Shaking Down Lobbyists

Back in February I wrote an article describing the influence of certain lobbyists over the legislative process. I wrote that lobbyists, " . . . are professional relationship manipulation experts and expert strategists, and they know the pressure points to push to get a key lawmaker’s vote. Their attempts to kill a good bill appear to be rather like a game to them. A team of lobbyists can point to a dead bill much like a trophy and use it as a warning to other legislators who might try to upset their deal."

I think the preceding paragraph very aptly describes the procedures used by certain special interests. It is important to note that not every member of the lobbyist profession falls into that description. The lobbying profession in my view isn't that different from the legal profession. Those who enter it know they will be paid to express a certain opinion and will be challenged to filter, bend or distort the truth to the benefit of their client. It is a very difficult profession to enter into and keep a moral compass. But there are certainly those who do just that and I think it is important to keep this in mind. 

Those who enter into these types of professions and manage to draw a clear, unassailable line are individuals of very strong character. They are subject to having to make some very tough and costly decisions in order to do the right thing. Perhaps they decide to turn down the patronage of a client because that client wants them to cross the line. Or maybe they have to stand up to politicians and refuse to do what the politician wants them to do. 

I have taken a pledge to not take gifts or political contributions from lobbyists and lobbyist-represented entities. This pledge has been most liberating because it has allowed me to interact with lobbyists based on the merit of their proposals. I think lobbyists appreciate the fact that we can discuss policy without ever having to worry about if they made a large enough contribution to my campaign or if they included me in an invitation to a lobbyist-sponsored dinner. This relationship also allows them to communicate their frustrations with the current system. 

Based on their feedback, it is easy to see that too many politicians in the past made a game out of seeing how much money they could milk out of lobbyists' bank accounts. 

Consider the following examples from recent years mostly involving lawmakers who are no longer in office:

Lawmakers raised money from lobbyists in order to sponsor out-of-state trips to various events hosted by different associations. A lobbyist would be solicited to make a donation to the fund. The lawmaker who solicited the donation would receive a "commission" of 50% of the amount raised. In essence, lobbyists who donated to "sponsor" a legislator's trip wouldn't just be paying for the trip, but would also put hundreds of extra spending dollars in the lawmaker's pocket, whether they knew it or not. This presumably went unreported and was not reviewable by the taxpayers.

Don't think for a minute that these lawmakers were actually going to spend that money on a trip. Once in attendance at these out-of-state conferences, some lawmakers used to make a sport out of finding lobbyists to take them to the best restaurants and run up a huge tab. In one such case, a group of Oklahoma lawmakers managed to find a team of three lobbyists to take them out to eat. The politicians took the opportunity to order extremely costly items and very expensive wine. When the bill for hundreds of dollars was provided to one of the lobbyists, the lobbyist asked the waiter to please divide the bill between the three lobbyists so they could share the cost. It fell to the waiter to inform the shocked lobbyist that they had already divided the bill and this bill for hundreds of dollars represented just one-third of the cost.

Certain lawmakers didn't have a problem double crossing their financiers who pay for this expensive game. I can recall the frustration of one lobbyist who described how he was working a vote. A lawmaker gave him his word that he would vote with the lobbyist's position. The lawmaker almost immediately broke his word and voted the other way. Later that same day, when it was time for lunch, the lawmaker called the lobbyist and without missing a beat asked the lobbyist if he would take the lawmaker and his friends out for lunch. Surely a person with the tiniest amount of shame should have at least waited for a couple of days before asking for stuff again.

These stories represent events in year's past. I do think the situation improves each year as the old guard politicians are term limited and a new wave of citizen legislators replaces them. Next week I plan to describe how term limits continue to make a difference as those legislators who were around when the Legislature was dominated by powerful elitists politicians are becoming fewer and fewer in number.

Disqualifying Candidates Based on Occupation

I believe our nation's founding fathers designed Congress to be made up of citizens from varied professions and occupations. This concept was applied to the legislatures of the several states including Oklahoma. Legislators naturally tend to gravitate to the area of policy to which they are familiar and I enjoy watching the contributions made from those with expertise in a given subject matter. This varied representation proves a great benefit to the taxpayer.

I try to keep all campaign material from each race in which I personally participate. This allows me to review the subject matter in my materials to ensure I am staying true to the platform on which I campaigned.

It is interesting to review the opponents' material as well. Over the years, I was invariably on the receiving end of one of those a comparison pieces contrasting my occupation with the other candidate. You have probably seen these types of mailers where one candidate places his best photo against a grainy or even altered photo of his opponent and lists off all of the factors which make him a better candidate. When describing my occupation opposition material would either list me as a security officer, or actually the more pejorative "night security guard", corrections officer, or perhaps the pejorative "prison guard".

Those materials never told the reader of my experience owning a private security agency. They certainly didn't disclose the important role corrections officers play in the public safety venue. They simply sought to disqualify a candidate based on a generic occupational description.

The longer I serve the more I am starting to realize how my personal occupational history has continued to shape what I do.

Owning a security agency highlighted the plight of the small business owner who must deal with government regulation on a day to day basis. I am strongly motivated to author and advance modernization processes to make government much less burdensome on the small businessman. I still cringe whenever I see an antiquated government paperwork-based application process. We have worked hard to eliminate these and I hope to have additional good new to report about this in the near future.

Perhaps no position better prepared me for holding elected office then working as a corrections officer (CO). As a CO I was assigned to guard a unit housing 120 offenders. As you might imagine, the odds are always against the CO who must learn to work with the offenders while also maintaining a firm line. Prison management understandably fears COs will become co-opted. After all they are co-located on their own with the offenders for hours on end. Certain offenders have little else to do then figure out and deploy complex physiological processes to co-opt the CO with whom they have much more access than prison management.

Oftentimes the co-option starts with the offender becoming friends of the CO and asking for very small and mostly meaningless favors such a giving the offender a prohibited item or other policy violation. Over time the scope of these requests grow. When the CO pushes back or refuses the offender may blackmail him by threatening to disclose his past violations of policy. Backed into a corner the CO becomes a tool of the 120 offenders he must work with each shift. COs are taught that the primary way to survive in this environment is to take a firm and consistent stand and never cross that line.

