OKLAHOMA CITY — Three legislators’ plan to take money from the corpus of the state’s $2.4 billion school land trust fund to pay for teachers’ raises would literally take an act of Congress — and a state constitutional amendment — the official in charge of the trust said Thursday.
“We’re not against salary increases for teachers,” said Commissioners of the Land Office Secretary Harry Birdwell. “But this is not a source that can do this. You’d have to change the (state) constitution and the Oklahoma Enabling Act.”
That act is the 1906 federal law that provided the legal framework for creating the state of Oklahoma.
The three Republican lawmakers — Kevin Calvey of Oklahoma City, Tom Gann of Inola and Rick West of Heavener — said Thursday afternoon that they will introduce legislation in the coming session to “require” the commissioners of the Land Office to provide funding for $5,000-per-teacher pay raises.
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“We are not asking the Land Office to do anything aside from their core mission, which is to support public schools,” Gann said in a press release. “This measure would just increase the amount that is given to schools each year, earmarking the additional funding to be spent on teacher compensation.”
Birdwell said it’s not that easy.
The Land Office was established by the Oklahoma Enabling Act and included in the state constitution as a permanent fund for the support of public schools, colleges and universities. It originally included more than 1 million acres in what is now western Oklahoma and $5 million in cash.
Today the office manages 750,000 surface acres, 1.2 million mineral acres and a $2.4 billion investment portfolio.
Those holdings essentially work as an education endowment from which the earnings — but not the corpus — are distributed annually.
Last year the distribution totaled almost $140 million. Birdwell said earnings include surface rents from the land, realized dividends and earnings from the investments but not royalty payments or unrealized gains.
Increased oil and gas activity and stock market gains since 2010 have caused the corpus to grow by almost $1 billion, Birdwell said. Annual distributions, he added, have more than doubled.
Calvey is among legislators resistant to increasing state revenue through taxes and fees, saying large trust funds such as the Land Office, the Tobacco Settlement Endowment Trust and higher education endowments should be tapped, instead.
“The use of this money as a sustainable and permanent solution to provide competitive salaries to our teachers is what the taxpayers want us to do,” Calvey said. “The state of Oklahoma should focus on better utilizing the assets already available.”
But dipping into the corpus, Birdwell said, would be “killing the goose that laid the golden egg.”
