K one AM, fourteen hundred FM, ninety three point three FM, ninety five point one and on KWETV, dot Com, Apple TV, and Roku. And once again we have Senator Daniels here tonight for our forum. And first of all, Senator, we're going to start you up with your opening. Stavid, you have three minutes to adorus the crowd. Thank you Tom, Thank you kwo N and the city for allowing us to use the City
Council chamber and everyone here in the live audience. My name is Julie Daniels, and I'm a candidate for State Senate to represent Washington, Nowada and the northern half of Rogers County. Government of buying for the people is about people. This entire job is about people. It's the eighty four thousand different residents who live in this district, many of them Native Oklahomas. Many more I'm
discovering recent transplants to the state of Oklahoma. Just this week, I've met someone from Missouri and Colorado and a native San Francisco, all of whom have chosen our state as their residence because we represent the values that they hold. Dear, we believe in limited government, we believe in attracting business and having strong jobs. We are a really attractive place for people to want to come.
And part of this was COVID, but many others are coming just because they've reached a stage in life that they want to go someplace where they feel that they are unfettered, they can live more freely and express themselves more freely than where they were before, and for that reason they've come to my state. I'm a native Oklahoma, born and raised in Oklahoma City. I graduated from the University of Oklahoma. I attended my first year of law school there
before I married Charlie. Charlie who will be here in a moment. He's been out all day doing his thing forty six years ago and he was a lawyer for Phillips Petroleum Company. So I moved up here and commuted to the University of Tulsa. For the last two years of law school, I interned with the DA's off I wanted to be an assistant district attorney. That may be still why I have some feeling for the das and what they do.
But Charlie got transferred to London, so we went there immediately after I took my last final exam and we came back nine years later with two little boys, and I decided that, being out of Bartlesville for almost a decade and wanting to stay home and raise my kids, that I would take advantage of, as you all know in this audience, the multitude of opportunities in this community to be of service as a volunteer, whether it was in the school's
parents support group, band orchestra, choir, booster club, many nonprofits, including my beloved Boys and Girls Club, and then coming here and sitting behind this table for eight years, a couple of years in tom Seed as mayor and serving on our city council. And I did that intentionally because I'm a conservative, a lifelong Republican with very conservative values, and I wanted to apply my political philosophy to governing and I did that here and it worked out very
well. And so when I had the opportunity in twenty sixteen, I ran for the state Senate. And I have had the extreme honor of serving you for eight years. I would like to serve the last four because all the things I said about volunteering in this community and all the things I bring to the table, you can add even more to that. After eight years as your state senator, and I hope to get into more of what I have been able to do. And I appreciate very much being here, and i'd
appreciate your vote on June eighteen. Thank you. We have our first question. These were formulated and set in via email to us at the radio station. We've condensed a few for time, and first one is about water conservation, water protection and even perhaps finding new sources of water. It's a big issue in our part of Oklahoma. As we grow and expand, more people are finding us here. From the position of a state senator, what can
you do to protect our interest in these efforts? And what can be done in your position pro active? I took some experience with water issues with me to the Senate. We all know about the drought of two thousand and one and our twenty plus year effort which is gaining even more steam now to ultimately
resolve our water supply problem up here in Washton County. But I was allowed to serve on the Energy and Natural Resources Committee the first two years in the Senate, a natural fit for somebody from Bartlesville, USA, but also because of the water experience, I was able to engage on the conservation issues and the great need to expend dollars on water infrastructure issues in our state. Just
this past session. I do not recall if we ended up putting all of it into the budget, but we were looking to put an initial one hundred and twenty five million dollars into water infrastructure repairs and construction in our state, because the best way to conserve water is to make sure you're not losing it as you treat it and transport it to people's homes. So it's a big state wide issue, and it's a bipartisan issue, solder treatment plant upgrades.