I think this training was pivotal in directing me to establish a similar line prior to taking office as a legislator. I determined to never accept gifts or political contributions from lobbyists. Too many elected officials go into office without setting a similar line. The special interests immediately befriend the just elected official before he has time to figure out the system. Over time the official risks becoming co-opted by the process and the special interests. Even if they see the light they are too far in and can not back out easily. These elected officials risk becoming little more than tools of the special interests. I think the taxpayers would greatly benefit if each new elected official had taken CO training.

In this case, I don't think it was a bad thing for the voters to elect a "prison guard".

When the Government Refuses to Follow the Law

Imagine the challenge faced by the citizen who feels the call to become civically involved and hold government accountable only to be denied access to transparency records to which he is legally entitled. Or put yourself in the place of the conscientious journalist who has been trained to do the necessary research to present a story in its full context only to hit a stone wall when asking for necessary and legally public government documents. Unfortunately, these scenarios occur many times each year in Oklahoma.

There are hundreds of government entities all across the state that must comply with Oklahoma open meetings and open records law. The large number of government groups has seemingly enticed certain legal firms to create a niche industry out of providing nuanced legal advice, allowing the governing boards to claim they don’t have to comply with even the most basic of transparency laws.

This was most recently brought to light when a member of the Sperry school board resigned. In his resignation he exposed the relationship between one of these legal firms and the district’s administration. Shockingly, the board had justified their failure to provide in a timely manner the board members’ packets to the public based on advice from the law firm of Rosenstein, Fist & Ringold. In fact, the packets were not provided to the public until after the meeting of the board - when it was too late for the public to express their opinion because votes had already been taken. Ironically, the school district superintendent also appears to have claimed he didn’t need to release the legal bills paid to that law firm.

This story brought back some rather painful memories of a nearly identical scenario that took place in Logan County just a few years ago. For years the local hospital government board constituted as a beneficiary of local county government had operated at a deficit, consuming approximately two million taxpayer dollars each year. Understandably, local officials started to question why the operation was not profitable in light of the fact that Logan County was one of the fastest growing counties in the state. Even with the rapidly growing consumer base, the hospital was still running a large deficit.

County Commissioner Mark Sharpton sent the hospital governing board a very basic request asking to know who was on the payroll and how much they were being paid. This type of open records request is the most basic and fundamental way of keeping the government accountable to those who are footing the bill. If the public cannot see who is on the payroll, all manner of impropriety can take place with taxpayer dollars, such as the retention of ghost employees, for instance.

Not only did the board refuse to honor the law and the request, they spent thousands more taxpayer dollars paying for high power attorneys to fight the request. Sharpton never received the documentation. If he couldn’t get it, even though he was on the board of the beneficiary, imagine how hard it would have been for a local citizen or report to fight their way through the maze of attorneys to get this very basic information.

The State Integrity Investigation recently released a report grading the transparency laws in the fifty states. Unfortunately, they gave Oklahoma an F. This grade was due in part to the fact that there is no single state official charged with enforcing open meetings and open records laws. When someone has been denied their legal rights, whether they are civic minded citizens, journalists or county commissioners, they do not have a transparency expert within state government to whom they can turn.

This must change! During the next legislative session we must advance the proposal to rectify this failure in policy and ensure Oklahoma’s transparency laws are properly enforced. Citizens should never again be denied their legal right to transparency simply because a governing board has the audacity to spend thousands of taxpayer dollars to hire high power attorneys to get out of following the law.

Taxpayers to Save 40 Million Dollars Each Year

Oklahoma taxpayers are set to save 40 million dollars during the current state budget year and each year thereafter according to a recent report. The Information Services Division of the state's Office of Finance released its fiscal year end report detailing the savings from the recently enacted plan to consolidate state government information technology processes. The report shows savings estimates continuing to climb and demonstrates that approximately 40 million of annual savings has already been achieved even though many state agencies still await the consolidation process. The savings can be attributed in part to lower software costs due to the fact that state agencies purchasing power has been combined and a 17% reduction in the number of IT positions needed to maintain the consolidated IT infrastructure. The plan also details additional levels of cost avoidance that are in addition to the 40 million of savings. This includes $1.8 million of potential cost avoidance after the centralised IT operation rectified software licensing-related liabilities previously incurred by state agencies. When the Legislature passed the proposal it required IT officials to realized a savings of at least 15% of the state's IT spend. The report demonstrates that the consolidation has met this goal. Last fall, Oklahoma Chief Information Officer Alex Pettit told the House Government Modernization Committee that the consolidation had allowed 30 million of year over year savings to occur. On the morning of September 11th, Pettit will again testify before the committee and will inform committee members of the newest savings numbers. Pettit is expected to field questions on his department's mitigation of legacy IT information security liabilities and the potential for additional savings as the consolidation continues. "CIO Pettit is doing a fantastic job implementing this plan," explained the concept's legislative author State Representative David Derby, R-Owasso. "During the next legislative year we are committed to continuing passing the legislation to enable these savings to continue." The IT consolidation provides a great example of a modernization reform that will save millions of dollars each year," stated House Modernization Committee Chairman Jason Murphey, R-Guthrie. "The report demonstrates that the plan has been successful and it is now our job as policy makes to export the concept to other policy venues to ensure even more savings can be realized." Pettit's testimony is expected to take place at approximately 11:00 am on September 11th in committee room 432a at the Capitol building. The meeting is open and the public encouraged to attend.

