Good morning, good morning, good morning, and welcome, welcome, welcome. Idious time now for our community connection right here on K one, the one.
You trust, and we're going to the big city, Oklahoma.
City, the Capitol. We have John B. Keen, our representative here today. John, you brought a friend.
Thank you, Tom, Yes, I did.
This is a This is an exciting day for me, actually for Representative strawmas Well and Senator Daniels. We have one of the really great leaders of our state here. We have a Speaker of the House, Kyle Hilbert. Hey, Kyle, who I'm just an honor for me to get to serve under him at the down at the Capitol.
He's a great leader.
We talked about some things he's done that's changed from the former leadership, and it's just doing things his own way, and he's been very, very positive. So I'm thrilled to have him up in District eleven and District ten, Oklahoma.
Well, great and Kyle, welcome a born. I understand you guys been kind of putting the pedal to the metal getting things done in this session.
Absolutely, so yesterday was our first committee deadline, So there were thirty two hundred bills filed back in January, and all bills that didn't make it through the committee process or are now dead for the session. And so yesterday was a big day. So we funneled bills down. Now there's about a thousand pieces of legislation left that we'll start vetting through as we go through the floor process.
But we've really been out of sprint.
And rezum Caine here to my right, he's our Vice share of Appropriation, So him and our budget chairman, as well as their counterparts in the Senate, really working hard to put together a good budget for the taxpayers of Oklahoma.
Well this sounds good, you know, I know that this is kind of a different time. We had all that monopoly money, as Senator Daniels would call it. It was coming in from Marpa. Now we're kind of going on our own.
Absolutely.
So there's two big things that are impacting our budget this year, of course, that we're watching is last year we passed the largest tax cut in the history of the state of Oklahoma by eliminating the sales tax portion of grocery tax. We saw with the Biden inflation and everything else that was impacting everybody when they're at the grocery stores the impact of the price of everything, and
we wanted to reduce that. So now all Oklahoma's are paying four and a half percent less at the grocery store, which is great, but that also impacts our budget, right since that was the largest tax cut in state history. But also the monopoly money you referenced is all filtering out of our economy now, so that federal money that's been propping up our state is gone, and so we just want to be diligent and wise about how we go about our tax policy for the state.
Now, speaking of taxes, we'd like to go to zero, you know, individual income tax, but it's going to take a while to get there. You can't do that with an ax. You got to do that with a scalpel, don't you. And I think you just kind of outlined it a little bit here by removing one tax and what are you going to do in order to keep things rolling?
Yeah? Absolutely.
In recent years, we've done a lot of tax cuts. I referenced the grocery tax cut. We've reduced income tax in recent years from five to four point seventy five percent, eliminated the franchise tax, eliminated the marriage penalty.
We used to our tax code used to.
Be structured in such a way that it was a benefit to file as a single taxpayer versus marriage.
And that's not pro family values for Oklahoma.
So we've eliminated that, and so we've made a lot of good progress, but again we want to be responsible about it, and like you said, not an axe or a chainsaw, but taken a scalpel to be really strategic in how we go about our budgeting.
Oh great, great, Now we've got a lot of other bills besides money going on. What are some of the ones that are on your radar that you're looking at.
Yeah, So education is of course always a hot topic. And one piece of legislation that we've already passed off our house floor was to reduce cell phone use in.
Schools and Johnny had a little to do with that.
Yes, yes he did.
And so you know when you look when you talk to young people today and you see them sitting around somewhere probably inside, they're oftentimes not even having conversations with each other because they're all sitting on their cell phones. And so we also see that in our schools, and so the goal of our legislation is to let kids be kids and let teachers teach and get those cell
phones out of schools. But there's also a critical piece in that I firmly believe I grew up in Depu, Oklahoma, thirty three people in my graduating class.
And what's going to work at Deep High School.
It's going to look different from Bartlesvill High School, it's going to look different from Tosa Public schools. And so we're allowing local control on how you implement this because that piece is really important.