And I'm also very very proud of the fact that I've now putting in place the science we're measuring progress of individual students and so in the public education system. I think that's the best thing we can do for parents, teachers, and children. And also of course always looking at the overburdened side. So will you ever support driver's licenses for illegal aliens? Thank you for the question. It's come up a lot. On May the twenty fourth of this year,
we passed the Anti Illegal Immigration Act in Oklahoma. We're already being sued by the Department of Justice which is not a surprise to us, but a bill to allow people who pay income tax with a taxpayer ID number to become eligible for a driver's license, so that they would buy insurance and cut down on the problem of uninsured drivers on our roads, which is also a public safety problem for having people for whom you have no idea when they are stopped
contributing to hit and run accidents. That language was attempted to be put into our bill on May the twenty fourth, and the entire Senate Republican caucus voted it down, including me. Now, this is the fourth time that bill has been introduced. It's had three different numbers. But the same subject matter was put before us in twenty twenty two, and at the time, the great concern was making sure if you adopted this policy that those folks would not
have voter registration services, would not be allowed to register or vote. Many groups were in favor of the policy. Again, looking at the problem of uninsured drivers in Oklahoma, we have a large percentage of that. It is a problem which I've just described. So I voted to send it to the House because I thought if the House addresses it, it means both sides of the legislature think it's an important issue and perhaps this is a policy that would
help it. The House didn't act. That bill did not pass. There are people today who think it is in effect, but it did not pass. And I told the author in March of twenty twenty two, I won't vote for this again. I gave you a chance to put the policy to the House. We all agreed it is a problem in Oklahoma, but that's
not the appropriate way to solve it. In twenty three, twenty four, I helped make sure it didn't get to the floor as an assistant floor leader, and then on April the twenty fourth, along with my Republican colleagues, I voted that amendment down. So I'm not in favor of illegal residents having driver's licenses. Senator, the authored bills regarding gender transitioning and children. Can
you explain them to the audience? Yes. I was put as chairman of the Rules Committee last year specifically to take up legislation where the Republican caucus wanted to speak with one voice, and I had the opportunity to direct the drafting of a bill that would prohibit gender transition procedures in minor children, children under the age of eighteen, because in Oklahoma, once you're eighteen, you can make your own medical decisions. And I took great care in crafting it.
My goal was to make sure it could stand up in court, and so far we have prevailed in federal district court and we're awaiting a decision from the Tenth Circuit right now. We said that we are not doing anything about behavioral care, mental health care, anxiety depression. Those were not involved in this bill. It was simply the physical treatments on minor children that we wanted to avoid because you're making adult decisions as a child, and I believe that parents
have been put in a very awkward position. Some of my colleagues actually wanted the bill to write to be written to prosecute the parents, and I said, no, absolutely not. The parents themselves are at a loss in some of these situations, so we need to show compassion for both the kids and the parents. But just make sure that in Oklahoma we don't to perform these
procedures on children. And got that passed fairly handly, and again we have prevailed thus far, and other states that have done it our way, just clear and not tried to muddy the waters by putting too many other things in the bill have also prevailed in the courts, and that is my goal. Good policy that can stand up in a court of law. Senator, can you explain Senate Bill eight thirty four and whether it allows more abortions back in Oklahoma? Thank you. No, it was not intended to do that,
and we did not take up the bill in the end. I regret so much that there is a division in the pro life community in Oklahoma at the time that we are facing two very fierce foes. We are facing the Oklahoma Supreme Court, which declared a right to abortion in the Oklahoma Constitution in March of last year, at the very same time that I was trying to get eight thirty four passed. To make all of the language and all of our
statutes having to do with abortion and pro life read the same. Every definition should be the same, every exception should be the same, so that our state Supreme Court could not pick the laws apart and find a weak link.
But they found a weeklink because we took no action. And now we are facing the abortionists themselves who will be coming to Oklahoma for our unborn children, and we have not done enough to protect the unborn from the ad campaign that is going to be coming our way that has swept other states, other pro life states just like ours. Eight thirty four was intended to say, if the exception exists in this part of the law, it should exist over here.