It Is Time To End Pork Earmarks

The issue of pork earmarks or legislative pass-throughs has received a bit of public scrutiny within the past few weeks after the Oklahoma Council on Public Affairs, an Oklahoma City television station, and one of the state's largest newspapers investigated and criticized the ongoing practice. The Oklahoma Constitution prevents the Oklahoma Legislature from appropriating money directly to entities which are not state agencies. This very important prohibition attempts to separate pork politics from the way your taxpayer dollars are spent. If one legislator can win approval for appropriating money to friends back in his district, he will probably be required to trade favors -- and other legislators will do the same. In the end, taxpayer money will be spent based not on the merits of the entity receiving the largess, but on the deal-making political power of those in the Legislature. The separation of policy making functions from spending processes is one of the most important concepts of good government. An entity who receives money from the government should always have to compete with other entities through a clear and transparent bidding process by which a contract is awarded to the best bidder. An entity should never receive an award simply because legislators pulled political strings. When legislators are given the power to directly appropriate to a specific organization, the climate is set for corruption. Legislators will naturally become heavily influenced by contribution from those who are close to the entities receiving the award. Historically, legislators have gotten around the constitutional prohibition as follows: instead of trying to directly appropriate money to a private entity, the Legislature has simply approved a "pass-through" appropriation by first appropriating money to a state agency and then passing a law telling the agency how to spend the money. What is worse, this was also accomplished at times by simple verbal direction. A state agency or a regional government entity such as the local Association of Central Oklahoma Governments might get a call from a legislative staffer telling them that they were going to be given some money and then directing them how to spend it. In my view, all forms of pass-throughs are inappropriate, but these verbal pass-throughs are most unethical. They are not transparent and they are carried out by very powerful lawmakers who cannot prove legislative intent. Over the last three budget years, it appears that all pass-through appropriations have been made by verbal or written direction but few, if any, were approved by a vote of the Legislature. Usually these appropriations occur through the Tourism, Agriculture or Commerce state agencies. A few months ago I wrote about the role that the new transperancy tools such as OpenBooks.Ok.gov or Data.Ok.gov are playing in exposing these appropriations. In the past, a pass-through might never have received public purview. However, as you may recall, I wrote about how even though pass-through laws were not being approved by a vote of the Legislature. We could use Open Books to see the ongoing expenditures to an entity simply known as "A Pocket Full Of Hope," which had previously received statutory pass-throughs. This brought into question the possibility that well-placed legislators were continuing to give orders to agencies to pass-through the money without a vote of the Legislature ever approving the expenditure. I very much believe that with the implementation of these new tools, the work by the Oklahoma Council on Public Affairs, the attention provided by the press, and the new wave of reform minded lawmakers, the days of the legislative pass-through are very limited. In the past, it wasn't easy to talk to other lawmakers about the need to end this practice. Today it is very different. A significant number of lawmakers have been disturbed by the recent reports and I think they are the catalyst to ending the practice as soon as next year. Those who continue to participate in these practices are now in the minority. I am glad to report that the days of the pork earmarks are limited.

Open Government Laws Should Apply To Legislature

Last year, I filed Legislation that would apply Oklahoma’s open meetings and records laws to the Legislature. As you are probably aware, these are the important laws designed to ensure that transparency follows the taxpayer dollar. Whenever the government spends your money, these laws are supposed to provide you with access to the documents and meetings affecting the decision to spend your money. Over the years, these transparency laws have evolved to become an important part of the ethics that govern the actions of government.

However, when the Oklahoma Legislature passed Oklahoma’s open records and meeting laws, they also exempted the Legislature from those laws. In other words, the laws that apply to Oklahoma governments don’t apply to the most important part of Oklahoma government.

I know it is only a matter of time before this law is applied to the Legislature as well. The hypocrisy of the unequal application is too apparent to be defended by even the most determined advocates of the status quo.

This summer, House Speaker Kris Steele approved an interim study of this proposal, and assigned the study to the Government Modernization Committee. The committee heard testimony of the law’s successful application in other states. I appreciated the fact that the Speaker allowed this study to take place. Speaker Steele has made it clear that he desires to continue opening up the legislative process and values the discussion about the law’s potential passage. I believe the time is right to continue advancing the measure, and I look forward to spending time developing and advocating the proposal during the upcoming session.

In the upcoming weeks I plan to write more about this bill and also intend to describe the next generation of government modernization legalization as it is introduced.

One of the most important modernization initiatives will not occur through the implementation of a single bill, but will take place during the appropriations and budget process.

You may recall my description of the millions of dollars set to be saved because of the state’s Information Technology consolidation effort. This is the year when those savings should be realized through the appropriations process. It will be vital for our appropriations officials to understand the many nuances of the consolidation so that agencies truly realize the savings.

The recent appointment of Edmond Senator Clark Jolley to Chair the Senate A&B Committee greatly enhances the chances of the successful realization of the savings. Jolly has been the Senator author of nearly every piece of government modernization, including the multi-million dollar savings from the consolidation of inefficient IT processes. Because of Jolley's knowledge of best practices and due to his role as A&B Chairman, he is in the perfect position to realize the savings on behalf of taxpayers.

I don’t doubt that some agencies will try to get an exemption from the reform by opposing the realization of the savings. Holding the line and realizing the savings will be an important component of the effort to shrink the size of government.

City and County Realizing Savings for Taxpayers

If you have read very many of these updates in the past, you are familiar with the savings to taxpayers due to the modernization of state government processes. However, it is important to note that the commitment of the Legislature and Governor to make state government processes more efficient does not just result in savings in state government. Because of these reforms, the taxpayers are realizing a savings at the local level of government as well.

For example, one of the most important focuses of the efforts to streamline government processes has been the effort to reform the state central purchasing policies. Past legislation has made it possible for state purchasing officials to focus on managing contracts on behalf of the taxpayers and it has given them the ability to renegotiate contracts when taxpayers are no longer getting the best possible service.

Once these contracts are managed, purchasing officials are supposed to analyze the usage of the contract and leverage the buying power of the state to buy in bulk and continue to drive down costs.

Taxpayer savings under this new system is approximately $20M over the life of the managed contracts. It’s important to note that not all of this savings is from state government, however. City and county governments are also eligible to participate in contracts and receive the same pricing structure as state agencies. Sometimes vendors will just provide the product or service to the local government entity at the state contract rate. At other times, local governments will opt in to a state contract.

For instance, Logan County District 2 recently needed to replace three trucks. By using the state’s vehicle contract, District 2 saved approximately $20,000 on the purchase price. To put this in perspective, the $20,000 saved represents approximately one-ninth of the cost of the very important two mile Midwest Road repaving project that is set to commence shortly. Midwest Road is probably the worst road in Logan County and local residents have waited many years for this project.

The City of Guthrie recently opted into the state’s purchase card contract. This contract should allow the city to streamline their purchasing procedures and earn a rebate on each purchase made.

The City of Guthrie has also entered into a managed document service contract with the company that pioneered the state mandatory document service contract model and saved the state thousands of dollars. If the City of Guthrie replicates the state model, I would expect the savings to be considerable.

By taking advantage of or emulating state reforms, local officials are serving their taxpayers well by preventing the needless waste of tax dollars through inefficient processes.

The Positive Impact of the New Legislators

The Legislature has greatly benefited this year from the influx of a large number of freshmen members elected during the 2010 election cycle. Because they are a product of this important election cycle, they know firsthand how important it is for Oklahoma’s policy makers to cut government spending.

