at current levels.
State law now requires districts to pay 100 percent of teachers’ health insurance premiums.
Hickman said even he was confused when committee substitutes to House Bills 3213 and 3214 began appearing in representatives’ email inboxes shortly before 10 a.m. Tuesday, with the notation that they had been added to the agenda of a 1 p.m. Appropriations and Budget Committee meeting.
Then, just before the meeting was to begin, the bills were removed from the agenda.
“It created a firestorm,” said Chairman Earl Sears, R-Bartlesville. “Of course, it would have created a firestorm no matter what.”
Big ideas and shortened tempers were in evidence Tuesday as the mandatory May 27 legislative session adjournment approaches with the House and Senate at odds over how best to solve the state budget crisis.
The biggest ideas, in sheer potential scope, were the vanishing twin House bills, but there were other startling developments in the Tuesday afternoon committee meeting. These included a failed attempt to advance a 3-cent-per-gallon increase in the state fuel tax and the passage of a bill that would give the state auditor more oversight of county assessors and another that would double a half-dozen low-level court fees.
The committee also approved for the second time in as many days a $1.50 increase in the state cigarette tax. The bill had to be heard again because its author, Rep. Doug Cox, R-Grove, took out language he was afraid might doom the measure.
Most interesting, though, was the glimpse of Republican leadership’s possible response to growing pressure for more education funding in a bad budget year and a ballot initiative championed by University of Oklahoma President David Boren for a new 1 percent state sales tax dedicated to education.
The Appropriations Committee did vote on several measures, including the 3-cent increase in the state diesel and gasoline taxes, contingent on those fuels’ wholesale price remaining under $3 a gallon. The tax would not be collected if the wholesale price rose above that level.
The measure would have generated $84 million, according to a staff estimate, but was defeated 9-14, with seven Republicans joining seven Democrats in opposition.
Several members, particularly Democrats, complained that they didn’t know the bill even existed until Sears began presenting it. Rep. Richard Morrissette, D-Oklahoma City, tried to have the bill ruled out of order but failed.
The committee passed HB 3217, which would put the state auditor and inspector in charge of training and modernizing county assessors’ offices and would make the Auditor and Inspector’s Office a nonappropriated agency.
It would do this by raising the current documentary stamp tax by 25 cents — from 75 cents to $1 for every $500 of value.
To avoid the constitutional 75 percent super majority required in the House and Senate to pass a tax increase, the legislation would delete the word “tax” in the current statute and replace it with “fee.”