I was the author, the Senate author of House Bill for three two seven. That was the Steerman Daniels bill that did shut the abortion clinics down in Oklahoma. It was because you could sue the abortionist rather than the criminal law you sue. And that was the bill that had the rape and incest
exception in it for the very first time in our statutes. So I simply took that and said, along with ectoptic presidency and our definition of contraception and our definition of save the life of the mother, we're going to make all of our statutes sound the same so that the abortionists and the pro abortion Supreme
Court cannot pick them apart. We didn't take that action. We've already suffered in the state Supreme Court, and I fear we will suffer when the initiative petition for abortion on demand up until the time of birth in our constitution comes our way and we better be prepared to fight for life at that time. Senator, do you agree or disagree with using tax payer dollars for economic development
instead of allowing the free market to function. When I served on the city council, I remember going to our economic development people over the chamber early on and saying, I don't like incentives. Why can't we get rid of these incentives, to which he said, that's fine. When everybody else gets rid of them, we can get rid of them. But to be competitive sometimes
you have to have incentives. Here in Bartlesville, we have what a quarter cent economic development sales tax that we have renewed every five years for over three decades, and it has worked exactly as it's supposed to. Jobs, bring it to the BDA, bring it to the city council, have the format for the rebate or the incentive baked in before the money goes out the door, and then if you don't achieve what you said you're going to achieve,
the money comes back into the kitty. It's the same the state level. It's a little more complicated and the numbers of dollars are larger than they are for a city. But I believe in certain instances incentives are justified. We have a Quality Jobs Act in Oklahoma's been here a long long time. That is all practically on autopilot. Over in the Department of Commerce. I know Chronicle Phillips benefited from it. ABB's benefited from it. These one off,
one time things do come to us. I much prefer rebates to putting money out the door and then hoping that you get the return on the investment. We are looking at how our Department of Commerce is structured to make sure that we couldn't do it better. It was proposed that we should create an entire separate Department of Commerce for economic development this last year. I opposed that.
I told the author I wasn't going to do that, and in the end the bill was simply to set up a committee to study how can we do economic development better in Oklahoma? So if we do use tax dollars, we do it in the most sophisticated, well researched way possible. Our next question came into via email as well. Why is our legislator are allowing a bar association which is a private organization. Why are they given the right to appoint
members of the important judicial nominating Commission. Gosh, Tom, I didn't send a question, but it could have been from me. My biggest reform effort this year, and I've been building on it for several years, is judicial reform, which is changing the way we appoint our appellate justices in Oklahoma. I want the people to decide whether or not they'd like to move to the federal system. The President vets and appoints, the Senate confirms, and then
they get life tenure. We have life tenure now with this retention ballot. We've never thrown any justice off. But given what I've just said about the pro life issue, I suggest you vote off Couger and Edmondson when you have the opportunity in November. They are two of the five pro abortion justices who found the right to abortion in our constitution. I want to change it so that we take this unelected commission out of the loop. Right now, people
apply to be a justice, which I've always thought is rather odd. But you apply to be a justice, you're vetted by this commission that is unduly influenced by the Bar Association because they're the only law lawyers allowed on the commission. So when you turn to somebody and say you're a lawyer, you know more than me. That's been entirely controlled by the Bar Association electing its members to the Commission. It's been in place for almost fifty years. Before that,
we had partisan elections of justices. And so I'd like to give the folks the opportunity to say, yes, the governor's elected by all the people. The Senate is elected by the districts. So you've got the two elected branches should be the ones making the appointment and the confirmation, and then set this independent judiciary on its way. I think we would get much better decisions from our court. They would be much more reflective of the people of the
state of Oklahoma. Sadly, even though the Senate got it, I'm proud of by Senate colleagues, the House did not. They it failed. The House didn't want the people to get to vote on this. But I'll be back to try again because I think it would get a much better result for us in Oklahoma. Patiently, when they act as legislators in black robes. I have two more questions for you here before we wrap up. Center. If a pandemic were to occur again, such as COVID, nineteen, would