Here is one example:

For years, various attempts have been made in the Legislature to bring some common sense to the way the state allocated benefits to state employees. Believe it or not, with very limited exceptions, state policy mandated that state employees receive a rich health benefit allowance even if the state employee had health coverage with another source. It made absolutely no sense that the taxpayers were forced to pay for a duplicative benefit that was not even needed.

Attempts to allow otherwise covered state employees to opt out of health coverage met with opposition and were always defeated. Advocates of the status quo argued that the removal of these employee from the state’s self insurance PPO would risk prejudicing the makeup of the universe of participants, and they didn’t want to set a trend of allowing certain employees to opt out.

Of course this resulted in an absolute absurdity because taxpayers were forced to spend thousands of dollars providing coverage for those who didn’t even need it.

Legislation to fix this problem was assigned to the Government Modernization Committee where we would always support it and send it on to the rest of the Legislature. But it never made it through the entire Legislature, and eventually died every time.

So this year, when freshmen Representative Dustin Roberts and Senator Josh Brecheen sponsored House Bill 1062, a limited version of the opt out legislation, it looked like all the other past failed attempts. I doubt that many believed the legislation would be successful because after all, similar approaches had always been defeated.

This did not deter the freshmen legislators from not only continuing to advance the proposal, but expanding it to include all state employees. Because of their hard work, the law was approved by the Legislature and signed into law by the Governor.

Now, for the first time, as state employees are signing up for their benefits for next year, they can opt out of the system. Each employee who chooses to opt out saves the taxpayers thousands of dollars.

I believe this success is partially due to the fact that freshmen legislators did not know they were attempting a task that veteran legislators had already failed to accomplish. Their intent was to right an obvious wrong and save the taxpayers money. They did not care about the politics of the issue or the difficulty of the task.

In my view, the legislative freshmen serve as a good example of the importance of term limits and the value that newcomers bring to the legislative environment.

More About the 2011 Modernization Reforms

I wanted to write just one more article describing some of the reform in this year’s successful Government Modernization legislation. These reforms put into place a comprehensive framework to increase the transparency of state government process, lower the cost of government to the taxpayer, and significantly enhance the ability of the citizen to access government documents and records.

Reducing the need for small business owners to interact with the bureaucracy. Oklahoma business owners must navigate through a series of state bureaucracies to obtain licenses and permits. House Bill 1601 builds on Oklahoma’s existing business one-stop web portal to offer the state’s licensing and permitting from one convenient online location. This means that small business owners should spend less time in line at multiple bureaucracies, and more time building their business and strengthening Oklahoma’s economy.

Placing state documents and reports in a single online location. Countless reports and studies are relegated to state archives, never to be seen again. You may remember from my update two weeks ago that I wrote about the effort to centralize access to state government forms. This reform is similar in that it places reports and studies online where they can be indexed and searched by keyword or term. The transparency impact should be significant. For instance, the 2005/2006 IBM study that was key to reforming the state's purchasing system, had received little attention prior to being discovered by a House interim study in 2007. It appears that prior to the House study, the document had already been shelved and was mostly ignored by the bureaucracy. These types of oversights should occur less frequently when the studies are integrated inside the one-stop documents.ok.gov portal where everyone can see them.

Integrating school district spending data with OpenBooks. During the 2010 legislative session, Oklahoma's local school district transparency data was mandated for online placement. However, the data was placed online through the Department of Education’s site and not co-located with other state spending data. House Bill 1086 co-locates the common education spending data with the state spending data through the OpenBooks web site.

Bringing transparency to state revolving funds. The state maintains a series of revolving funds that are not subject to limitation by fiscal year. The public and state policy officials have limited easy access to the status of these funds. House Bill 1086 mandates the ongoing publication of the fund balances through the data.ok.gov web portal. As with all data.ok.gov data feeds, this data is to be published in a standardized format.

Allowing the public to see the current condition of state Information Technology projects. State officials have the ability to engage in costly IT related projects with little oversight from the public, the press or policy leaders. House Bill 1086 creates a project management platform that is publicly accessible. Project updates must be publicly posted, allowing the public and policy leaders to quickly ascertain when a project experiences a cost or time overrun, or a deterioration in the projected value of project deliverables.

Ending the practice of incentivizing state travel. State employees have been incentivized to travel on the state’s dime because frequent flyer miles awarded for taxpayer-funded travel could be retained for personal use by the employee. The continued use of state travel expenditures during the economic downturn has been especially disturbing. House Bill 1086 develops a policy similar to policies implemented in other states that stops this practice.

Consolidating payroll services. Past testimony before the Government Modernization Committee has described how state government could save about $2 million each year through the consolidation of the state’s payroll system. House Bill 1086 consolidates the state’s payroll processing system into a single offering.

Over the past three weeks I have been able to talk about many of this year’s government modernization reforms. To see a more detailed listing, visit hd31.org/151.

Consolidating State Agencies

Last week I wrote about the large number of modernization initiatives that were approved this year by members of the Government Modernization Committee, the Legislature and Governor. In that article I described a small sampling of these initiatives. These efforts were designed to result in cost savings and greater transparency. In this week’s update I have described House Bill 2140 and House Bill 1304. These two modernizations bills are designed to transform Oklahoma state governance and result in millions of dollars of savings to the taxpayer.

Until passage of House Bill 2140, Oklahoma’s central service functions such as procurement, human resources and financial services were divided into seven different agencies. In some cases, these bureaucracies offered competing shared services services. State employees were forced to navigate a gauntlet of central service bureaucracies to obtain services for their agency. HB 2140 consolidated five of these agencies into one and created a central services one-stop shop for state employees. A multi-million dollar savings mandate was attached to the legislation.

This consolidation should allow the state to focus its policy efforts and yield considerable additional savings to the taxpayer. Here is one example of an absurdity created by the fact that so many agencies overlap on policy. State employee benefits policy has historically been divided between two separate state agencies. This year, one of these state agencies subsidized the state employees’ PPO health care premium costs by using income from that agency’s investments. This means that the employees’ cost for their PPO health plan premium did not increase.

A second state agency awarded HMO contracts that reflected an increase in premium. Because the state employee benefit allowance is tied to a formula that accounts for the price of the HMO plans, the employees' benefit allowance is set to increase.