Well, that's good. Flexibility is always good, especially when you have a great idea. You don't want to see it to go south because it didn't fit quite everybody's cheeksaw puzzle.
Absolutely.
And I also want to say, and I always want to point this out when I'm talking about this subject. We talk about kids, but we as adults need to own it too. How many times have you been to a restaurant and it's late at night, it's dinner, and you see two people who are very clearly on a date and they're not talking to each other, they're looking down at their cell phone. So that's my challenge to all the listeners is get off your phones. Have conversations, talk to people.
The first thing I'm doing when I retire, that thing's going in there. I've told that to everybody. Okay, and Johnny, you've been working really hard here on the money part too as well. What do you got to say about your leader here? Has he really been keeping you guys in liner? You guys been just kind of all on the same page since the get go.
You know, he does he runs a tight ship, but he empowers us to do our jobs, and that's the.
Really best of both works.
Yeah, I really appreciate that about him.
You know, if you're a chairman or vice chairman of a committee, he says, do your work, and he trusts us to understand the topics and you know, if we need him, we bring recommendations. He's got our back. So he's terrific in that in that manner. So, yeah, we're working hard. I think that there's a we talked about it at the very first of this session. It's kind of a it's a it feels different in the Capitol this year with the new leadership on both sides of
the Rotunda and the Senate. In the House, that new leadership, there's better, there's better conversations going on between the Senate and the House than there have been the two years prior.
I'm delighted to see that.
I think that's only going to result in better policy and going forward.
That sounds to me like there's been some improvement in communication, in streamlining in some of the things that you do.
Oh.
Absolutely so.
One of the things that we did we changed our House process to where we have a two tiered process on most of the legislation. Now we've always done that on appropriations bills, but now on policy bills as well. Legislation went through a policy committee as well as a polic oversight committee. And the reason we did that is it shouldn't be easy to change the law in the state of Oklahoma. There should be and we want more sunlight, we want more transparency, and that's been a good thing.
We actually we had a town hall this morning in Via, Oklahoma, and Senator Daniels, the floor leader in the Senate, said that for the first time, I think she said in living memory, the Senate still has more bills alive than the House.
So our process worked.
We did a good job of funneling legislation, and you know, but I think the end goal is to put out good result from taxpayers.
Well Gate, speaking of that, you got the clock ticking till we get done with session. What's in your windshield here coming up in the next couple of weeks.
Yeah, So our next big deadline is March twenty seventh, So that's the big date to watch. So over the course of the next three weeks, the House will be hearing all those bills that came out of committee on our side, our counterparts in the Senate will be doing the same and then trying to navigate through what that looks like. I mean, we talked about the budget a little bit. All these policy bills they end up having fiscal impacts as well, and so what does that end
up doing to the budget? How do you work that all in a lot of good negotiations. As represent Kine said, though, the relationship and the House of Senate, it couldn't be better. I can't remember a time it's been better in my nine years in office. And that doesn't mean we agree on everything. Frankly, it wouldn't be good government if we agreed on everything. But we can disagree better and have good conversations about how to move the state forward.
ALRIGHTY want to thank you for being here. Is there anything you'd like to add?
Sure, I would say one other thing that we're really talking about is administrative rules. And I know administrative rules are not something that are the hottest topic, and everybody stays up late at night reading administrative rules. But we're in legislative session February through May. We pass statutes. When we leave session, then the bureaucracy, the agency heads, they take those rules, those laws that we passed, and then interpret them.
What do those mean?
And sometimes agencies and government has a tendency to scope, creep and grow and go beyond the legislative intent that we originally pass. And so we're really taking a close look on administrative rules because those have impacts on people's
everyday lives. And if it has a substantial financial impact on the state on Oklahomas, then now we're making it where they're administrative rules have to come back to the legislature for an up or down vote for legislative approval by elected officials instead of just unelected officials determining the law of.
The land in Oklahoma.
I dogs by time.
That's right. The Rains Act, that's great, that's great Thank you.
Gentlemen, John B. Thank you, and thank you Gut for coming in. Appreciate it.
Great to have you.
Thank you.
Nice education today,