you vote to require masks in public building? Thank you. Note I drew the line on telling private employers what they must do, anything that prohibited government from demanding a vaccine or a mask. I was absolutely all for that. I'm very proud of the fact that we already had in place in Oklahoma very limited emergency powers for our governor what other states were looking at as model language. We already had a thirty day emergency. It had to be re upped
by the legislature. They could take it away at any time. So we entered the pandemic with the tools in place to make sure that our freedoms were not unduly affected by that very tumultuous time. The other thing I was able to do then, with one of my colleagues in the House, was to write the bill that gave liability protecttion to business owners. When we were starting
to open up again, people said, what if we're sued? So we made sure that as long as you were file following one guidance from the Department of Labor or the Centers for Disease Control or the Oklahoma Department Health, if you were following one of those guidances, you would not be liable if somebody claimed they contracted COVID in their place of employment or in the business, and that was another thing that helped get us open a lot quicker than some of
the other states. Senator, what steps would you take to end the state income tax? I have tried to do that already, and along with judicial reform, I will continue to work on it. I'm frustrated that we have not yet adopted a formula by which we can gradually reduce the income tax depending
on state revenues. We did it before, but did it in such a way that as soon as revenue went up a little bit, it triggered the cut, and then we faced the budget shortfall of time twenty seventeen and twenty eighteen, and people got completely cold feet about the trigger that was in place,
and so they repealed it. I've been on a tax reform task force, hard to say, for the last two years, where we've studied how all the other states do it, and we've had the Tax Foundation in here, We've had ALEC in here, We've had the state and the US Chamber of Commerce talking about how different states construct their tax code so as to figure out a way to gradually go to zero. I authored the quarter sent reduction in twenty three. The ProTem took it away from me, but that's okay.
We got it passed. And this year with the Speaker, I authored that again without the cut but just the formula. But again there's just too much disagreement on which is the right way to go for the Republican Party in both houses to unite. So I will continue to work on that. Senator,
it's down time for your closing statement. Thank you, so. Tax cuts, judicial reform protecting the Republican reforms were put in place when my party finally took the majority in both houses after one hundred years of rule by the now minority party. It's important to protect those reforms, lawsuit reform, workers comp reform, pension reform, because they impact every decision that we make,
particularly the monetary ones at the state level. And because of term limits, which I do support and voted for, I am now the institutional knowledge for those reforms, because when the pro tem turns out this year, there won't be anybody left except those of us who were working through the Republican Party to get legislators to put those reforms in place. So I will continue to work on those. I'm very interested in rolling back regulations. We have far too
many. Even in a state that doesn't overly regulate, we could improve greatly, and I believe this would be a great help to small business owners in our state who employ most of the people. Standing up for individual freedom will continue to be very important to me. Having passed bills on campus free speech, free exercise of religion, donor privacy, election integrity, I continue to be asked to run those sorts of bills, and I will continue to work
with all those advocates that want to protect our freedoms and so. In closing, it's been the honor of a lifetime to serve these last eight years. I've had some opportunities the last six years to be in leadership which allows me to have a larger voice and input at the table about what happens in our state and therefore what happens in Senate District twenty nine. I think those opportunities are ahead of me for these next four years, and I would appreciate your
vote. On June eighteen, danielsokaysenate dot com Facebook centator to Julie Daniel's message me, or you can text or call me at nine one eight three three one seven two sixty seven. Thank you KWN, Thank you Bartlesville. Thank you Senate District twenty nine. Thank you very much, Senator Julie Daniels. Once again, folks, that you can catch all of our podcasts from all of our candidates on our website at Bartlesville Radio dot com. It's called the
campaign Corner. It's enter the demand tab, so if you want to go there. And also a reminder that we have early voting on Thursday and Friday upstairs fourth floor. Saturday as well, shortened time. I believe it's eight to two and that's upstairs two on the fourth floor as well. Again, thank you Senator Daniels for being our guest here tonight. Folks, you are
watching and listening to our forum for our twenty twenty four primary. It's right here at City Hall in Bartlesville and it's being brought to you by Phillip sixty six and Susicq's Village Mall on AM fourteen hundred KWON Bartlesville, FM, ninety three point three K one Bartlesville and also at ninety five point one kW and as well as K one TV dot com. We'll be back with more after these words on K one, the one you trust