This means the cost of purchasing health insurance will stay the same for many of the employees who use the PPO plan. This is at time when their benefit allowance is increasing. Many employees already have 100% of their benefits paid for, so the excess allowance will be taken in the form of direct monetary compensation. In other words, state agencies must now pay their employees thousands of dollars in benefit allowance that is not needed to purchase benefits. This is a pay increase without a vote of the Legislature or approval of the employees’ agency-level employers.

House Bill 2104 consolidated both of these agencies, and should put an end to these types of absurd outcomes.

House Bill 1304 consolidates much of Oklahoma state government’s information technology processes. Currently, millions of dollars of information technology spending is segregated across countless state agencies. Information technology is not coordinated, strategized or planned on an enterprise-wide basis. A 2011 study found that Oklahoma spends over $40 million more than comparable organizations in IT spend each year. HB 1304 cuts through the bureaucracies and views information technology activities from the perspective of a single entity. Once completely implemented, the legislation is designed to save about $80 million each year.

The Department of Education volunteered for inclusion in the IT consolidation even before the law takes full effect. This one state agency alone is estimated to experience an approximate savings of $600,000 per year because of the consolidation.

This article has just began to scratch the surface of the impact that these bills will have on state policy in the years to come. If properly implemented, the savings and efficiency will be considerable.

23 Modernization Initiatives Going Into Law

This year was by far the most successful year for legislative state government modernization reform proposals. In all, 23 significant government modernization initiatives have been identified. Each of this initiatives was considered by either the House Government Modernization standing or conference committee and all were approved by the Legislature and signed into law by the Governor.

These changes are comprehensive and will have a far-reaching effect in monetary savings, creating new transparencies and driving down the cost of state government. The first of these new laws has already gone into effect and the state has already started to experience the savings.

A description of five of these initiatives is as follows:

Online Electronic Payments - An estimated 230,000 of the state’s payments are made through traditional paper transactions. Governor Fallin asked the Legislature to approve a component of House Bill 1086 to transitions the state to an e-commerce payment system. The State Office of State Finance has indicated that by using traditional paper conveyances, the state could be spending up to $13.50 per vendor payment. This compares to electronic payments which costs the state approximately 5¢ per transfer. House Bill 1086 creates a mandate to convert the system to electronic payments. This mandate should save state taxpayers millions of dollars each year. House Bill 1086 contained this, and a number of the other modernization initiatives.

Health Savings Accounts - House Bill 1062 put in place a law to drive down state employee and state agency insurance costs through the implementation of health savings accounts. Very few state employees are enrolling in the state’s free market-oriented health savings accounts, partly because the accounts are post-tax. This provides little incentive to the employee to sign up. House Bill 1062 allows pre-tax enrollment and is a step towards the successful Indiana state employee health insurance plan that stabilized the cost of state employee health insurance. If the Oklahoma HSA program follows the Indiana example, the savings will be significant.

Agency Consolidation - Each year, Oklahoma's non-appropriated state agencies take about $900 million out of the Oklahoma economy. These fees punish businesses and disincentivizes new economic growth. Senate Bill 772 empowers a task force to study consolidation opportunities for these agencies. Consolidation could lessen the burden placed on Oklahoma businesses, incentivize economic growth, and allow the state to benefit from new business activity.

Centralized Online Forms - Oklahoma taxpayers are forced to spend time searching through state agency web pages to find the necessary forms to interact with state government. Some of these forms may not even be available online. House Bill 1086 allows citizens to access state government forms from one location. The forms.ok.gov Web portal should be searchable by keyword, allowing for the speedy retrieval of forms by number or description.

Reducing State Agency Office Footprint - State agencies can enter into contracts for expensive office space without documenting efforts to use innovate approaches such as telework to reduce the amount of office space needed. House Bill 1086 places a check and balance on the ability of agencies to expand their office footprint by requiring them to certify that they cannot reduce the number of square footage needs through the application of innovative telework approaches. I believe this is an important step in the effort to mandate that state government quit financing new buildings with expensive bond issuances. We need to change the focus of state government to where many of the physical assets of the state are liquidated and the state’s capital infrastructure footprint is greatly reduced.

Next week it is my intent to write about the two big Government Modernization state agency and process consolidation initiatives that are taking effect and will be the target of a Government Modernization interim study on November 10.

Too Many Tuition Increases

Later this month, State Representatives Corey Holland, Leslie Osborn and I, in conjunction with the Oklahoma Council on Public Affairs (OCPA), will conduct a study of the state’s higher education system.

During the past few weeks, OCPA (OCPAThink.com), OklahomaWatchdog.com and CapitolBeatOK.com have written a series of articles detailing the spending practices of Oklahoma’s higher education institutions.

The reports have found that nearly all of these organizations have increased spending even during an economic downturn. At a time when government should be downsizing, almost all of these groups are increasing tuition to finance a type of spending arms race with each other and institutions in other states.

Make no mistake, these increases in tuition and spending don’t exist just at the University of Oklahoma, but appear to be institutionalized across the higher education system. For example, a report by OCPA, released in June, shows that in the time period from 2004 to 2009, inflation-adjusted revenues per full time student increased by 40.5% at UCO, 34.3% at ECU and 29.2% at the OSU main campus.

One of the foremost concerns involves the number of professorships that appear to receive an excessive salary when those employees have very limited in-classroom responsibilities.

For instance, I recently attended a meeting with OSU officials. This year, OSU has implemented yet another tuition increase. They point to a well-meaning and aggressive effort to build the size and scope of the university’s research capabilities. The idea is that if the university can bring in enough money through research revenues (such as patent revenue), perhaps they can keep tuition down.

However, my fear is that unless a clear plan is laid out and institutionalized with a definitive time period to channel this revenue into tuition reduction, the temptation to empire build by using both the additional revenues and the student's tuition will be too strong. Worse yet, the mission of the institution risks becoming varied and unfocused. Is the mission of OSU to hire employees to build a patent library or is it to provide an education at an affordable price?

This systems creates two classes of employees. The first is charged with the important responsibility of the classroom teaching environment, while the second may rarely be required to interact with students.

As is the case with so many government entities, the heavy investment in these high paying government jobs may not result in the desired effect. It may pad the state government payroll at the taxpayer and student’s expense. Unlike businesses in the private sector, state-owned universities do not go out of business when they become inefficient. They simply pass on the cost to the taxpayers and students.

In a recent study, Oklahoma State Professor Vance Fried posited that as part of an effort to reduce the cost of college education to $6,700 per year, universities should separate their research and teaching functions. This would avoid placing the bill for the research on the student and allow the research to receive funding based on its own merit.

At the very least, the ability to set tuition should be returned to the Legislature. This would allow Oklahoma's policy makers to serve as a check and balance on higher education’s temptation to empire build and to veer away from its core mission while sending the bill to Oklahoma’s students.

It is my belief that our study will bring attention to this and other concerns.

How Many State Employees Are Paid More Than the Governor?

There is no question that when properly used, technology provides the public with insight into government as never before. All too often, people will express dissatisfaction with the size of government and state their belief that there is too much waste in government, but fail to provide a concrete example of substantive government waste.

Technology changes this. In my view, new technologies should be quickly deployed to allow the public to see government spending, analyze government performance, and expose wasteful and inefficient processes.

I am a big believer in the fact that government should use technology to push out as much government performance raw data as possible. All too often, when the government simply creates transparency tools without releasing the underlying data, the data used by the tool is filtered in a way that is not user friendly or, worse, is designed to prevent data viewers from being able to gain a complete understanding of what they are seeing.

I have enjoyed being a part of the effort to push out raw data feeds through the data.ok.gov portal. I believe that free market-oriented organizations will use this data to develop transparency tools that are far more advanced than those tools internally developed by the government. These new tools will not only provide the public with the means to see government performance, they will also be used by policy makers and government officials to understand the strengths and weakness of government processes (something that legislators do not currently have the ability to do).

The Oklahoma Council for Public Affairs recently provided a fantastic example of this type of service. OCPA requested several raw data sets from state government through Open Records requests. They used this data to develop a transparency website located at AccountabilityOK.com. The site allows the public to query and see individual state expenditures, tax credit recipients, pension systems and revenue data. The site’s user interface is more user friendly and comprehensive than the state’s Open Books transparency portal. This site is free to use and I would encourage you to visit the site and see just a few of the areas where state government is spending your money.

This new tool is providing journalists with a fantastic method for sourcing new stories about government inefficiencies. For example, last week, on the blog CapitolBeatOK.com (hd31.org/153), writer Patrick McGuigan used the OCPA data as the foundation for an article detailing that 877 state employees earn a higher salary than the Governor’s salary of $147,000 per year. In June, writing on NewsOK.com (hd31.org/155), writer Paul Monies used the OCPA data to point out that 60 former state employees make more than $100,000 each year from state retirement payments. These are concrete examples of government waste.

I believe that journalists will write many such stories based on queries of the OCPA data, and think this type of tool will be a catalyst for transforming Oklahoma government.

I also believe that the data requested from the state by OCPA should have never needed to come through an Open Records request. It should have already been available through the data.ok.gov portal. I plan to continue the effort to place additional and more comprehensive raw data sets to be published online.

Staying Focused

Earlier this year, I wrote about my decision to help bring attention to the need for a federal balanced budget amendment. I enjoyed the opportunity to document the significant amount of support in the Oklahoma Legislature for ratifying the amendment if Congress would just give us the opportunity to do so.

I also mentioned my hesitance to take on new tasks. Over the past few years I have become very focused on finding inefficient government processes and helping write and pass the legislation to transform those processes. It is my belief that this effort could result in massive tax reduction for Oklahoma taxpayers. I think it is immoral for state government to take your money and waste it in unbelievably inefficient and dysfunctional processes.

I firmly believe that these reforms could allow Oklahoma to completely eliminate its state income tax. This is one of the most important reforms that could happen because studies have shown that the absence of an income tax has been a key factor in incentivizing economic growth.

As you might imagine, this work has taken time. One of my biggest challenges has been to stay focused and not take on too many major efforts. This isn’t easy because there are so many areas in state government that need reform. At any moment, I am likely to take on a new major reform effort.

For instance, I am tempted to focus on welfare reform each time I observe someone using an access card (your money) to purchase junk food while using their own money to purchase cigarettes.

Each time higher education institutions raise tuition on students yet again, while their own budgets skyrocket upwards, even during an economic downturn, I feel the temptation to invest my energy in reforming the higher education system. I think the actions of higher education over the past few years have proven that the Legislature should have never turned over the right to raise tuition to higher education. Technology should be driving down the cost of education. The increases do a great disservice to Oklahoma students.

I am tempted to focus my efforts on human services reform whenever I see reports of DHS placing a child in a dangerous environment or see them remove a child from a safe environment. I have a series of ideas for human services reform that I plan to write about in the future.

Of course, common education reform represents one of the greatest areas of need for reform. There are far too many school districts, way too much red tape, and limited freedom of parental choice. The Legislature's refusal to act more proactively over the years on education reform has trapped thousands of students in failing school systems. I have a great distaste for the actions of politicians who grandstand on the education issue while constantly blocking attempts to enact reform.

And, then there is the antiquated system for addressing the state’s road needs. From an antiquated funding formula to a bureaucracy-heavy, top-down approach to paving local roads, too much money is soaked up in costly bureaucratic processes that are feeding a government bureaucracy and taking money away from paving roads. I could commit a great deal of focus on this issue.

These are just a few of the efforts, each of which one could spend their entire time in the Legislature seeking to accomplish. At this time, I am determined to stay focused on the effort to reduce the size of state government. However, I am also subject to taking on one or several of these efforts -- and others I haven't mentioned yet. And of course, I am always prepared to vote in support of my colleagues in the House and Senate who are working to accomplish these and other reforms. I also very much appreciate your continued feedback and suggestions. My views on the need for these reforms have been heavily influenced by the input I have received.

Consideration of Bills in Committee

In last week’s article, I articulated my support for the proposal to change House rules so that all bills receive a hearing in committee. I strongly believe in the principle that each proposal should receive an on-the-record vote so the constituents of each Representative will know where their legislator stands on each issue.

It has been my challenge to reconcile this belief with the fact that as a Government Modernization Committee Chairman, it is my responsibility to filter the good and bad legislation and give the good legislation a hearing in committee.

The Government Modernization Committee is the destination point for legislation that seeks to modernize and streamline government. I enjoy working with bills that seek to accomplish this goal and usually give them a quick hearing and our committee sends them off to the full House with our support.

Legislation that conflicts with previous modernization reforms, however, is also assigned to the committee. Under the current system, it is regarded as my responsibility to stop this bad legislation. Simply denying a hearing to these bills would be the easy way out. Instead of taking this approach, I have attempted to work with the authors of the bills to understand their reasons for their sponsorship of bills. My practice is to work with the author to refine the proposal and potentially use their bill to actually advance new modernization concepts. In fact, earlier this year, a bill that started out as an effort to reverse an important efficiency reform successfully implemented one of the most important pieces of the year’s modernization agenda.

This process is time consuming, but it has allowed me to build stronger relationships with those legislators. Most of the time, the legislators appreciate the fact that their bill was not simply rejected, and they are usually willing to work together to substantively address their concerns without reversing previous modernization and efficiency reforms.

If I were to deny these bills a hearing, I would miss the opportunity to build these relationships and to advance additional reforms.

In my three years as chairman, I can’t recall a single time when a legislator refused to work with me on addressing the issues of concern in their bill. I think you would be hard pressed to find someone whose bill was rejected by our committee who felt there was not an attempt to give the bill life.

I believe there are several committee chairmen who follow this approach. They take their jobs as gatekeeper seriously, but do not reject legislation out of hand.

Of course, there are also chairmen who invest little time and effort into analyzing the true merits of a proposal. All too often they simply take the word of the bureaucracy that would be affected by a proposal and kill the bill based on feedback from the bureaucracy. This kills creative proposals that would inject a new approach. In my opinion, this is the lazy way to chair a committee and is one of the primary reasons why the status quo is maintained.

Thank you for reading this week's update. Next week I plan to provide an update on the recent state and county redistricting processes.

State Officials Making a Difference

During the past three weeks I have used this medium to describe the role Oklahoma’s newly elected officials have played in working toward smaller state government.

I initially envisioned that I would write about this in just one article. However, I have observed so many different attempts by these officials to eliminate wasteful spending, that one article has grown into four.

I enjoyed the opportunity to work with new Labor Commissioner Mark Costello this year. I spent a significant amount of time this year working with Labor Department officials as part of our state agency consolidation processes. Costello has made of point of declaring his opposition to “sacred cows” in state government and has been a strong advocate for reducing the size of government through agency consolidation. I look forward to working with Costello in the future to consolidate unnecessary overhead in state government. Without a doubt, Costello has emerged as one of the state’s leading advocate for government reform.

I am also extremely appreciative of the fact that new Oklahoma Lieutenant Governor Todd Lamb is drawing attention to the state’s need for asset management. You may recall in the past that I have described how state assets such as buildings have not even been included in a centralized inventory. Can you image what would happen to a privately owned business that could not even tell you what buildings it owned? A cursory compendium of state assets has recently been curated, and this document should provide us a start in attempting to get a handle on this huge problem.

The Lieutenant Governor’s leadership on this issue will be crucial in finding the millions of dollars of state assets that should be removed from the hands of the government and returned to the free market where they belong.

This fall, the Government Modernization committee will conduct a study led by State Representative TW Shannon to analyze the need for a much more aggressive state asset management solution.

Finally, a most dramatic transformation has occurred in the state Department of Education. You may recall from a previous article how at the end of 2010, the department refused to follow state law that required an assessment of their information technology assets. This was an important study that was necessary to determine the possible money savings from the implementation of an enterprise-wide IT consolidation plan. It was incredible that a state bureaucracy just ignored the law.

Once new Superintendent of Education Janet Barresi took office, all of this changed. The Department of Education transformed into a leader in following the IT consolidation law and actually became the first large state agency to consolidate under the state’s IT consolidation plan. The savings is expected to run as high as $600,000 each year. At a time when too many state agencies are still fighting the IT consolidation, it is very exciting to see this type of transformation occur inside a state bureaucracy. $600,000 is a lot of money and the taxpayers have been well served by this decision.

I believe these actions reflect the fact that many of Oklahoma’s newly elected officials have a real desire to reduce government spending. I am confident that most of them will remain true to this goal and that Oklahoma will be well served in the upcoming years.

Saving Money and Informing the Public

During the recently concluded legislative session, I enjoyed the opportunity to place transparency and openness proposals from newly-elected Oklahoma statewide elected officials into modernization legislation.

Under the leadership of Superintendent Janet Barresi the Department of Education requested legislation to bring transparency to the department’s conference and training processes. In the past the department had conducted conferences and training events with what appears to have been little public purview.

House Bill 1207 created a pilot program to place the expenses associated with these activities online where they can be readily accessed by anyone. The bill allows the training programs to take place in-house without the use of a third-party vendor, and requires the use of e-commerce when conducting the event, plus a report that demonstrates the amount of cost savings due to the reforms.

House Bill 1207 also addressed a request by State Auditor Gary Jones. Each year Oklahoma cities and towns hire a third party auditor to audit cities’ finances. Those audits are sent to the State Auditor where they are filed away and very unlikely to receive any oversight from the public. Jones wants to change this by placing electronic copies of the audits online for everyone to see. House Bill 1207 clears the way for electronic submission of the audits.

State Attorney General Scott Pruitt’s office requested the modernization of the process for printing Attorney General opinions. In the past, Oklahoma laws have mandated the physical publication of law books and Attorney General opinions. These publications were sent to the Oklahoma Department of Libraries where they were forwarded to the other 50 states. In exchange, the other states sent their legal publications to the Oklahoma Department of Libraries.

Over the years, this process has become unnecessary as the various states and Oklahoma have placed their legal materials online. However, the law still mandated the transfer of printed information. The cost for printing thousands of pages of unnecessary legal publications was huge.

I have sponsored legislation with Senator Patrick Anderson in the past that eliminated the requirement for Oklahoma to send statute books to other states. This year, House Bill 1086 also removed the requirement to print the Attorney General’s opinion book to send to the other states.

Next week I will write about the efforts of some of Oklahoma’s other statewide elected officials to reform state government.

Modernizing the State Treasurer's Office

This year I enjoyed the opportunity to work with several of Oklahoma's new statewide elected officials in their efforts to modernize state government. I served as the House author for modernization legislation on behalf of State Treasurer Ken Miller, State Auditor Gary Jones, Attorney General Scott Pruitt and State Superintendent Janet Barresi.

When State Treasurer Ken Miller took office, he commissioned his staff with the responsibility of finding inefficiencies and drafting proposed updates of state law when necessary to address those inefficiencies.

Miller’s modernization proposal was sponsored in the form of Senate Bill 571. The bill was authored by Senator Clark Jolley in the Senate and I carried the bill in the House.

Senate Bill 571 targeted several areas. The bill updated procedures for the liquidation of properties deposited into the state’s unclaimed property fund. In the past, state officials had to engage in antiquated and duplicative procedures that added unnecessary cost and had to eventually be paid by those who owned the property. Miller’s bill streamlined those unnecessary process procedures so that the unnecessary cost was not passed on to property owners.

Miller also noted that the state had thousands of dollars remaining in an old account that had been used to pay claims from a 2004-era tax refund program. The fund had not experienced a claim for several years but the funds were tied down awaiting claims that were obviously never going to be filed. SB 571 closed down this unnecessary fund.

SB 571 also put an end to redundant reporting processes that interfered with each other because they used the same data but had to be filed at two different times. SB 571 synchronized the filing process so that the reports could be filed using the same data sets.

These provisions of SB 571 probably won’t receive any attention from the media. Very few citizens realized any of these issues even existed. But that bill will save taxpayer money and resources that otherwise would have been wasted. I especially appreciate Treasurer Miller’s commitment to doing the right thing and modernizing government process even when no one was paying attention. I believe that speaks to his good intent and am happy to have been able to assist Miller and Senator Jolley in doing the right thing for state taxpayers.

Next week I intend to write about some of the other modernization initiatives requested by other state officials.

A Refreshing Change of Pace

In past updates I have described how Governor Mary Fallin has played an important role in calling for and ensuring the passage of innovative proposals to cut the size of state government and make it more open and transparent.

In addition to getting the word out about the Governor’s hard work for reform, I feel it is also important to mention the work of other newly elected and appointed statewide officials.

This year I worked with several new officials on various modernization proposals and enjoyed observing and (when possible) assisting them in their efforts to institute reforms.

I have observed many times in state bureaucracy that the executive officer of an agency places a heavy emphasis on the fact that funding has been reduced, the subsequent pressing financial needs of the agency, and an ensuing request for more money. This point is so heavily emphasized that the agency director often leaves little opportunity to focus on innovative ways to remove wasteful spending practices or to apply technology to cut costs.

It is rare and almost unheard of for an agency head to actually request a reduction in funding. This is disappointing as I believe the foremost focus of state government leaders should be to provide better service to taxpayers for less cost.

We all know there are a significant amount of wasteful spending practices in state government. This common belief has been confirmed with just about every independent consultant’s report I have seen since taking office. During this same amount of time, however, I have rarely observed state agency heads admit to wasteful practices taking place within their departments. Worse yet, some agencies actually oppose modernization and efficiency efforts that result in savings.

I have looked froward to the day when a state agency official would actually call for a reduction in appropriations as a way of demonstrating their agency’s commitment to providing a more streamlined, efficient service.

That is why it was so encouraging when newly appointed Secretary of State Glenn Coffee requested a complete elimination of all appropriations for the Secretary of State’s office. Coffee made the request early in the session when speaking to a legislative appropriations oversight committee on which I serve. Coffee’s request sent a strong message that the new administration would not only call for fiscal conservatism within state government, but would also immediately apply those principles to their own offices.

The Legislature accepted Coffee’s request and completely removed all appropriations for his office. The Secretary of State’s office will now be funded by existing fees for service, and I did not observe that any of these fees were increased.

Coffee’s request was a refreshing change of pace to a legislative body that has become so accustomed to demands for more money and traditional excuses as to why agencies cannot innovate and reduce the scope of their budgets.

In my next update I will write about working with several of Oklahoma's other executive branch officials to enhance transparency and cut costs.

The Year of the Reprimand

The Oklahoma Constitution contains a clause that says that for any speech or debate in the Legislature, legislators shall not be questioned in any other place. In other words, the speech of Representatives while considering legislation is sacrosanct. The clause mirrors a provision in the US Constitution and places a priority on the ability of legislators without fear of retribution to expose any wrong, debate any idea, and express any point of view, regardless of how unpopular or controversial the viewpoint.

For the past five years as I have served in the Legislature, I have observed plenty of political grandstanding, less-than-accurate demonization of the opposition, and significant amounts of hyperbole. I have also witnessed countless dilatory and unnecessary procedure motions which are designed to throw a monkey wrench into the process. This mostly serves to force the other Representatives into a time crunch to such an extent that they have to dispense with normal debate procedures, and thus the dilatory parliamentary process does little more than take away the opportunity for the debate and counteracts the stated end goal of those who engage in those tactics.

But all of that is part of the process. It is the prerogative of any Representative to be an obnoxious jerk if that is what he thinks he must do to make his point. He will be judged by those he represents and unless he is subject to impeachment, it has not been the place of other Representatives to stand in judgement of his actions.

At least not until this year.

This year we have inexplicably been asked not once, not twice, but three times to vote for a “motion to reprimand” our fellow Representatives. Unbelievably, the last of these motions was made to reprimand a Representative specifically for comments made in debating for passage of a bill.

I have voted against the motion to reprimand each and every time. I know it is not my place to judge an elected Representative from another district and I never want my vote to reprimand another Representative to be used as a political tool against them in their next election. The voters of that district should be the ones who stand in judgement of their Representative’s actions.

These demoralizing motions have greatly reduced the dignity of the House and have created an atmosphere where the House floor feels a bit like a grade school playground. This playground is roamed by a few bullies who are natural political grandstanders and have no problem inflicting pain and humiliation to a colleague in order to advance their own warped vision of a successful political career. The newly discovered “motion to reprimand” could be their perfect tool for inflicting this pain to anyone who dares cause them trouble or who does not fit their view of being politically correct. And make no mistake, it will be deployed in the next campaign season to try to defeat the victims of the reprimands.

I believe this alarming and inappropriate new trend will have a stifling effect on the ability of Representatives to debate issues openly, and I think it is contrary to the spirit of the important Constitutional provision I previously referenced. Every comment and debate, both on and off the House floor, must now be carefully couched to ensure that it cannot be used by the opposition to engage in the latest political correctness witch hunt followed by the now dreaded “motion to reprimand."

I believe these unfortunate actions will cause many to think back on this year as the year when politicians played a series of unprecedented petty games which demeaned the reputation of the House. This is unfortunate because there have been a number of significant policy accomplishments this year.

I certainly hope this was a temporary trend, that Oklahoma legislators will stop the foolishness, and that the year of the reprimand will be never again be repeated.